Brains are a model of the universe we live
in. Everything we see comes to us via the brain. We point our eyes, our
retinas, at something and we see the patterns transmitted to them via spacetime
oscillations we call light. The various motions our eyes follow when we look
around are also painting a picture for us based on what we think is important.
All organisms have greater or lesser subsets of reality staked out for their
survival. They have developed into a niche in the world, and their perceptions
and attentions reflect that world they live in. We see many well-known examples
of this in nature: Bats hunt at night with sound waves, and live in caves.
Other animals use smell, and pheromones,
as a powerful tool in building their slice of reality, and even the
lowly bee has a narrowly-focused language of sorts (Von Frisch, 1971). Dogs
bare their fangs and assume postures when threatened, and other dogs tend to
focus on these things in the establishment of dominance hierarchies. Males tend
to focus on areas in the environment we call “females” for obvious biological
reasons—as one example. Human males buy certain magazines and flowers, beetles
smell pheromones, and travel, over great distances to find mates. Human
politicians focus all their attention on a certain subset of competitive
relationships between peoples in order to force folks to do, or not do, good or
bad things. Chimpanzees engage in politics also—suprisingly like our own
(DeWaal, 1989). A small fish called a stickleback attacks red to force other
males out of their territory, since the males, when ready to mate, have red
breast coloration (Tinbergen, 1952). Females in general tend to be nurturing,
and vigilant for dangers to offspring. In another striking example of
perception related to survival, baby chicks will attend to a bird silhouette
and have an escape response only when the silhouette is moved in a particular
direction—so that it appears to have a short neck and long tail like a hawk
(Tinbergen, 1939). Since we have larger, more flexible brains than these
organisms, we can see that their behaviors are narrow. In our own behaviors, we
know that certain things we do are a subset of our available repertoire. Are
there limits to our own perceptions and overall worldview that are blind spots
for humans? Certainly all the evidence we have from animal behaviors shows one
thing quite clearly—all perceptions, and perceptual organs, and the behaviors
they are involved in, are survival-related.
Stickleback fish attend to red things, and
even react to a ping-pong ball painted red more vigorously than the real thing!
Geez, if only stickleback fish had some way of knowing truth, they would see
how ridiculous and counterproductive attacking a ping pong ball is (education,
larger brain, motivation to find truth, scientific methodology, etc. all might
help here!). Certain other very simple organisms have a simple attraction
(phototropisms in plants, phototaxis in protozoa) to light, or sugar concentrations.
Heck, our own rather complex children are also attracted to sugar
concentrations, or want us to “leave the light on” at night. Organisms perceive
according to the niches they occupy in the environment. Their worlds are
constructed out of these dedicated perceptions. The stickleback example shows
how the world “out there” may really be just the way that particular brain has
been organized—a pattern projected out there that is not complete, or even
necessarily true in the many situations (or contrived environments) it finds
itself in. Our human brains are full of coherent, dynamic, physical theories
and functions designed for one thing—to ensure our survival, to ensure that we
exist. For example, we see only a narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.We
know that our brains only allow us to see certain things about the world
related to the furtherance of our existence --in dominance hierarchies, food
gathering, work, dating, education, and also based on our motivations or
personalities too. Other, lower animals illustrate this well. A bat will never
investigate or appreciate a rainbow. Humans have MUCH more potential to see
beyond these things than any creature on earth. What a blessing that is.
From the time we are small children, our
world teaches us things. All of the things we learn are related to how to avoid
bad things and bring the good things into our lives. We are prepared to learn
certain things by the limited biology of our brains. We feel pain and pleasure
related to the functioning of our sensory systems. We only see certain colors
which then become significant by association. Everything we learn is organized
and reduces our anxiety. Once we grow up, we have many things installed in our
brains about how the world works—all wired in to pleasure and pain centers.
This constitutes our culture, our social milieu. Our anxiety rises if we find
ourselves in a situation where these things no longer apply—such as in a
different culture. Even between cultures, there are shared constraints on our
perceptions common to all humans—we model the universe we live in with
coherent, dynamic theories. We seem to automatically know where a thrown ball
will land—a complex prediction based on velocity, gravity, wind, etc. Just like
the narrow perceptual spectrum of our visual system, we may be only seeing a
slice of reality in general. We see the part that matters for the continuance
of our existence. Without space and time, we could not exist as we know
ourselves—moving forward through a life. We tend to notice relationships that
have something to do with our survival--the relationships that have applications
in our lives. In highly verbal mankind, we tend to remember spoken language
stuff more than anything. We have developed abstraction and conceptualization
abilities in our brains. We can expand our vision of the world with these
abilities. We abstractly construct complex theories about how the world works
in our language, but our brains are already complex physical theories about how
the world works. The most important stuff is already tooled into our brains.
