Sutapas
Bhattacharya was born, of Bengali parents, in Guwahati#, North-Eastern
India in 1964. His family moved to London, England in 1967 when he was
two. His formal education led to a First Class Honours Degree in
Molecular Biology from the University of London in 1986 including prizes
for being the top student in the School of Biological Sciences in his
college in both the 2nd and Final Years. His course supervisor
Lorna Casselton later became Vice President of the Royal Society. In
2009, on learning about his identification of the physical correlate of
the Pure Consciousness, she commented that he seemed to be “making
your mark on the world as we [the academics who taught him]
expected” *as well as inviting him to visit her at the Royal Society.
#Guwahati (previously Gauhati) was in medieval times known as Pragiyotishpur or "The Light of the East".
*(Given
the profound implications of Sutapas’ identification of the physical
correlate of Pure Consciousness in undermining the metaphysical basis of
Western science, - which Sutapas had highlighted in his initial
communication to her in 2009, the basic acknowledgement of the
overwhelming evidence supporting his physical correlate as ‘making your
mark on the world’ is quite something in itself).
Indeed,
at age 18 in 1983, even before starting university, Sutapas had
published a metaphysical paper purporting to explain the problem of the
Ontological Status of Consciousness which won him the praise of
distinguished professors of Philosophy.
Whilst
working for a major international Scientific Publishing Company in
1994, he identified the physical correlate of the Divine Light (or Pure
Consciousness) with the brainwaves from the Brainstem Reticular
Activating System (RAS) – this is the first ever (and still remains the
only ever) identification of a physical correlate of Consciousness –
indeed of the so-called Pure Consciousness (not recognized by Western
Philosophy and Science) or the Divine Light or Godhead, which is the
central element of all True Spirituality. In fact, modern Medicine
already recognizes the brainstem Reticular Formation which controls the
RAS activity as being the prerequisite for any form of Consciousness in
humans.
Sutapas went
on to show how the entire Physicalist picture of Western Science could
be integrated into the bigger, deeper transcendentalist metaphysical
picture of Indian Yogic mysticism in his book The Oneness/Otherness Mystery: The Synthesis of Science and Mysticism. This
book was published in 1999 by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi who are
the most prestigious publishers of Indian Philosophy and co-publish with
Princeton U.P. The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies series.
However, the Sanskrit- obsessed, scientifically-illiterate academics in
Indian Philosophy have largely ignored Sutapas' revolutionary work
which finally resolves the great central problems. No doubt that such
scientific-takeover of the study of Mysticism & Spirituality
threatens these linguist & Humanities academics, posing as
philosophers, with the prospect of irrelevance and redundancy as a
modern, scientifically-literate audience will no longer want to read yet
more speculative (and largely false) interpretations and translations
of ancient texts* when the authoritative scientific interpretation is readily available!
* It
has been the non-academic gurus such as Vivekananda (who befriended
William James and Nikola Tesla), Aurobindo Ghose, TM-founder Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi , Gopi Krishna (who befriended Carl von Weizsacker) and
Jiddu Krishnamurti (whom David Bohm befriended) who have led efforts
toward scientific corroboration of yogic phenomenology and metaphysics
although, as stated on other pages of this website, this has largely
resulted in pseudoscientific misinterpretations.
The Oneness/Otherness Mystery won
remarkable plaudits from scientists who were already well-versed in the
study of the Science-Mysticism interface such as Professor Arthur
Ellison and Professor J.H.M. Whiteman. The Chairman of the Scientific
& Medical Network (SMN; a UK-based international network of
people interested in Science & Mysticism) , Professor Peter
Fenwick pushed him to show his book to the Templeton Prize people [but
his work undermines the very Theism which the Templeton Foundation
promotes - along with NeoChristian Creationist myths such as
'Intelligent Design'. ]#
#Drawing
upon the work of physicist Milo Wolff and others, BBAB undermines such
anthropomorphic Theistic myths by showing that the Nonlocal, Holonomic
Wave Structure underlying Matter (or stable spatio-temporal forms) can
also account for the self-organization of law-like universal
regularities (which the Christian West described anthropomorphically as
'Laws of Nature' (originally conceived as laid down by a Christian
Creator God possessing miraculous powers) and as Physical Constants).
Indeed, Transcendental Holonomy can explain the very fact that such
'lawlike' behaviour operates universally as it supplies the underlying
coherence, or interconnectedness of all phenomena, which is presupposed
tacitly in any such notion of 'Universal Laws of Nature'.
The
Union Minister of Education in India during 2000 Maharaj Kishen Kaw was
excited by Sutapas’ book having himself called for a scientific
understanding of Spirituality in a small book in 2000.
