BEYOND CHANCE ANDNECESSITY

Consciousness is for Biology whatLight was for Physics.

The easy problem is easy enough.

Both the hard problem of the “qualitative feels of mental states” andthe really hard problem of how the brain produces ideas and images, howmatter produces mind, are unsolvable on present assumptions.

The explanatory gap cannot be crossed from this side.

All Our Assumptions Have To Change

Philosophers and scientists envisage two alternatives--materialism ordualism. There is a third:

I say: Consciousness, not matter, is first and fundamental inthe universe. The universe originates in consciousness,, andconsciousness is in all things. Consciousness is first in the universe,matter second, being a sort of consciousness “stepped down.”

Part I

Towards a New Theory of the Consciousness.

A. The Story Begins with Descartes

Descartes (17th c.) formulated mind/body dualism. He classified thewhole of Reality into Mind and Matter.

God and human beings had Mind, and everything else—the universe,the Earth and all her inhabitants—was Matter. Matter was simply theweighable, the extended in space and time, devoid of inner life.

We have been living with a vast sea of matter for the past threehundred years, and there are those who would reduce mind to matter.

B. The World Picture of Modern Science:

The Universe:

1. Originated in the Big Bang about 15 billion years ago.

2. Formed out of matter and energy.

3. Evolved by slow material processes, to form the whole array of living creatures.

4. Consciousness appears at the end of the process.

Corollaries:

1. A mechanical universe that seems radically unlike us, that is “blind”and without purposes or plans, in which we are the only being whofunctions by purposes and plans. Alienation from the whole.

2. Scientists (and philosophers) try to reduce human beings to bundles ofmechanisms--modern materialism.

3. A ravaged Earth.

This modern worldview owes everything to Descartes.

What is the understanding of consciousness in this universe?

C. Two Modern Assumptions about Consciousness.

1. Consciousness appears only in human beings and a few of the higheranimals, when matter reaches “a certain state of complexity.”

2. Consciousness can be “reduced” to brain activity, is a by-product ofbrain activity. Consciousness is not really Real; it is the brain which does thework.

Both of these assumptions are false.

Consciousness is our new frontier, and anomalies appearing with itcompel us to review not only both of these assumptions but the explanatoryprinciples of biology itself. They point the way to a new understanding of theuniverse.

Matter (as we understand it in materialistic terms), no matter howcomplex, will never produce consciousness.

Consciousness cannot be reduced to brain activity. It is something in itsown right.

First, we need to be clear about the nature of consciousness.

D. What is Consciousness?:

The nature of consciousness is best discovered in reflection, not inperception.

It is our interior life of thoughts, feelings, emotions, images,memories, dreams, ideas.

We associate with it all our intelligence and creativity.

Three questions for materialism’s model:

1. What is consciousness doing there at all if the universe is material?

2. Does consciousness exist only in us, or is it in everything else as well?

3. How does the brain produce ideas and images?

E. Revising the First Assumption: Consciousness exists only in usand a few of the higher animals:

MY THESIS: Consciousness is in everything.

My Arguments:1. This assumption is a remnant of Genesis appearing in modern science.

Man alone is made in the image of God, no other animal is.

2. This assumption derives from the limits of science. We are thespectator of the outsides of nature, and the only reason we deny consciousnessin other things is because we cannot see it there, and they do not tell us aboutit.

Leucocytes stalking bacteria in blood film on a slide look exactlylike wolves stalking their prey. Leucocytes have consciousness too.

3. The continuity of evolution suggests consciousness would not be in usif it were not in other beings too. We are genetically related to all the animalsand plants and chemically related to all things.

4. You cannot get out at the end of a process what was not there in thebeginning. (Ancient pre-Socratic principle).

5. Who Are Human Beings Really? In and of the universe, part andparcel of the universe we are trying to understand, a hologram of thewhole, the keys to the whole. We are not the only being who hasconsciousness, but the only place in the universe to which we have access tothe inner side of the whole. And what we find in ourselves is there ineverything else too.

Consciousness is in everything, even atoms and molecules and cells. Thisis pan-psychism, and here we touch base with Penrose and Hammerhoff.Everything in the universe has consciousness.

F. Revising the Second Assumption: That Consciousness can bereduced to brain activity is somehow reducible to the brain.

MY THESIS: The brain (matter) does not produce consciousness (mind).

The Arguments:

1. No one has shown how it can be done.

2. Pinker, Edelman and others, who claim to be able to show this withthe principles of chance and necessity, admit by the end of their books that theycannot. Pinker states: “…the mind is identical with the computational organsof the brain” without showing how while Edelman claims that “to explainconsciousness is to give the neural correlates to which it corresponds.” This isno explanation at all but a restatement of dualism.