Time and space are there—as something moves across our retina, for example.
There is a flow of events in our brains that is a panoramic metronome of
reality which gives rise to our sense of time. We know that we see only a
narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, but this works fine for
constructing what is necessary for us to exist. This color vision is wired into
the biological structure of our bodies. We are seeing the physical manifestation
of these theories of our existence when we look at the brain. We might as well
be looking at the formulas for our existence. Consciousness translates these
brain characteristics into language so that we are able to scrutinize and apply
these theories with great precision. We know that we can construct with
language (including mathematics) a model of the world we see.
We have expanded our sphere of
perception using logic, science, and technology, but this expansion has been
more in degree rather than in kind. As an example, the theory of relativity
expands the kind of perception of our world rather than the degree. Time and
space—a natural, seemingly stable and immutable, invisible, background
constituent of all experience to the average brain, is now seen as a relative,
flexible, single dimension of “spacetime” stuff. Our human brains artificially
carved spacetime into the separate, background concepts of time and space. When
we figured out that light had a certain speed (Roemer, 1675—cited in Asimov,
1962) by carefully observing the moons of Jupiter with an early telescope
(which expanded the degree of perception of distant objects), and later with
the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which depended on this first
discovery, we had fundamental changes in our ideas about reality. These changes
gave rise to subatomic physics—which counterintuitively describes and
investigates the basic construction of the universe. X-ray astronomy is an
excellent example of expanding the degree of perception—along a scale of
electromagnetic radiation. In 1896 Vienna, before that, Roentgen had
“discovered a way of photographing hidden things, even to the bones within a
living, human hand” using x-rays (Romer, 1960, p.15). Other examples of
expanded degree and refinement of our perceptions include molecular
biology—which expands and refines our view of organisms, and chemistry—a finer
and more accurate view of substances in our world systematized into a periodic
table. The periodic table itself has proven to be a great tool in predicting
the existence of elements that we otherwise would never have known--A sort of a
decoder and extrapolator of our vision. Some elements exist only briefly (made
in nuclear accelerators, etc.) because they are unstable. It is easy to see
that a bat pays attention to sound in order to find food to a greater degree
than we do. The model it uses is smaller, less detailed, less accurate, more
directly related to the acquisition of food, but coherent to the bat. By the
sphere of its daily behaviors, we can see that the bat lives in a limited, but
nonetheless coherent, world. It maintains its own existence well. It is my
thesis that human brains are like this. We live in a limited perceptual world
that we see as coherent and internally consistent even though it is incomplete
and flawed—just like we do not see the gaps in our vision where the optical
nerve courses through the retina, where there are no rods or cones to react to
light. Furthermore, these limitations may be different in kind than the
differences in perceptions between various animals and humans because we share
ancestry (and various aspects of our biology) with all other organisms at some
point. Part of this limitation is physical, such as the eye seeing only a
certain range of reflected radiations, and other parts are emotional or
psychological (from learning, or lack of it). Some humans develop several
personalities, or ways of seeing and interacting, which points up that these
were all “available” somewhere in the brain but were walled off by some process
(fear, hunger, etc.) in our brains. Even human brains have serious limits to
greater or lesser extents, but certainly a bat does not know, or question, what
a sun is. The sun has much less meaning for a bat. Humans have a complex
language that gives us a definite advantage.
Our brains use flexibility and learning to
speed up the evolutionary process toward constructing a more flexible and
all-encompassing world niche—this does not mean we are necessarily at the
pinnacle of insight and possible perceptions, however. In every age, the sages
and scholars think they have discovered the reasons why the world works as it
does—from the “gods” of rain and the harvest, phlogiston, spontaneous
generation, and humors to Newtonian physics. Even some religious constraints on
behaviors had important biological bases—the prohibition against eating pork
(trichanosis/disease avoidance) for example (Harris, 1974). In each age,
whether we consider their agriculture, house design, etc, or other parts of their culture, they had knowledge of how to survive. From
our later (more complete) perspective,
it seems they did not really know what was going on or how the world really
worked. We have similar gaps in our own knowledge today. We have gaps in our
knowledge that seem to be quite large and fundamental. Furthermore, the largest
gaps in our own knowledge are brought to light especially by considering the
problems of consciousness. For example, the phenomenology of consciousness in
relation to the physiological operation and structure of brain tissue just does
not make sense. This problem is huge, and points out that there may be
fundamental processes at work woven through our reality that we have not begun
to see until now, that we could not really see until our knowledge in all areas
of science—from physics to introspection—brought us to this shore.