Sutapas
upstaged all the 'big name' New Age speakers at the August
1999 Beyond the Brain conference held at King's College
Cambridge, sponsored by the SMN and the US Institute of Noetic Sciences
(‘IONS’ founded by Apollo 14 astronaut (and physicist) Dr Edgar
Mitchell) when the final audience question from a woman in the audience
at the final panel discussion session was “There is a person in the
audience called Sutapas Bhattacharya and he knows a lot more than any of
you speakers and we should all hear what he has to say”.
But
very shortly afterwards, when ordinary members of IONS asked the
Director of Research of IONS when they would review Sutapas’s book in
their magazine, she responded pretending that she had not heard of it –
even though she had written to Sutapas asking for a copy herself
in 1998 and had been on the stage at the Cambridge conference when
Sutapas 'stole the show'. This was partly due to the fact that
Sutapas’ work exposed the false arguments of US New Age writer Ken
Wilber – who had just received a large donation from the ‘UFO-CEO’ Joe
Firmage allowing him to set up his own Integral Institute. In his web
article The Cult of Ken Wilber, Wilber's old associate Michel Bauwens
tells of how many of Wilber's critics switched to being admirers after
Wilber received the Firmage money. Both the SMN and IONS had
presented Wilber's work (basically expounding Indian Advaita Vedanta and
the Mandukya Upanishad's famous 4-state AUM model of the States of
Consciousness) as if it was some highly original integral world-view** even
though Wilber had claimed absurdly that Science-Mysticism integration
was impossible due to his naive misunderstanding based on conflating
terms like 'Material Plane' with the 'Matter' of Physics leading to a
tacit Dualism whilst claiming to be a Monist. Wilber had also
misunderstood Enlightenment in his naive 'Pre/Trans Fallacy', 'Height
Psychology' and ever-changing epicyclic models (which are rubbished in
Sutapas' new book BBAB). US New Age worship of Wilber tends towards
crediting falsely the White Man Wilber for the actual collective
achievements of countless Indians and other Asians over thousands of
years. Even critic Bauwens writes ludicrously that Wilber has produced a
masterly synthesis of Hindu-Buddhist Nondualism as if Hindu-Buddhist
Nondualism is now the property of this hyped-up Westerner (who has in
fact not produced such a synthesis).**
**Most
of the US professors of Hinduism and Buddhism who discussed Wilber on
the Infinity Foundation's YogaPsychology web forum in 2000 agreed that
he has largely copied his 'Integral Psychology' from Sri Aurobindo's
'Integral Yoga'. Wilber also repeats the pseudoscientific myth peddled
by Aurobindo (copied from Romanticism) of the Evolution of Consciousness
which is undermined by the RAS-brainwave correlation and
Sutapas' fact-based 'Retreat-to-the-brainstem' interpretation of
Enlightenment.
**Ironically the late president of IONS Professor Willis Harman (who died in 1996) had called in his New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science for
US New Agers to learn from Indians as Indians had studied Consciousness
for thousands of years. Harman, an ex-professor of Electrical
Engineering at Stanford and ex-Director of Stanford Research Institute,
had also predicted that the Science of the Future would be based on
Indian metaphysics with its Primacy of Consciousness and
Transcendentalism. Sutapas had worked out the philosophical foundations
for this New (Consciousness-based) Science. The likes of What is
Enlightenment magazine and journals such as Zygon (supposedly about Science & Religion) also
ignored Sutapas' book in spite of amazing letters praising it from
distinguished professors.
Also in 2000, after meeting him at a US conference, Rajiv Malhotra** founder
of the Infinity Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey offered Sutapas
sponsorship to get a PhD at a top US University. Rajiv had first
seen O/OM whilst visiting the famous PEAR Psychokinesis research lab at
Princeton run by the ex-Head of Aeronautical Engineering at Princeton,
Professor Robert Jahn. Jahn had tried to get O/OM reviewed by a US
fringe science journal but (probably due to the unusual mix of personal
narrative, history, politics, poetry and metaphysics) this did not
happen. Rajiv felt that Sutapas might get his views heard in Western
academia if he became an academic himself. But given the deteriorating
condition of his elderly mother, who had Parkinson’s Disease, Sutapas
knew that the burden of care would fall on him, given the lack of
concern shown by his three brothers (they had no extended family in The
UK). Also, given the takeover of Sutapas’s employer by another large
publishing empire, he was hoping to be getting a large redundancy
payment in the near-future, so he turned down Rajiv’s offer. In truth,
Sutapas knew that no PhD specialist could possibly undertake the
integration of the whole of human knowledge into one coherent ontology
that he was undertaking. Academic specialists learn more and more about
less and less and Western academia simply would not have allowed him to
do what he wanted. Who in the world could have supervised Sutapas whose
first book O/OM acknowledged only one teacher, his Deeper Self (the
impersonal spirit or Atman) which had driven him on toward his
destiny through compulsions, insights and synchronicities.