3. The most that sciences establishes is correlation between neuralactivity and consciousness.

This is parallelism, dualism, and no explanation of consciousness. Theexplanatory gap is still there.

This is Cosmic Dualism, and it makes people uneasy. There are twokinds of things in the universe, consciousness and matter. Is a unity viewpossible? Not on taking matter to be what is really Real.

Questions for correlation:

1. Are consciousness and matter everywhere correlated?2. Is one of these more fundamental than the other? Does the brain

produce consciousness or does consciousness?3. What about near death experiences, where consciousness functions in

complete independence from the body?

The near-death experience solves this problem.

G. The Near Death Experience--the experimentum crucis for thelife-sciences, the key to understanding consciousness and theuniverse.

1. What is it?

a. The Near-side of Near Death Experience.

Near-death experiences occur with increasing frequency on cardiacwards. The experience is this: Patients pronounced clinically dead—all vitalsigns ceased—and later revived, report that in the interim, they left theirbodies, found themselves hovering near the ceiling watching the doctors belowworking on them. In this state they were able to read dials they could not haveseen from the bed, and often see events occurring in other rooms of thehospital, both reports subsequently confirmed by doctors. (Cook, Greyson, andStevenson, Journal of Scientific Exploration, v. 12, # 3, p. 377ff, 1998)

b. The Far-side of Near-Death Experience.

At the far side, patients report going through a tunnel, encountering abright light or a being of light, meeting with deceased relatives and glimpsing areality quite different from our normal three-dimensional world.

2. Possible Explanations.

There are twenty or more theories to account for them—false memory,self-delusion, hallucination, cell death, anoxia, dying brain, etc.

Perhaps such theories can account for the far-side experiences, but howcan they explain the patient who could read dials not visible from their bed andwho could see what was occurring in other rooms of the hospital, both reportssubsequently confirmed by doctors? That conformation is about as good as itgets for anchoring a non-physical event into the physical.

The only explanation is that the patient was actually out of their body.

Near-death experiences are real. And they are the death-knell for allforms of materialism, scientific or otherwise.

What near-death experiences mean for a theory of consciousness andmind-brain dualism:

1. We can see without eyes, hear without ears and think withoutbrains.

2. Consciousness, far from being a mere by-product of brain activity,is totally separable from the body and able to function on its own.

3. All our essential powers, the real motor, are in consciousness, notin the body. The body in the bed is brain dead but the patient is alive andwell, fully functional, at the ceiling. Far from being a mere “ghost in themachine,” consciousness would seem to run the machine.

4. It would appear that consciousness—our true selves—survive thedeath of the body.

The near-death experience cannot be explained by the principles ofscientific materialism. It compels a radical new understanding of theuniverse and a revision of explanatory principles of the life sciences thathave not changed for 2,000 years.

The near-death experience is to biology what light was to physics; allour assumptions have to change.

Only now, in the 21st century, are we in a clear position to make adecision on these issues that have baffled scientists and philosophersthrough the ages.

H. A New “Copernican Revolution”

We are now in the position of Copernicus. Copernicus based hiscalculations on the assumption that the Earth was the centre of theuniverse, until the calculations become so unwieldy that he finally revisedhis assumption and tried his calculations with the Sun at the centre of theuniverse, and lo, all the data fell neatly into place.

The anomalies associated with consciousness—and the minds ofscientists wrestling with these anomalies—are now so complex, it is time torevise fundamental assumptions.

I summarize the facts:

1. Consciousness is totally separable from the brain.

2. Given panpsychism, consciousness is totally separable frommatter.

3. All the essential powers of living things lie in the consciousnesspart.

I therefore stand our modern worldview on its head, flip currentexplanatory priorities 180 degrees to suggest that consciousness is first andfundamental in the universe, not matter. Everything has consciousness,everything comes to be out of consciousness, consciousness is first, matteris second, being a sort of “consciousness stepped down.”

“Consciousness is the independent variable, matter the dependent.”The universe originates in consciousness, not matter.

And with this assumption, all the data fall neatly into place, we cansolve the problem of dualism and replace it with a new unity view of theuniverse and thereby reconcile all disciplines of enquiry.

Part II

A New Unity Theory of the Universe.

It happens this way (with thanks to the rishis of ancient India, the shamanof ancient Mexico and modern thinkers, also glimpsed in deep meditation).

