Episode 8: The Night Tesla met the Monk

QUANTUM AWARENESS

Sound is Emptiness — Emptiness is Sound

Episode 8: Tesla, Vivekananda and the Akasha

Was the Universe Always Conscious?

[COLD OPEN]

[OM CHANTING BEGINS, FADES IN]

New York City. 1896.

Two men are sitting together in a laboratory on Fifth Avenue. One is the most brilliant electrical engineer the world has ever produced. The other is a Hindu monk who has just spent years travelling the world teaching Vedantic philosophy to anyone willing to listen.

They shouldn’t have anything in common. One speaks the language of volts and frequencies and electromagnetic fields. The other speaks the language of Brahman, Atman, Prana, and Akasha.

And yet.

The engineer leans forward and tells the monk: I think we’re talking about the same thing. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for this conversation. To be the recipient of such teachings would be just beyond…

Welcome back to Quantum Awareness — Sound is Emptiness, Emptiness is Sound — where we explore the fascinating intersection of quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and Buddhist philosophy. I’m QP, your Quantum Preceptor.

[MUSIC FADES OUT]

Before we dive in — if what we explore here resonates with you, a follow and a like costs nothing, and it’s just the frequency the universe needs to give you and others like you more of this. I’d be very grateful.

[SECTION 1: THE MAN THEY COULDN’T CONTAIN]

He was a visionary of exemplary proportions. Nikola Tesla was way ahead of his time — perhaps even what some Buddhists might call a tulku, or a high lama, only that he was reborn in the West.

Tesla gave us alternating current. He gave us the radio — yes, him, not Marconi, that argument was settled by the US Supreme Court in 1943, the year Tesla died. He imagined wireless transmission of energy across the planet. He spoke of tapping into the very resonance of the Earth itself in order to manifest this.

But what most people don’t talk about — what gets left out of every documentary and every car brand and every Halloween costume — is what Tesla actually believed the universe was made of.

One of my favourite Tesla quotes is: ‘If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.’ If this does not excite the particles in you, the modern seeker or Buddhist, then nothing will.

Energy. Frequency. Vibration.

Not particles. Not matter. Not atoms bumping into each other in a void. The universe, for Tesla, was fundamentally about how things move, oscillate, and resonate. It was relational and interdependent. It was alive with pattern.

Sound familiar? It should. Can you hear my Buddhist ears focusing in on something transformative here?

[SECTION 2: THE MEETING THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING]

In the 1890s, Swami Vivekananda came to the West. He famously addressed the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893 and stunned the audience. He then spent years travelling, teaching, meeting scientists, philosophers — really anyone willing to engage seriously with Vedantic thought.

And he met Tesla.

What impressed me the most — and I find this extraordinary — is that Tesla had already arrived at some of these ideas before he met Vivekananda. Their shared meeting only seemed to strengthen and cement his resolve that Western science and Vedantic or Eastern teachings were actually talking about the very same thing.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall listening to them theorise together.

Vivekananda was teaching the ancient Vedantic concepts of Prana — the life force, the animating energy of the universe — and Akasha — the primordial substance, the field in which everything arises. Tesla was so taken with these ideas that he actually attempted to express them mathematically. He wanted to write equations for Prana and Akasha.

Think about that for a moment. One of the greatest scientific minds in history was trying to find the mathematics of what the Rishis and Mahasiddhas had been pointing at for thousands of years.

He didn’t fully succeed. But the fact that he tried tells us everything about the kind of man that he was.

[SECTION 3: THE AKASHA — WHAT TESLA CALLED THE PRIMARY SUBSTANCE]

Here is perhaps the most important thing Tesla ever wrote. And I want you to really sit with this one:

‘All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never-ending cycles all things and phenomena.’

Is this quantum foam? Is this the zero-point field, the seething vacuum that physics tells us underlies all matter? Or is it something that precedes even those descriptions — something that physics is still approaching from one side, while Vivekananda was approaching from the other?

