I was dragged kicking and screaming into a clearer understanding of the physical machinery of our consciousness. It is not what we thought it was. It is way greater. It is also way more impressive as well.
Our real physical self has a companion component that is constructed of neutral particles that we understand today as dark matter and whose physical density is at least three orders of magnitude less than our identified physical reality, yet whose information content is also three orders of magnitude greater than our own. This physical Dark Matter component is bound together with what we would recognize as photonic energy whose information content again multiple orders of magnitude greater that what i have just described.
This spirit operates our physical selves in order to interact with the physical world itself and that is what we experience along with the natural limitations that this imposes. Quite a trick really.
All the evidence out there supports this conjecture and it disposes of a number of obvious difficulties as are listed in this article. It is ironic that we imagine producing robot bodies to support our brains after the destruction of our own. This suggests that this will not be too good an idea and a waste of time.
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Consciousness: The Beginning and the End
Michael Grosso
September 23, 2014
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/09/23/consciousness-beginning-end/
Nothing is more certain than the fact that we are conscious. And yet
there is something very puzzling, even uncanny, about being conscious;
and the learned talk of the mystery of consciousness. The mystery
centres around the origin of consciousness; the prevailing scientific
view is that consciousness is a property that emerges from complex
brains. The problem is that we haven’t the foggiest idea of how the
stuff of our minds could conceivably come forth from anything physical.
Bits of electrified meat don’t easily translate into episodes of
consciousness – we have it, we know it, in some sense we are it – but
what it is and where it came from escapes us.
There is also a mystery about the future of consciousness – I mean
for each one of us there is the mystery of what comes after death.
There’s no easy answer to the ‘after’ question, but I will offer my
opinion, based on my own experience and research. We might begin by
saying that the imagination of the human race is clearly in the
affirmative about the ongoing journey after death. The mythic consensus
is that consciousness continues after death, and does so in many forms
and styles; accounts are recorded in the history of religion and poetry
and more recently in the annals of psychical research. No doubt
individuals have always had their private views and hunches on the great
mystery. But a crucial turn of events took place in the seventeenth
century; the scientific revolution began to overthrow the entire
mythical worldview of humanity with its instinctive sense of gods and
souls and spirits. The sky was disrobed of its divinity and turned into
meaningless emptiness; according to Leopardi’s Story of the Human Race,
all the illusions of the imagination were exposed and a great void of
meaning settled down triumphantly in their place. Our consciousness, the
new prophets of reductive materialism declared, will vanish with the
brain’s entropic rot.
Are we really forced into this worm’s-eye view of reality? People
generally go along with the stories, rites, and customs for dealing with
death that they inherit. But some break free and think for themselves.
Some are exposed to modern scientific ideas (possessed by the conceits
of reductive materialism) and the idea of another world starts to seem
unreal. And yet, our views (apart from fashion) continually change in
the face of new and unexpected experiences. So how we view death and the
fate of our consciousness is sometimes based on the kinds and
intensities of experience we have. For example, I am at least open to
the idea of something going on after death because of some odd
experiences I’ve had. (For an account of some of these, see my Soulmaking [1997]
Hampton Roads: Charlottesville, VA.) A person who has had an unusual
experience is likely to be more receptive to the idea of postmortem
survival. Of course, one might have such a vivid encounter, and still in
the end dismiss it as some seductive delusion. Others, on the other
hand, may embrace great cosmic schemes on the basis of trivial
coincidences.
I have come to form my own view based on my experiences and my own
thinking. My attitude toward this question of life after death is
slightly odd. Three times I had encounters that were clear evidence for
something smacking of survival, (including on one occasion being
attacked and physically paralysed by a ghost), and yet I have doubts; I
lack robust confidence that I will survive. Nevertheless, I would insist
there are good reasons not to be cowed into premature disbelief.
We can be silent about the dreaded subject or we can discuss and
confront it. Moreover, it seems natural enough to yearn for more life,
for infinite life, and there is no reason to suppress, condemn, or feel
embarrassed about these yearnings. Let me explain one reason I resist
the idea of survival. If indeed consciousness is an emergent property of
the brain, it’s hard to suppose it could go on when the brain dies. In
spite of being acquainted with ghosts and telepathy and precognition,
the initial dependence on and emergence from the brain weighs against
the idea of survival. But there is a way to move ahead on this. It is to
drop the assumption that consciousness must be a product of the brain.