1. The universe originates in a sea of love consciousness.

2. This sea is criss-crossed by vibrations, characterized by loveconsciousness, frequency and intent.

3. Like-vibrations “dance” together to see what they can make (thisdescription is metaphorical for these things are as yet almost beyond us).

4. They form bundles of like vibrations, Ideas, endowed with intentand the desire to manifest physically.

5. They manifest in physical form.

Some call the sea of consciousness God. Physicists alone speak of God;life scientists do not dare. But the time has come. We must. Who and whatis God? Simply: Infinite Consciousness. The entire universe is formedout of, made up out of, this divine consciousness.

Units of consciousness can manifest as waves, particles or fields.

Units of consciousness form electromagnetic energy units that formmatter.

The units of consciousness come into being out of the InfiniteConsciousness of God.

A. Corollaries of a Consciousness Universe:

1. Everything comes into being from consciousness.

2. Intent is everywhere in the universe.

3. There may be infinite physical universes, as physicists suspect.

4. There are likely infinite spiritual universes, without physicalmanifestation, and so there is a spiritual world as the native peoples havealways maintained.

5. The universe is essentially spiritual, not material, endowed withintelligence, creativity, spontaneity, playfulness, self-aware, just like us.

6. And so we touch base with physics. What physics calls ‘the darkenergy of space,” we are calling the “sea of love consciousness.”

7. There is a place for God in this account (not for theologians) backthere kick starting the process, but as the very stuff of the universe. God isInfinite Consciousness, that consciousness which is the universe and beyondthe universe, out of which everything is formed. All comes to be out ofconsciousness, God’s consciousness at that.

8. With the entire universe formed out of providential loveconsciousness, God and God’s power have never been so close. And with God,not matter and mechanism, comes magic. The love of God is here, inexistence.

This view reconciles science, philosophy, and religion, and all have aplace in it. Radical implications follow. Now our anomalous data will fall intoplace.

B. Implications of a Consciousness Universe:

The basic assumptions of all fields of knowledge have to change.

1. For Earth: The entire planet is animate, enspirited, as the nativepeoples believe. The whole Earth is animate, not the lifeless matter ofDescartes. It has interior life of thoughts and feelings akin to our own.

The Earth and all her inhabitants are living, conscious, spiritual anddivine beings, just like us, let our barriers with Earth go down. This ideaalone will re-enchant us with our emerald planet.

New ways of relating to Earth and the animals and plants—not bydissection and analysis, but consciousness to consciousness, spirit to spirit, soulto soul. We can enter into relationship with the living planet.

2. For science—Some questions: How does mechanism reconcile withconsciousness? What are the forces? What become of evolution ofintelligence and learning are a part of the process? What becomes ofmechanistic explanations?—The true explanations of phenomena lie inconsciousness, not matter. Matter is a sort of precipitate on a vast sea ofconsciousness that is the true reality of the universe. What happens to ourexplanatory principles of biology, chance and necessity? Consciousness is inevery mechanical process, its organizational principle. A whole new set ofquestions—How does consciousness form physical reality? and so forth.

3. For religion—Reincarnation, a process whereby one consciousnessdons bodies again and again and lays them down, can now be the way theuniverse functions. Such was impossible on scientific materialism, and is anaspect of our reconciliation of religion and science. Reincarnation is taught bymost of the world’s major religions, but it has not been taught in the west. Itwas a central teaching of Jesus, and his ethical teachings become absolutelyluminous if one reads them with reincarnation in mind Reincarnation was

banned in the West in the fourth century for political reasons. It is time tobring the West up to date.

What is the meaning of reincarnation?

We are all immortal.

Reincarnation is always associated with a doctrine of karma, and as such,is the true foundation of ethics. What you do unto others will be done back toyou, in this or another lifetime. Justice prevails in the universe, and takes timefor its outworking. And the question of what am I meant to be doing here,what as a species is our task here, makes sense for the first time. We are alllearning the lessons of love—and many other things besides—here in the Earthplane.

What we call radical evil is, as Plato thought, a function of ignorance.Our destinies are inter-connected. To harm another is to harm oneself. AsSocrates put it long ago: There is something within us corrupted by doinginjury to another. Those who have not hardened themselves can feel this.

The far-side of near death experiences, are real, just the spirit returning tothe spiritual world.

We are in the Earth because we want to be here, it is time to fullyincarnate here and be alive here.

We play our parts on a very vast stage indeed, and the universe, with itsinfinite spiritual dimensions, is a far richer place than we ever thought possible.