The simple beauty in this one sentence — connecting both worlds, not just on a literary level as he uses both English and Sanskrit terminology, but on a level of understanding unsurpassed by most if not all minds of the time.

My take — from my Buddhist understanding which is very close to Advaita Vedanta — is that the Akasha, the luminiferous ether, is what we might call Mind. Or perhaps consciousness itself.

What Tesla called the primary substance — what Vivekananda called the Akasha — in Tibetan Vajrayana we might simply call གཞི — gzhi — pronounced roughly “shee” — the ground. Not ground as in dirt beneath your feet. Ground as in the primordial nature of mind itself. གཉུག་མའི་སེམས། — gnyug ma’i sems — pronounced “nyoog-may sem” — where སེམས — sems — mind — is not your thinking mind, not your mood or your memory — but the primordial awareness that was never born and will never cease. The surface everything appears on. The sky all clouds arise within.

Prana acting on Akasha. Creative force acting on primordial awareness. In never-ending cycles, all things and phenomena arising.

Does this not sound exactly like dependent origination? Like the Mahamudra teaching that all phenomena arise within awareness and dissolve back into it? Like the quantum field from which all particles briefly emerge and return?

And when physicists describe the quantum vacuum — this seething, generative nothingness from which particles arise and into which they dissolve — are they measuring the surface of something that contemplatives have been diving into for millennia?

[SECTION 4: C = E = mc² — CONSCIOUSNESS AS ENERGY]

Now let me bring in something I’ve been sitting with for a long time. A formulation I arrived at with two friends on X, in an old lost thread that I’ve never been able to find again. Boys — if you’re out there — send me some C.

C = E = mc²

Now — before the physicists among you close the app — let me say this clearly: what follows is not physics. It’s poetic compression. A way of holding ideas together that points at something real, without claiming to prove it in a laboratory. Hold it the way you’d hold a koan. Not too tight.

What this means is that consciousness — C — is a fundamental aspect of the universe, present in all forms of matter, from the smallest particles to the most complex organisms. This is panpsychism — the view that consciousness is not exclusive to sentient beings but is pervasive throughout the cosmos, imbuing all matter with some degree of subjective experience.

C = E aligns with the notion that consciousness is a form of energy that permeates the universe. By framing consciousness as a fundamental force akin to energy, we are challenged to reevaluate our understanding of the relationship between mind and matter.

And just as energy can be converted into mass and vice versa — E = mc² — consciousness in panpsychism, and in Vajrayana Buddhism, can be seen as a dynamic process that transforms and manifests in various forms. Not produced by matter. Expressed through it.

Now here is where I want to slow down. Because there’s something hiding inside this equation that I don’t want us to miss.

Notice that the equals signs run both ways. C = E = mc². There’s no arrow here. No beginning, no end. You can enter the circle anywhere — from mass, from energy, from consciousness — and you arrive at the same place. This is not cause and effect. This is not post hoc ergo propter hoc — this caused that, sequentially, one billiard ball striking another. This is mutual arising. This is pratītyasamutpāda dressed in the language of physics.

Energy — the verb of the universe. Not a thing but a doing. The ceaseless movement between awareness and form.

But then ask yourself — are consciousness and mass subjective and objective? Knower and known? Inside and outside?

That’s precisely the dualism that both Advaita Vedanta and Mahamudra say is the fundamental confusion. The illusion. Samsara itself. Because from the Mahamudra view, mass — the apparent objective world — is the display of consciousness. It arises within awareness. The mountain doesn’t exist independently of the mind that perceives it. Not in some solipsistic way — but in the deeper sense that subject and object co-arise. Neither has independent existence.

And physics already knows this. Quantum mechanics destabilised the clean subject-object split long ago. The observer is not separate from the observed. The boundary between the knower and the known turns out to be — negotiable.

So the equation doesn’t have an inside and an outside. C = E = mc² — the circle has no beginning because there is no one standing outside it, looking in. Energy is not the verb between two separate nouns. Energy is the recognition that the nouns were never separate.