The invention of the telescope allowed us
to see the nature of light and the construction of the universe, while our
microscopes and chemistry allowed us to investigate the workings of brains. We
are building a more complete knowledge so rapidly now that our knowledge
acquired in the last 100 years or so exceeds that acquired in the few thousand
years before that. We are hurtling toward complete knowledge of ourselves, but
there are still plenty of fundamental gaps. My 4 papers here certainly are
dedicated toward a remedy for this lack of knowledge. To increase the meaning
in everything we see, to increase our consciousness of things toward understanding,
meaning, and glory, is the true aim of science, and religion for that matter,
which are only facets or dimensions of inquiry—methodologies (see especially B.
Alan Wallace, 1996, for an excellent discussion of a great Buddhist
methodology). The common theme of these is to transcend our worldly
limitations—a new format of life on earth. A true freedom beyond the
limitations lingering in brains from our evolutionary past. Real truth must
involve all these things, all personalities, all segments and slices of
reality. Consciousness is a great metaphor, even a recapitulation, of the
process, and the goal, in life and man toward truth and greater flexibility.
Consciousness, therefore, by its qualities of transcendence of time and space, unity, and meaning, seems to
be the one thing about brains that has come from the future, not
the past like our bodies and limitations do (more on this later, and in my
other posters). Drop the limitation (and directionality) of time or space, and
things become much more meaningful. In fact, all of existence and all of
history only makes sense from this viewpoint (see my “logos echo” poster). This
is a big lesson of our own consciousness and its memory, etc. These are
processes that we can “carry out” of our brains into the world to help us
see—just like the periodic tables of chemistry allow us to extrapolate or, more
pertinently, the binocularity of the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea in
Hawaii allow us to get much more information “out there” because they use a
method that is inherent in our own biological information-gathering to a
greater degree (binocularity). The very underlying, basic way our brains work
is a LARGE arrow pointing towards the nature of truth. What do brains do? What
do they move toward as “ideals”? When we realize where the evolutionary
contingencies in our brains and culture are taking us, what the nature of the
unseen reality must be like, everything becomes much more
meaningful. Science learns the words and grammar, but the content of the
message left for us across time (like some great 2001 monolith lying in wait
for eons underlying all learning and striving) is simply staggering. It is the
message of consciousness.
Apparently, from what we know about brain
science and introspection, consciousness is a way of looking at ourselves, at
our own mental processes—in order to see what is going on, to find meaningful
patterns within the functioning of neurons and neural systems. We use conscious
attention to expand our world, to infuse it with meaning, to unify it. We use
many tools in this task—from language to the vast, complex rings of nuclear
accelerators, all the way up to our beautiful gilt space telescope. Most of our
expansions in knowledge are in degree, rather than in more fundamental kind.
They have been mostly like this any time knowledge has expanded in history.
This may only be the case because our brains have already been selected to
perceive smaller slices, smaller aspects of these things. It is easier to
expand on these slices than to fundamentally reorder them all, or move outside
them. There are other ways of seeing that people can be trained to do (such as
Tibetan Buddhism techniques, the self-realization of the Hindus, or the
spiritual knowledge of the Christians) that can show us different kinds of
processes at work in the universe beyond our survival-adapted senses and
predilections—precisely because our consciousness has transcended or bridged
the gaps in our knowledge at points. Consciousness “reads between the lines”,
so to speak, of our experiential reality, and affords that reality with much
more meaning, and a profound unity. The social milieu, as well as the natural
world, shapes what we see and pay attention to. Newtonian physics led many to
believe in a “clockwork universe”, for example. Cultures are patterns of social
interaction and survival (Hall, 1981; Harris, 1974). These patterns can also be
transcended via conscious attention shifting and practice in a solitary
reflective setting—as seen in many religious practices for example. Also, just
plain old education—when driven by the self-educating desire to know truth--can
allow you to transcend the social and natural world presented by our basic,
older, brain physiology—while learning great volumes about yourself in the
process. All learning and all meaning depends on what we already know—which is
unified and expanded upon by consciousness. When we seek to learn something
transcendant, or even more mundane, we focus our attention on it. We tool in
more flexible patterns. This is as if chance and natural selection moved into
our brains, came alive, and became a god over itself—as if the future of our
behavioral flexibility was making itself in our learning via our consciousness.