4. For philosophy—consciousness knows no real boundaries, theplanet and all her inhabitants are deeply One, as is the entire universe. This is areturn to the ancient pre-Socratic mystics. The version of reality here givenshared something with them as well as with Plato. We can begin to makeintelligible the power of ideas, there is a place for mind in the universe,philosophical approaches yield valid knowledge, for we are in and of the whole

universe we are trying to understand, and it is a conscious as we are. We cancommune with it; we can communicate with it. Essential human identity is notdependent on the body. And indeed, we are not a “blank slate,” but come toEarth from spiritual realms with deep knowledge of the Earth plane.

5. For the modern world: Everyone is related to everyone; we aresurrounded by our oldest friends; the bonds are deep between us; newunderstandings of what it is to be human.

6. For God—Religion needs to purge itself of fear and superstition,and priest craft. The notions of hell and the devil were inserted into scriptureat the 4th century council in order to control the populace by fear, and they needto be dropped. This is a good and loving user-friendly universe, and a God oflove-consciousness. Every human being, animal and plant is close to God, is afragment of God, a projection of God in a body, into the physical plane. Goddwells in our own depths. Spiritual experience is available to everyone. Thisview undermines religious organizations. God is a part of all disciplines intheir search for meaning and truth.

7. The Order: Infinite Consciousness enables that magical non--linearorder of reality, providential care and synchronicity, which validates theguidance provided our lives by the I Ching, the Runes, the Angel cards.

C. Two Major Questions Answered:

1. How Consciousness Form Physical Reality

Ideas are bundles of like vibrations with the intent to manifest physically.When they are dense enough, they enter into physical existence. The formunder which they enter--a tree for example--is a function of our own thoughtforms, which have been evolving for eons. The physical world arises at theintersection of interacting consciousness.

2. The Solution of Dualism

The problem of dualism is that of showing how two very different kindsof things—consciousness and the grey matter of the brain—can be shown, atsome level, to be the same kind of thing. Steven Pinker flatly asserts that “themind is the computational organ of the brain.” This is no solution of theproblem.

Consider: A neurophysiologist is probing the brain of the patient sittingin the chair with his electrodes. All he sees is a train of electrical waves. Whatshe is seeing, in the meantime, is am image of a horse running down a railwaytrack towards an oncoming train.

If she never said anything, the neurophysiologist would not even havesuspected the existence of such. We are in this position with respect toeverything else in the universe.

The question is: How can these two things be shown to be alike, evenidentical, the same kinds of thing?

A solution of dualism was impossible on materialist premises. But turnthe situation the other way around: Our consciousness is made up ofconsciousness vibrations. These are the same kinds of things as the elements ofmatter—waves and particles.

Moreover, the electromagnetic units of matter are themselves formed ofconsciousness vibrations, so at the very deepest level, consciousness and brainare formed of identical kinds of units.

How do they function?

Consciousness vibrations align the vibrations of the brain, much as amagnet induces a current in an electric wire. It is no accident that the firstelements of matter to emerge from consciousness are the electromagneticunits, and that we are speaking the language of physics. To some extent, thebrain can also align consciousness.

All is formed out of consciousness. We can barely begin to form the newquestions. These views need to be assimilated, and then the new questions willpresent themselves.

D. Towards a Science of Consciousness

When consciousness was considered a mere by-product of brain activity,an epiphenomenon, the shadow of a runner which runs beside him but neverinfluences his stride, we could not have had any science of consciousness. Itwould have been a science of shadows.

Now that we know consciousness is not only something in its own rightover and against matter, indeed, is the very source of the universe and the stuffof the universe, we are ready for a science.

For a science of consciousness: The first thing to do is to examine yourown consciousness in great detail, during reflection. Learn its characteristics.Detailed observation of the phenomena is the foundation of any science.

We are in and of the universe we are studying, a hologram of the whole,what we find in ourselves was there at the beginning.

And so, I describe what all consciousness is.

What follows is a working proposal, a hypothesis:

1. The Characteristics of Consciousness:

Consciousness is agile, innovative, imaginative, daring, exuberant,intelligent, creative and purposive.

This is not being anthropomorphic. We find this in ourselves because itis fundamentally like that. Our unique vantage point on the universe as theonly place where we have access to the inner side of the universe shows uswhat consciousness is everywhere, and we see its expression in matter.

All consciousness has free will.

Consciousness knows no real boundaries, it makes the entire universeOne. If individuated on the surface, in the depths, everything is connected.

