I started out
accepting the idea that consciousness is produced by the physical and that is
the beginning and end of the discussion.
Then I created Cloud Cosmology, the nth order Pythagorean to describe
physical curvature and the First Movement.
Everything changed.
Consciousness self creates
by initiating the physical and is naturally external to the physical universe
of space and time. At best we can argue simultaneity
and internal evolution to the present but I am still forced to accept
externality. Thus our mystical soul is
in fact our conscious self that also exists in all time and space artificially
external to other souls and their weight.
In short it makes complete sense to elevate our personal consciousness to
the level of soul and not make it mystical at all.
As I have already
posted, it is now clear that the ‘fall’ from Eden was the cutting off of easy
direct access to the greater consciousness of world around us and the universal
consciousness. Restoration of this
capacity will allow us to walk with lions.
All this easily allows
the whole range of reported experiences to be accounted for and yes, we walk
today in a cloud of profound ignorance that we are challenged to shed..
The
Consciousness Revolution
By
Graham Hancock
Consciousness is one of the great mysteries of science –
perhaps the greatest mystery. We all know we have it, when we think, when we
dream, when we savour tastes and aromas, when we hear a great symphony, when we
fall in love, and it is surely the most intimate, the most sapient, the most
personal part of ourselves. Yet no one can really claim to have understood and
explained it completely. There’s no doubt it’s associated with the brain in
some way but the nature of that association is far from clear. In particular
how do these three pounds of material stuff inside our skulls allow us to have
experiences?
Professor David Chalmers of the Australian National University has
dubbed this the “hard problem” of consciousness; but many scientists,
particularly those (still in the majority) who are philosophically inclined to
believe that all phenomena can be reduced to material interactions, deny that
any problem exists. To them it seems self-evident that physical processes
within the stuff of the brain produce consciousness rather in the way that a
generator produces electricity – i.e. consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” of
brain activity. And they see it as equally obvious that there cannot be such
things as conscious survival of death or out-of-body experiences since both
consciousness and experience are confined to the brain and must die when the
brain dies.
Yet other scientists with equally impressive credentials are not so sure
and are increasingly willing to consider a very different analogy – namely that
the relationship of consciousness to the brain may be less like the
relationship of the generator to the electricity it produces and more like the
relationship of the TV signal to the TV set. In that case when the TV set is
destroyed – dead – the signal still continues. Nothing in the present state of
knowledge of neuroscience rules this revolutionary possibility out. True, if
you damage certain areas of the brain certain areas of consciousness are
compromised, but this does not prove that those areas of the brain generate the
relevant areas of consciousness. If you were to damage certain areas of your TV
set the picture would deteriorate or vanish but the TV signal would remain
intact.
We are, in other words, confronted by at least as much mystery as fact
around the subject of consciousness and this being the case we should remember
that what seems obvious and self-evident to one generation may not seem at all
obvious or self-evident to the next. For hundreds of years it was obvious and
self-evident to the greatest human minds that the sun moved around the earth –
one need only look to the sky, they said, to see the truth of this proposition.
Indeed those who maintained the revolutionary view that the earth moved around
the sun faced the Inquisition and death by burning at the stake. Yet as it
turned out the revolutionaries were right and orthodoxy was terribly,
ridiculously wrong.
The same may well prove to be true with the mystery of consciousness.
Yes, it does seem obvious and self-evident that the brain produces it (the
generator analogy), but this is a deduction from incomplete data and
categorically NOT yet an established and irrefutable fact. New discoveries may
force materialist science to rescind this theory in favour of something more
like the TV analogy in which the brain comes to be understood as a transceiver
rather than as a generator of consciousness and in which consciousness is
recognized as fundamentally “non-local” in nature – perhaps even as one of the
basic driving forces of the universe. At the very least we should withhold
judgment on this “hard problem” until more evidence is in and view with
suspicion those who hold dogmatic and ideological views about the nature of
consciousness.
It’s at this point that the whole seemingly academic issue becomes
intensely political and current because modern technological society idealises
and is monopolistically focused on only one state of consciousness – the alert,
problem-solving state of consciousness that makes us efficient producers and
consumers of material goods and services. At the same time our society seeks to
police and control a wide range of other “altered” states of consciousness on the
basis of the unproven proposition that consciousness is generated by the brain.
I refer here to the so-called “war on drugs” which is really better
understood as a war on consciousness and which maintains, supposedly in the
interests of society, that we as adults do not have the right or maturity to
make sovereign decisions about our own consciousness and about the states of
consciousness we wish to explore and embrace. This extraordinary imposition on
adult cognitive liberty is justified by the idea that our brain activity,
disturbed by drugs, will adversely impact our behaviour towards others. Yet
anyone who pauses to think seriously for even a moment must realize that we
already have adequate laws that govern adverse behaviour towards others and
that the real purpose of the “war on drugs” must therefore be to bear down on
consciousness itself.
Confirmation that this is so came from the last British Labour
government. It declared that its drug policy would be based on scientific
evidence yet in 2009 it sacked Professor David Nutt, Chairman of the Advisory
Council on the Misuse of Drugs, for stating the simple statistical fact that
cannabis is less dangerous (in terms of measured “harms”) than tobacco and
alcohol and that ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding. Clearly what was
at play here were ideological issues of great importance to the powers that be.
And this is an ideology that sticks stubbornly in place regardless of changes
in the complexion of the government of the day. The present Conservative-Liberal
coalition remains just as adamant in its enforcement of the so-called war on
drugs as its Labour predecessor, and continues in the name of this “war” to
pour public money – our money – into large, armed, drug-enforcement
bureaucracies which are entitled to break down our doors at dead of night,
invade our homes, ruin our reputations and put us behind bars.
All of this, we have been persuaded, is in our own interests. Yet if we
as adults are not free to make sovereign decisions – right or wrong – about our
own consciousness, that most intimate, that most sapient, that most personal
part of ourselves, then in what useful sense can we be said to be free at all?
And how are we to begin to take real and meaningful responsibility for all the
other aspects of our lives when our governments seek to disenfranchise us from
this most fundamental of all human rights and responsibilities?
In this connection it is interesting to note that our society has no
objection to altering consciousness per se. On the contrary many
consciousness-altering drugs, such as Prozac, Seroxat, Ritalin and alcohol, are
either massively over-prescribed or freely available today, and make huge
fortunes for their manufacturers, but remain entirely legal despite causing
obvious harms. Could this be because such legal drugs do not alter
consciousness in ways that threaten the monopolistic dominance of the alert
problem-solving state of consciousness, while a good number of illegal drugs,
such as cannabis, LSD, DMT and psilocybin, do?
There is a revolution in the making here, and what is at stake
transcends the case for cognitive liberty as an essential and inalienable adult
human right. If it turns out that the brain is not a generator but a
transceiver of consciousness then we must consider some little-known scientific
research that points to a seemingly outlandish possibility, namely that a
particular category of illegal drugs, the hallucinogens such as LSD, DMT and
psilocybin, may alter the receiver wavelength of the brain and allow us to gain
contact with intelligent non-material entities, “light beings”, “spirits”,
“machine elves” (as Terence McKenna called them) – perhaps even the inhabitants
of other dimensions. This possibility is regarded as plain fact by shamans in
hunter-gatherer societies who for thousands of years have made use of visionary
plants and fungi to enter and interact with what they construe as the “spirit
world”. Intriguingly it was also specifically envisaged by Dr Rick Strassman,
Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, following his
ground-breaking research with human volunteers and DMT carried out in the
1990’s – a project that produced findings with shattering implications for our
understanding of the nature of reality. For further information on Strassman’s
revolutionary work see his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
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