Having
finally got the large redundancy pay-off in August 2002 Sutapas was
soon forced to become his mother’s full time carer in November 2002 when
his mother lost her independence due to dystonia induced by wearing-off
effect of l-dopa and numerous other medical complaints occurred
soon after. Thus Sutapas had to wait until 2006, after her death,
to resume his plan to rewrite his Science-Mysticism synthesis for a
Western audience. This involved turning down an offer for a US
publication from Paragon House in 2003 given the pressure of caring for
his mother. However, prominent US New Ager John White (Ken Wilber’s
original Literary Agent, and Literary Agent for Amit Goswami) who had
reviewed Sutapas’s proposal for Paragon House (where White had been the
publisher in the past) saying it would be a ‘landmark work’ remained in
contact, acting as Sutapas Literary Agent in 2012 when Sutapas
approached US/UK publishers with BBAB.
**Malhotra's
own focus is on what he labels as the 'U-Turn'. This is based on his
experience of Western New Agers (many of whom he sponsored) learning
from Indian Philosophy (Hinduism and Buddhism) and then later
reformulating Indian ideas and practices in Western and Christian
clothing, suppressing the use of Sanskrit terms and references, in order
to pander to the prejudices of White society. Although Sutapas
introduced Malhotra to the SMN in 2000 resulting in Malhotra providing
the SMN sponsorship for its 2001 'Beyond the Brain' conference, note
that the SMN did not invite Sutapas to speak (having stolen the show
from the academic speakers at the end of the 1999 conference). In 2018, Malhotra was made a Visiting Professor at JNU in Delhi.
Rather
than rush, Sutapas spent his own savings on slowly researching over 6-7
years the background knowledge from numerous diverse fields, especially
Continental European Phenomenology, Cognitive Science, Consciousness
Studies, the metaphysical interpretation of Quantum Theory, Ancient
Greek philosophies, Western Esoteric traditions, Comparative Religion
etc. to produce his new work The Brainstem Brainwaves of Atman-Brahman: The Synthesis of Science and Spirituality.
During this time he also discovered much more evidence confirming his
RAS correlate of the Divine Light and began to understand how his
discovery allows us to interpret Western esoteric and Christian
mythology symbolizing spiritual transformations in scientific terms. In
fact, as indicated in Freke and Gandy's 1999 book (discussed on the Homepage
of this website), the central mystical teachings of the Mediterranean
Mystery Religions (whose myths were copied by the Hellenized Jewish
Gnostics in order to concoct the mythical story of 'Jesus' as a Jewish
Mystery Religion) are essentially the same as the Vedantic doctrine of
the Atman-Brahman.
Whilst preparing this work in 2008, Sutapas prepared a scathing critique of Professor Lewis Wolpert’s 1996 book The Unnatural Nature of Science – the book Professor Richard Dawkins had heaped praise upon at the 1996 UK Publishers’ Association Centenary Conference*.
Sutapas showed that Wolpert’s central arguments rehashing the supposed
“Greek Miracle” in Philosophy and Science were in fact Eurocentric myths
created by Colonial White Supremacist Classics in the
19th Century. In fact Ancient Indian achievements in Philosophy and
Mathematics were superior to those of the Greeks. He copied his
critique to Wolpert who acknowledged it and also got praise from the
likes of Professor Martin Bernal (author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization) and Professor J.M. Hobson (author of The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, CUP).
* Dawkins
had simultaneously lambasted the publishing of "mystical pseudoscience"
books which filled the shelves of many bookshops. In fact, Sutapas
would agree with Dawkins that most of these New Age books are
pseudoscience. As discussed on my Western Academic Racism
page, Wolpert's book rehashes Western Classics' fabrications of
Ancient Greek mystics (shamanic healers deeply involved in Occult
practices and who also believed in reincarnation - practices and beliefs
which Wolpert lambasted in other traditions) as if they were
'scientists'.
Similarly
in 2008, Sutapas exposed the errors and false reductionism in the late
‘neuro-phenomenologist’ Francisco Varela’s Brain Dynamics model of the
mind (ego) based on the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl presented in
Varela’s protégé Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life (Harvard
U.P.). Sutapas pointed out that Varela’s friend the Dalai Lama had made a
clear distinction between the Inner Light (whose physical correlate
Sutapas had identified) and the ego mind which Varela had chosen to
ignore just as Varela had ignored the similar distinction between the
Ego and the Absolute Consciousness (actually the Inner Light) in
Husserl’s phenomenology. Sutapas’ critique drew positive comments
from the late Varela’s old colleague, Historian and Philosopher of
Science Michel Bitbol, whose own Eurocentric suppression of Erwin
Schrödinger’s Indian Vedantic philosophy Sutapas had also exposed.* Bitbol admitted that they had been “too shy” to challenge the dominant Western metaphysics.* The Brain Dynamics researcher Scott Kelso also responded positively to Sutapas’ critique asking for more information.