Consciousness, after all, is utterly different in kind from anything
physical we are acquainted with (barring certain abstract resemblances
to quantum states). If one thinks carefully about it, the idea that
consciousness grows out of our brains is more a verbal construct than an
intelligible idea.
Does the Brain DETECT OR Transmit Consciousness?
Some scientists and philosophers have indeed argued that
consciousness is not produced by the brain; rather, they hold that the
brain is more like an organ that detects or transmits consciousness than
produces it. According to this view, consciousness pre-exists and
transcends body and brain, although it interacts with them. The
important move is this: if we deny that consciousness is born from the
brain, there is no reason to believe it must disappear with the death of
the brain. (This is similar to an argument used by Plato in the
dialogue Phaedo.)
Now this shift toward the idea that we possess or are constituted by an
irreducible mental factor has certain advantages. One of them William
James noticed in his Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality of 1898: we are no
longer obliged to try to figure out how the brain could create
consciousness. If it’s so hard trying to explain consciousness as an
emergent property of brains, it may be because it does not emerge from
brains in the first place. Henri Bergson makes a similar point by
suggesting that the mind by its nature continually overflows the boundaries of brain and body.
This hypothesis of the irreducible nature of mind is consistent with
the idea of postmortem survival. As pointed out, if the beginning of
consciousness is not essentially tied to the brain, then death of the
brain needn’t imply death of consciousness. This way of looking at
consciousness as something basic in nature has other advantages. It is
in tune with the great spiritual traditions that posit the primacy of
some kind of greater mind. It also helps explain unusual mental
functions like extrasensory perception. Consider something like
telepathy, direct mind-to-mind contact. According to the view we have
touched on, we are already mentally connected, it’s just that our minds
generally cluttered with sensations and all kinds of distracting
thoughts screen us (some would say protect us) from the mental life of
others; if through some accident or discipline we could remove the
clutter we would “see” things otherwise occluded.
But there is something else. Our revision provides a basis for a type
of experimentation that promises to induce experiences, impressions,
and insights into the mystery of life after death. For this very
personal question of life after death, there are things we can do;
alter our life style, revise attitudes and values, and adopt specific
practices. Reading about case histories and weighing all the arguments
and interpretations are necessary and admirable. We need to supplement
this indirect method by practice. And we need to experiment with the
most fascinating subject we can readily find – ourselves.
Break on Through to the Other Side
Throughout history people have engaged in practices designed to help them “break on through to the other side” (The Doors).
Certain kinds of people are more suited for this kind of venture: edgy,
neurotic, strong-willed. These are the people who practice divination
and shamanism; inspired poets, dancers and musicians; prophets and
mystics; or ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary,
dangerous, life-threatening situations. By accident or by deliberate
practice, human beings have and continue to have encounters with the
transcendent. In terms of our practical hypothesis, they are either
forced by circumstance or choose by discipline to remove the clutter of
their ordinary mental life, so as to increase the likelihood of being
struck by some form of transcendent lightning.
There is nothing terribly strange about calling for this kind of
self-experimentation. Traditions of the world are full of such
practices. The native peoples of the Americas have always cherished
their vision quest in highly individual ways. In the ancient world there
were all sorts of mystery religions, which were group inductions into
what Aristotle called pathe, experiences, not episteme,
rational cognition. Like the native Americans, techniques of fasting,
dance, chant, manipulation of symbols, etc., were used to induce contact
with spirits, gods, and goddesses. Most famous were the Eleusinian
Mysteries that lasted two thousand years in ancient Greece, an annual
rite whose most notable effect was to create confidence in the soul’s
immortality; after a nine day fast, the ingestion of a kykeon or “brew” of beer and psychoactive ergot, the rite culminated in the telesterion:
the Goddess Persephone appeared in a blaze of glory. The experience was
transformative as we know from testimonials of various notables,
including Cicero and Sophocles and (indirectly) Plato. Different mystery
rites used different gods to induce their encounter with the powers
suggestive of immortality.