Consciousness, mass, energy. Not three things. One reality, known three ways. The physicist measures two of them. The contemplative dives into the third.

Tesla’s Akasha is the field. Prana is the creative force. In Buddhist terms — awareness is the ground, གཞི, shee — and phenomena are its display. Different vocabularies. One universe.

Tesla’s energy, frequency and vibration. Say it slowly. Energy — mass — consciousness. Subject, object, action — SOA. The irreducible structure of experience. But not as a sequence. Not as cause and effect. As a circle. As mutual arising. As one reality known three ways. The physicist measures two of them. The contemplative dives into the third.

Tesla wasn’t doing Buddhism. He wasn’t doing Vedanta. He was doing physics. And he arrived at the same place.

[SECTION 5: THE QUESTION THAT PUZZLES ME MOST]

Here is something that puzzles me. And I’ve been puzzling over it for years.

If we as humans have been talking about this for approximately 7,000 years — why have we not come to any conclusions? Why is there no consensus between these two worlds? Between East and West?

I have several ideas as to why. Is it simply our hubris? Our pride? Our DOGMA? That western society cannot reconcile that it is not the smartest or wisest tradition on the planet?

Is our understanding of eastern philosophy still tainted by the Catholic missionaries’ interpretations of Vedic, Hindu and Buddhist texts in the 17th and 18th centuries — that positioned Buddhists as nihilists wanting to lose themselves in nothingness, disappearing into a black hole?

Did we lose most of the ancient knowledge in the burning of the libraries of Nalanda in India and Alexandria in Egypt, due to religious wars, and has it simply taken us 1,000 years to catch up?

Or is it simply that we have not sat down and discussed the possibilities in enough open forums?

I don’t have a single answer. I have a suspicion though. I think we have not had enough Tesla moments. Enough moments where the scientist and the monk sit down together, without agenda, and discover they have been describing the same elephant from different sides of the room.

That’s what this podcast is. That’s what we’re doing here. Every episode.

[SECTION 6: CONSCIOUSNESS AND AWARENESS — ARE THEY THE SAME?]

Now I want to pause. And ask a question I genuinely find fascinating.

Are consciousness and awareness the same thing?

In English we use them interchangeably. But in Sanskrit, in Tibetan — in the languages that were actually built to describe these states — there are distinctions that English simply doesn’t have the resolution for.

So let me just ask. And I want you to really sit with each one.

Am I aware that I am conscious?

Am I conscious that I am conscious?

Am I conscious that I am aware?

Am I aware that I am aware?

[pause]

And then — the one that stops me every time:

Am I aware of that which is conscious of?

[pause — let it sit]

That last question is not like the others. The first four are still the mind examining itself. Turning awareness back on itself, one degree at a time. But the fifth — the fifth is pointing at something the conceptual mind cannot follow. The witness of the witness. The awareness that is aware of awareness itself.

In Mahamudra — this is not a philosophical position. This is the pointing-out instruction. This is your Lama looking at you and saying — that. Right there. That which is reading these words right now. That which heard the question before the answer arose.

I’ve been asked many times what this feels like from the inside.

The texture is soft. Easy. Expansive. Especially when my Lama was there to open and hold the space for me and the thousands of other students with me.

The French have a term I keep returning to — conscience panoramique. Panoramic consciousness. Wide, open, unobstructed. Present without grasping. Aware without an object.

Tesla had this. You can feel it in his words. He wasn’t describing the universe from a distance. He was in it. Awed by it. Feeling its aliveness pulse through him. His energy, frequency and vibration wasn’t just a scientific observation — it was a love letter.

That’s conscience panoramique. That’s what practice cultivates. And that’s what I believe Tesla stumbled into — whether through sheer intensity of attention, through the pointing-out instructions of Swami Vivekananda, or perhaps because he simply arrived in this life already knowing.

