“This is the Lord of all; this is the inner controller; this is the source of all. And, this is that from which all things originate and in which they finally dissolve themselves. [20)” ‘This is indeed remarkable. Prajna, the individual, is being praised here in this venerable Upanisad in terms one would reserve for [svara, the Totality, itself. This, if we are not mistaken, speaks to an awesome truth: At the deepest innermost level of each being, there is no separate individuality, but only totality. Unlike the gross and subtle realms, the causal body is one undivided whole, and not a collection of disparate bodies. That is, all things and beings are inter-connected at the causal level. Other schools of thought have also arrived at similar observations. In his work titled “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, the noted psychologist C. Jung states that “the deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness” [21]. Quantum physicists will tend to agree with this conjecture too. One startling implication of their theory is what Einstein dubbed as “spooky action at a distance”. This is a phenomenon wherein a pair of elementary particles co-ordinate their (otherwise unpredictable) behavior and act in perfect unison even when they are galaxies apart. It is as though the two particles can read each other's mind instantaneously! Bizarre as it sounds, this phenomenon has been experimentally confirmed. Laws are necessarily universal and not individual; to that extent, it makes sense to suggest that the causal body is one whole. However, we recognize that the manner in which a law affects an individual does depend on the characteristics of that individual- e.g. gravitational law is universal, but its effect on an object depends on the mass of the object. In the same way, the laws of vasana are universal but their effect on an individual depends on the “vasana make-up” of the individual. ‘These ideas will be elaborated in Chapter 8 where a mathematical theory of vasanas is developed. A second important characteristic of the causal body noted by Vedanta is that it is, at the individual level, of the nature of ignorance. The causal body is enveloped in darkness in the sense that it is beyond jiva’s perception, A jiva can, and usually is, aware of the state of its gross and subtle bodies, but not that of its causal body. The causal body is, to borrow a term from psychology, “sub-conscious”. Prakrti’s vasanas and Igvara together control the individual from the causal body, a realm not accessible to the individual’s awareness. The implications of this Isvara- Prakrti Paradigm will be the subject of the next chapter.