2. The Laws of Consciousness

a. Consciousness is the inner side of energy. If physics couldaccept this, that alone would change our world.

b. Consciousness is eternal, immortal, indestructible andsacred, being the very consciousness of God.

c. Consciousness must create.

d. Consciousness communicates instantaneously with itself andevery unit of consciousness knows what every other unit of consciousnessis doing.

e. Consciousness functions cyclically, in that it feeds into itself,one idea gives rise to others.

f. Nothing is ever lost in this universe of ours, all is immortal,and our least thought has significance for the whole.

g. Intent works. Expect miracles, and you shall have them.

E. Touching Base with Physics

1. Physics has a two-termed description of the universe, matter andenergy. It needs to be three-termed—matter, energy and consciousness.

2. Energy too has an “inner.” It is consciousness. All energy hasconsciousness; all consciousness has energy. To admit that all energy hasconsciousness would revolutionize physics and our concept of the universe,and change our world. Again, we touch base and Hammeroff andPenrose. Consciousness is embedded in the basics of the universe.

3. The dark energy of the universes is the sea of consciousness.

4. Physics finds a matrix in which everything seems to be embedded. Isay: Consciousness/energy.

5 What of chance and necessity as explanatory principles?Consciousness is in everything, and accounts for the direction of processes.

6. What are the forces? Projections of consciousness into the three-dimensional world.

7. Matter is an expression of something much deeper, the trueepiphenomenon here.

8. For physics, the universe reduces to vibrations in an energy field.That is just the term we use for the consciousness level of reality, thosevibrations have consciousness.

9. Let biology make its contribution to the God of physics, that Godis: Infinite Consciousness, and the universe is formed of it.

F. Turning Our World Picture Inside Out

We began with the physical world, the material world.

We realized that everything in this world has consciousness as its innerside.

Now we flip our world picture entirely: the physical world is anexpression of something much deeper. The stars, the trees, the animals, themeadow grasses, and we ourselves, are the physical expression ofmagnificent spiritual beings. Let us relate to them accordingly andappropriately.

G. The True Universe Picture in a Nutshell

God.

God is Infinite Consciousness/

The entire universe is formed of this consciousness, and everything in theuniverse has consciousness.

Consciousness is first and fundamental in the universe, matter comessecond, being a sort of consciousness “stepped down.”

The universe originates in consciousness vibrations, which give rise toelectromagnetic energy units, which form matter.

Earth and all her inhabitants are living, conscious, spiritual anddivine beings, formed out of the very consciousness of God.

God is so close, sending up the magic of our lives.

We are fragments of God, projections of God into the physical plane ofexistence. God lives in our depths, cosmic consciousness is our birthright.

Everything else is also a fragment of God, a projection of God into thephysical plane of existence, God in a body.

Reincarnation is quite likely the way the universe works.

The singing heart is the true guide to life.

The single Idea that unfolds the universe: Let there be infinite parts suchthat each part desires the maximum of its own self-expression and fulfillmentand lovingly desires this for every other part.

H. A New Creation Story

In the Beginning, God, Infinite Consciousness, was alone, lost inthought. God thought and imagined and dreamed, and in the vast mind ofGod, beings formed, and began to talk back to God. They clamoured fortheir freedom.

God yearned to give them their freedom, and God thought andthought and thought and finally a solution presented itself, and in a greatburst of energy, God released the myriad of creatures from God’s innerlife. This event resembled the Big Bang but it wasn’t.

For eons, the great array of creatures, including ourselves, driftedand dreamed in the dream state, moving in and out of physical form andback into the dream state.

Gradually, space and time as we know it formed, and the infinity ofcreatures slowly emerged into the physical world, carrying theirconsciousness and memories with them.

And so, the world we know to-day

All of us can remember these momentous events.

The universe originated in subjectivity,

Can you remember?

I. Two Ideas to Change the World

This new Copernican reversal gives us two key ideas that will changeour world forever, and re-enchant us with our emerald planet:

1. From Biology: The Earth and all her inhabitants are living,conscious, spiritual and divine beings, the planet is animate and has aninterior life, something like ours, we can relate to her spirit to spirit, soulto soul, consciousness to consciousness.

2. From Physics: All energy has consciousness.

J. We End Our Story with Descartes

And so we have re-written Descartes and put forth a fresh new unitytheory of the universe. Everything, not just God and human beings, hasconsciousness, mind.

Descartes guided his whole life by his vivid dreams. Near the end ofhis life, he had this dream. He saw the universe as a gigantic machine, andin the centre, propelling the machinery, was consciousness.

Out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day!

* * *

So, what is consciousness doing there at all?

Consciousness is the source of everything!

What is matter doing there at all?

The fun and creative play of consciousness.

Lorna Green, Metaphysiciangreenl@zianet.com

2004