*Bitbol had written the Foreword to the 1995 Oxbow Press reprint of Schrödinger's The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics in
which Bitbol claimed that Schrödinger's Idealist ideas came from the
influence of Ernst Mach. Bitbol cited Schrödinger's My View of the World as the source for this assertion. Yet in his My View of the World (which
Oxbow Press had reprinted with a Hindu-style orange cover and
Hindu-style 'Eye-of-Wisdom' on the front cover) Schrödinger had
once-again stressed his advocacy of the Indian Advaita Vedanta (nondual Brahmanism) metaphysics as the primary source of his metaphysics and made no mention of Mach!
*In fact, in his book Mind in Life,
Thompson reassures his readers (assumed to be Physicalists) that he has
not ventured beyond Physicalist metaphysics [an example of what Sutapas
labels in BBAB as 'Physics Appeasement' in Western academic
philosophy]. Simultaneously, Thompson laments that the so-called 'Hard Problem' [a new label for the old problem of the Ontological Status of Consciousness] seems impossible to resolve. It is of course impossible if you limit yourself to Physicalism for fear of upsetting mainstream Western beliefs!
In 2010 Sutapas watched the first episode of the 2004 BBC TV series Light Fantastic presented
by Cambridge University Historian of Science Simon Schaffer. Schaffer
peddled Eurocentric falsehoods about Greek culture supposedly dominating
India and he also claimed that Isaac Newton’s work on Optics had
discredited the "ancient myth" of Divine Light. Unable to find
Schaffer's contact email, Sutapas complained to the BBC about these
falsehoods showing his evidence confirming the physical correlate of the
Divine Light. The Executive Producer of Light Fantastic, Anne
Laking, wrote back saying that she had read both the evidence and the
free draft chapters from Sutapas’ work-in-progress The Brainstem Brainwaves of Atman-Brahman which were then available on-line. This had even prompted her to buy Sutapas' The Oneness/Otherness Mystery which
she was going to show to colleagues in the BBC Science Department. Of
course, individuals in such mainstream British institutions will not
dare to publicize such ideas undermining the root mythologies peddled by
Britain's most famous scientists past and present. BBAB mocks the,
actually absurd, comments made by many BBC Science (and non-Science
documentary) presenters who are lauded by the mainstream British media**.
This reflects the institutional-racism of British academia which has
been at the forefront of demonizing India's indigenous traditions (see
Western Academic Racism page)**and peddling the White Supremacist myth of the 'Greek Miracle' etc.
**Max
Muller wrote of the British Indologist Colebrooke (who demonstrated the
Hindu origins of Modern Algebra - see Western Academic Racism page)
that, had Colebrooke been a German his name would have been celebrated
throughout academia. But in England, there was "Not one word".
** Mainstream
British culture is notorious for its hostility to mystical and
metaphysical thought (in stark contrast to Germany and even to
France). This is exemplified by Dr Samuel Johnson's claim to
'refute' the Idealism of Bishop Berkeley by simply kicking a stone. Thus
the hostility and total lack of any institutional support for
Sutapas' work in Britain is not that surprising. John Locke wrote
that early Protestant enthusiasts were deluded in claiming to experience
an Inner Light. Even in 2016 the (supposedly 'intellectual') BBC 4 has a
TV Science documentary series The Brain with David Eagleman in
which US neuroscientist Eagleman glorifies the (Kabbalist)
pseudoscience of the fraud and charlatan Sigmund Freud (who was not the
pioneer of the 'Unconscious' as is claimed). Freud's fraud and countless
falsehoods [ BBAB quotes a US National Academy of Science book
stating that not a single Freudian Psychoanalysis concept including
unconscious repression has any scientific evidence to support it]
have been exposed by real scientists including his misdiagnosis and
mistreatment of child abuse victims in terms of absurd notions such as
the Oedipus Complex! As stated on the Homepage, Leftist Cult hero
(Slovenian) Slavoz Zizek makes repeated references to (pseudoscientific)
'Psychoanalytic Theory' as if it is some profound set of truths! It is
perhaps not surprising that on a 2015 episode of the BBC political
debate Question Time, right-wing celebrity historian David
Starkey tried to show off his supposed erudition by asking another
panellist if she had not read Freud!!!