I wasted an entire working day, watching YouTube videos and reading articles in preparation for writing another post on consciousness. What did I learn? Every neuroscientist, psychologist, yogi and quantum physicist out there in video land, has no more idea about our mind that the original ancient Greek philosophers.
Virtually every twenty-minute lecture, Tedx or otherwise, began with a series of quotes from long dead scientists and thinkers, gurus and religious leaders, to sure up their own take on the same thing.
What does that tell me?
That they are all going around in circles trying to define and measure the indefinable. It all boils down to the same thing in the end, whether you label it a Quantum Field of Existence, or Plato’s famed Pan-Psychism, consciousness is what we experience inside us, a resonant collection of memories, ideas, and beliefs filtered through our own perception of reality.
How do we know that everything possesses a form of consciousness?
We think, move, feel and express ourselves in similar ways to others in our species. We can identify emotions, empathise, understand and learn from each other. And not just within our own species, but often between species too. A dog can communicate its positive and negative emotions, linking negative experiences and memories of trips to the vet with patterns of behaviour shown by its owner.
A fruit tree can release chemical signals to warn other trees in the orchard of a virus or infectious disease, triggering defence systems in plants further away. A honey bee can convey the exact location of a quality food source to its hive members with a complex dance. All of these living organisms have the ability to constructively collaborate to further the species survival.
Consciousness remains elusive to these scientists because they are focusing their efforts on locating the physical space in which it could possibly be housed. They think in terms of biomechanical maintenance of body organs and systems, or the neural links laid down in certain patterns during memory formation. Consciousness is more than a build-up of metabolites requiring a nightly detox, it is the combination of all the mental components that make a person unique. Not one scientist can locate a thought or a memory or a transient belief.
Where are they looking?
Some scientists such as Dr Roger Penrose and Dr Stuart Hammeroff have narrowed their search to microtubules inside the neurons. Their latest idea is that consciousness is a result of quantum vibrations within the tubules and that this could be the seat of the mind. Perhaps they will be proven right, who knows?
Others, such as Dr John Hagelin, Harvard alumni quantum physicist turned meditation specialist, believes that we all share the same Unified Field on a sub-atomic level, while Dr Rupert Sheldrake calls a similar plane and connections within it Morphic Resonance. There are more, but I think those will suffice to give a general idea.
It seems that the emerging theories are leaning towards Aristotle’s original statement of:
“Concerning the challenge, we just faced about how to describe things in numbers and definitions, what is the reason for a unity/oneness? For however many things have a plurality of parts and are not merely a complete aggregate but instead some kind of whole beyond its parts.” Or as it is often misquoted as; “greater than the sum of its parts.”
Lawyer Brandon Hughes talks a great deal about his holistic viewpoint based on the Zulu phrase, ‘we are one,’ or Simunye. His theory, while similar to others, attempts to explain our role in the universe as a collective force of human consciousness. We are individuals with our own perceptions of the world, but we are greater as a universal consciousness. Yogi Dada Gunamuktananda quotes Descartes, “I think therefore I am,” before extolling the virtues of meditative practices to tune our own consciousnesses into that of the universal force.
In short, all these highly qualified and experienced orators are skating around the issue. We have conscious minds which rely on chemical and electrical signals and which generate measurable frequencies. So too, do the rest of the animal kingdom, and to a lesser extent, the plant kingdom also. Doesn’t it behove these well-paid educational and scientific experts to address the core facts of interconnectivity?
If intention can collapse a waveform during the famous double slit experiment, and random generation machines suddenly begin to correlate to a significant degree on days of collective world mourning, then shouldn’t they lift the stigma attached to the so-called Fringe Sciences, and examine the possibilities for themselves?
Each of these big names skirts the issue of Fringe Sciences by renaming unsavoury words like telepathy with media-friendly terms such as Morphic Resonance. This is just another way of saying that similar species have a degree of interconnected frequencies, a sub-conscious method of communicating. Sheldrake even has rigorous experimental data to back this phenomenon’s existence.
How long will the world have to wait before they acknowledge the fact that we are on the precipice of an exciting new paradigm, one that embraces our expanded conscious and sub-conscious abilities instead of mocking them? instead of mocking them?