With the rise of Christianity, a new mystery was invented called the
Mass. As Carl Jung has explained, the Mass is a classic mystery rite in
which the divine and immortal powers temporarily become present on the
altar and the human becomes one with the God. And in the ancient world,
even philosophy, especially as practiced by Platonists and
neo-Platonists, was a kind of mystery rite designed to induce direct
awareness of other worlds and higher dimensions of reality. Modern
analytic philosophy would be at the antipodes of ancient philosophy,
which was always about radical liberty and self-transformation. So, for
Plato, philosophy was defined as the “practice of death” – in short,
detachment of the psyche from the soma. To “practice death” is to quiet
the distracted brain and open oneself to the greater consciousness.
It is certainly an ironical fact that in this age of science and
technology that seems to sponsor materialism, medical science is
responsible for thousands of paradigm-challenging near-death
experiences. NDEs and the Eleusinian rites have this in common: they
produce feelings of confidence about the reality of another world. The
near-death experience has become the equivalent of an ancient Greek
mystery rite.
In 2001, the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel published a paper in the Lancet that
described about a hundred and fifty cases of cardiac arrest in which
individuals reported NDEs. This publication made headlines around the
world. What is interesting is that these people had any experiences at
all. The mainline view of neuroscience is that to have any conscious
experience, certain specific parts of the brain (stem, frontal cortex,
etc.) must be functionally interacting. But the moment the heart stops,
blood stops flowing to those brain parts, so they can’t function.
Nevertheless, in these cases, not only are there conscious experiences
but experiences of an exalted character; brain quits working but
consciousness doesn’t; on the contrary, it expands and intensifies in
cognitive scope and richness of meaning. The NDE, instead of reflecting
materialist views of mind, reflects the traditional view of mind as an
independent reality – to be released not annihilated at death. In a
near-death incident, the ‘filter’ on the full flood of consciousness is
ripped away; the famous luminous bliss-drenched experience results.
According to near-death research, deprived of a functioning brain, you
may still have profound, conscious experience. This is an extraordinary
scientific discovery.
It would be a mistake to focus on one strand of evidence, however
striking. What the diligent seeker of the mysteries must do is gain a
sense of a whole family of pressure points on the belly of reductive
materialism. We began by pointing to the sheer fact of consciousness,
which is the basis of everything, and about which we know practically
nothing. But there are specific features of consciousness that are
suggestive for our purposes. Physicist Steven Weinberg, who thinks
physics is inching toward a theory of everything, admits he would love
to unpack the riddle of memory. Nobody even knows for sure if memory is
even “stored” in the brain no less how.
Memory Puzzles
There are oddities of memory that compound the mystery of
consciousness. A phenomenon only recently being studied is called
‘terminal lucidity’. These are cases widely reported of persons
suffering from Alzheimer’s or other forms of brain disease unable to
recognise even members of their own kin; then, at a time very near death
these persons suddenly regain their memories, as if their conscious
minds were starting to disengage from their brains in preparation for
departure. Other puzzles about memory involve the stupendous mnemonic
feats of some people afflicted-blessed with so-called ‘savant-syndrome’.
And let me say that we fail to appreciate the astonishing creative
power of the most common dream, in which an individual fashions for
himself out of nothing a full-spectrum sensory world that one becomes
completely immersed in – surely a phenomenon to give the earnest
neuro-fundamentalist a headache. All these intellectually squishy spots
we are palpating have something in common: the phenomena – dreams,
terminal lucidity, and the enlarged mental faculties associated with
arrested development – all these seem to be related to consciousness
being forced back into itself. We attain to the omnipotence of dream,
when (like the mystic) we cast aside reason and sense in sleep. The
omnipotence of memory, whether with savant or near-death experiencer,
seems to result from being robbed of the capacity to negotiate the
external world. Again, the ‘filter’ is debilitated or entirely cast off.
What I’m trying to say is this: Anyone who craves a more inwardly
felt conviction not only concerning their survival but the qualitative
value of that survival, should head for the green fields of personal
experimentation. It would, however, help to know that behind us stands a
mass of human experience that seems to say, “Yes, we found something –
come on! Do not fear!” It would be useful to bear in mind the lush
variety of tales, stories, and authenticated reports contending or
implying that real people survive bodily death.
It seems important there are many forms of experience that seem to
reveal different people survived death. The manifold of breakthroughs
seems to fit with the theory that has guided these reflections. The
notion is that we – our individual mind-bodies – are immersed (so to
speak) in a sea of consciousness. The pressure is constant on us, so to
speak, and the slightest crack or fissure in our cognitive apparatus
will cause a cascade into our consciousness.