[SECTION 7: WHAT BUDDHISM SAYS ABOUT ALL THIS]

Vajrayana Buddhism — a school of Tibetan Buddhism known for its esoteric teachings and advanced meditation practices — offers profound insights into the nature of consciousness.

According to Vajrayana teachings, consciousness is not limited to individual beings but is interconnected with all phenomena in the universe. This resonates deeply with panpsychism’s premise that consciousness is ubiquitous and present in all aspects of reality.

In Vajrayana Buddhism, consciousness is seen as the radiant clarity — the clear light of mind — that underlies all experiences and perceptions. Transcending individual identity and ego. This is supported by the Cittamatra, the mind-only or non-dual perspective. Mind only means that everything that happens — what we see, what we do, the universe itself — all happen in mind.

I don’t want to stop with just that. Because in Tibetan Buddhism we have three words that deserve our attention. Three views of emptiness — tongpanyi in Tibetan, shunyata in Sanskrit. And they are: Rangtong. Shentong. And Detong.

Rangtong — empty of self-nature. Many see this as nihilistic. The Sakyapas and Gelugpas tend to support this view.

Shentong — emptiness with something on top. The idea that because emptiness can be experienced, the experience is part of reality. This was debated as being too materialistic. The Nyingmapas tended to favour this.

But my Lama always talked about Detong. De comes from dewa — and means bliss. So Detong is the great joy that arises from emptiness. This happens when mind recognises its own radiant space. Its own energy, frequency and vibration.

Perhaps these should not be seen as competitive ideas but as steps on the way.

When Tesla says energy, frequency and vibration — I can only think of JOY as the highest energy, frequency and vibration. I hope he really had a good glimpse of mind.

Both panpsychism and Vajrayana Buddhism share a holistic understanding of consciousness as a pervasive force that transcends individual beings and the universe. Both perspectives challenge dualistic views of mind and matter — pointing towards a more integrated understanding of reality that acknowledges the intrinsic relationship between consciousness and the universe.

Tesla was pointing at this. Vivekananda was pointing at this. The Buddha was pointing at this.

Different fingers. Same moon.

[SECTION 8: DOES TESLA INSPIRE YOU?]

Does Tesla inspire you? I hope so. He inspires me enormously.

Not because of the inventions — though they are extraordinary. But because of the courage it takes to stand at the edge of what science knows and say: there is something more here. Something the equations aren’t capturing yet. Something the monks have been describing for millennia that we are only now finding the mathematics for.

Tesla died alone, in a hotel room in New York, deeply in debt, his patents largely stolen or disputed. The world he tried to give us — free wireless energy for everyone — was suppressed because it couldn’t be monetised.

But the ideas? The ideas cannot be suppressed. Energy, frequency, vibration. Akasha. Prana. Consciousness as the ground of all things.

Those are still here. Still alive. Still waiting for us to catch up.

[LEAD-OUT / NEXT EPISODE TEASER]

So today we’ve sat with Tesla and Vivekananda in that New York laboratory. We’ve felt the electricity of two traditions recognising each other across the table.

We’ve looked at C = E = mc² — the idea that consciousness is not produced by the universe but is woven into it. That energy and awareness are not two different things but one process, seen from different angles.

And we’ve asked the question that has puzzled me for years: if we’ve known this for thousands of years, why are we still arguing about it?

But now — here’s where it gets personal. If consciousness is energy. And energy cannot be created or destroyed. Only transformed.

Then what happens to your consciousness when you die?

Next time on Quantum Awareness, we go there. All the way there. We look at the Net of Indra — one of the most beautiful and radical ideas in all of Buddhist philosophy. We look at what early Christianity actually believed before certain councils decided otherwise. And we look at what modern physics says about information, energy, and whether anything is ever truly lost.

The answer might surprise you. Or it might confirm something you’ve always quietly known.

This is QP. Sound is emptiness, emptiness is sound — every question about consciousness is consciousness asking about itself.

Catch you next time.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

[Gong]

Episode Runtime: Approximately 23 minutes  |