There is a well-known case of a man from North Carolina being visited
by his father’s angry apparition during a series of dreams. The father
proved himself by instructing his son as to the whereabouts of his
hidden but final will and testament. He had hid it in an old Bible, and
then died. The will was found and probated in court; it led to a more
fair distribution of the father’s estate. Mr. Chaffin was dead for four
years; no one knew the whereabouts of the will he had hidden in the old
Bible until an apparition of the dead man revealed it to his living son.
Actually, there is a parallel story about the last missing Cantos of
Dante’s Divine Comedy. They were said to be missing until Dante’s son
received intelligence from a dream of his illustrious father. Hidden in a
secret compartment sequestered in a wall, the manuscript was found. In
general, there are patterns of phenomena that are like words in a
language that seems to want to speak to us. Such patterns cluster around
the event of death. An interesting example would be the psychokinetic
events often reported to occur at the moment of somebody’s death.
Ernesto Bozzano collected cases of clocks stopping at the moment of
death, paintings falling off walls, glassware shattering, pianos playing
themselves, and in fact a huge variety of actual occasions. What
appears to be happening is that a psychic factor at the moment of death
is released and expresses itself in some meaning-bearing part of the
environment. Again, the idea of death as a transition to enhanced power
is indicated.
As I said, the paths to post-mortem consciousness are manifold. One
way is via reincarnation, and here I must mention the massive
achievement of Ian Stevenson in collecting case histories all over the world. Thousands of carefully assessed cases – to use Stevenson’s word – suggest that
memories, likes and dislikes, physical habits and even bodily marks may
be identified usually among children no older than eight years old.
Stevenson’s work has implications for understanding the depth and
complexity of the human personality. These may shape our lives even if
for the most part we are consciously out of touch with them. The Buddha
once said that a person can see all his or her previous lives at the
moment of enlightenment.
Discarnate Intelligence
Mediumship is another way that information about other worlds and
discarnate intelligence may be obtained. Mediumship is found in the
vicinity of ecstasy and possession. Mediums generally deploy ‘controls’,
psychic constructs essential to make contact with the subliminal
universe. A striking bit of evidence for life after death came about at
the turn of the last century. The medium was the great Leonora Piper,
under the careful investigation of the highly critical Richard Hodgson.
It happened that Piper obtained a new control, called GP (for George
Pelham); in life, he happened to be an acquaintance of Hodgson. The
younger man was skeptical about survival, and promised offhandedly that
should he die first, he would do his best to prove it to Hodgson. Soon
after he fell off a horse in New York and was killed. Soon after that he
was claiming to be speaking and writing through the body of Leonora
Piper (as her new ‘control’). Hodgson wrote up the ensuing experiments
in painstaking critical detail, and published the five hundred pages in
the English Proceedings for Psychical Research.
During “GP”’s tenure as control of Piper, “he” received one hundred and
fifty people, thirty of whom GP in life personally knew. The
personality that acted through the medium’s body behaved in a
recognisably consistent manner, always in character and knowledgeable
of precisely the thirty persons he knew in life, never confusing
anyone he knew in life with any of the remaining strangers at the
sittings. In short, the persona acting through Piper’s vocal chords and
nervous system acted exactly like the real personality of a deceased
person – a very difficult case to dismiss.
So there is some robust evidence for life after death – as well as
much that is tantalising and dubious. In the meantime, if you are
impatient, you can try to launch your consciousness out of this world
here and now and not hang on mincing proof, nor care about arguments or
degrees of their weightiness. It might for all we know be very easy to
gain an insight into the beginning and the end of consciousness.
“Imagination is Eternity,” said William Blake
who also said that death was just stepping from one room into another.
It may not be possible to step all the way in, but you may be able to
push open the door for a peek.
About the Author
Michael Grosso studied classics and received his
Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. Formerly a philosophy
teacher at City University of New York and the City University of New
Jersey, he is now affiliated with a research group at the Division of
Perceptual Studies of the University of Virginia. Recent books include Experiencing the Next World Now and (co-authored) Irreducible Mind: A Psychology for the 21st Century. Presently at work on a book, Wings of Ecstasy: The Story of Joseph of Copertino, his main interest is in consciousness studies. Grosso is also a painter. He can be contacted via email at Grosso.michael@gmail.com.
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