Everything we all do is toward the future, and the future always occupies our
consciousness and thoughts—that’s what makes memory of the past important.
Consciousness brings these together.
When we see with our eyes in the spatial
sense, we are always seeing things “out there” in space that we could move towards—actually
in the future, because it takes time to get “there”. From another viewpoint,
that of time, the light we see always also shows the past. Telescopes can see
things in space from billions of years ago, since it takes light a long time to
travel across space. Consciousness brings these things together. The unity of
consciousness allows us to string together ideas about species in diverse
areas, because our consciousness is actually the pearl of connection
between all these things—they are the past which allows us to see our future,
to understand ourselves. They are also us, our consciousness tells us—the line
of heredity is unbroken if you remove the constraint of directionality to time
(which consciousness seems to be indicating by its very unity across time that
this is valuable to do). Nothing exists that is not also important in an
information sense, and this includes the processes of our minds and
consciousness.
We use metaphors, analogies, and
allegories to learn and make sense of the world. We especially see survival
related symbolism everywhere—food, sex, competition, etc. Even these can be
transcended as parts of the world constructed by our own brains. We are the
selectors, organizers, systematizers, notepads, rewriters, and creators of our
own realities. The living tree of life, in a way, since we can encompass and
learn from all other organisms. The one
constraint running through all of it seems to be our own survival, or moreover,
the existence of a stable history tuned enough to have given rise to us or to
allow us to exist. This is what we always discover. If we look from outside our
worldview, and outside the worldview of all organisms for a common theme, the
survival and expansion of all life seems to be based on flexibility (diversity
in lower species). Greater amounts of flexibility in an organism require
greater amounts of whole knowledge. Greater slices of truth and reality. There
has been a progression in evolution towards something, some greater more whole
truth, and that something is freed and focused—intensified and embodied—by
consciousness and its learning. Memory
is itself a transcending of time and space upon which our worldview is based,
and our future is based. It is as though there has always been something up ahead--beyond
the world we see and know of everyday life and everyday science, upon which
religions, and philosophies, are based (looking forward “through a glass
darkly”, or the “shadows on the wall of a cave”) and that this unified entity
reaches back through time and draws us forward—much like Leonardo Davinci drew
pictures of helicopters, tanks, and flying machines before they existed. And
also much like tributaries flow into a river that eventually reaches an ocean.
The apparent purpose of all evolution, if any at all, seems to be greater and
greater levels of meaning or unity and relatedness to knowledge—just what we
find in our consciousness, and our symbol systems of language.
It is apparent from our own consciousness
and enhanced learning ability—which are just speeded up versions of
evolutionary processes and the apparent “ideals” of evolution—where evolution
must have been headed all this time. Consciousness of our own mental
processes is the most powerful thing an organism ever developed. If we simply
drop our narrow notions of the directionality and basic nature of causation and
probability in time, in a way that organizes the history of the universe better
based on teleological evolutionary trends, many things become clear. once you
negotiate the minefield of half truths, fears, and love of stasis that many
people of the past had, you reach a new level of understanding. These are
necessary parts and hurdles to the future—a sort of test of worthiness, and
trial by fire. Consciousness is the prize of overcoming in evolution. A little
knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially when it contains some truth—as the
survival and organization of an ant hill shows. Truth is arguably the most
compelling thing for life--since in my view all things are driven by this. The
very words and ideas we use make it hard to see these things because, though
they help us to understand, they are only parts of a whole. Words and ideas in
and of themselves are misleading if focused on narrowly. Only further
understanding, and a great overarching mental mobility can tread the waters
between the excerpts of reality contained in the words, and the parts, of our
knowledge. It is much like the idea of “spots” for functions in the brain from
my earlier work (for example Romer, 1992; Romer, 1993)—these parts may seem to
have a function to us, but they get their real meaning because of the whole
brain they are embedded in. It is useful to look at these parts only if we
later can put them all together to make a whole brain. Consciousness is the
result, and impetus, of these forces in evolution.
Directionality of causation, and the physical nature of causation, along with
biological metaphors having to do with hierarchy, sex, food, etc. are walls to
our vision which were necessary for a time, but now must be pulled down so that
we can expand our horizons again. These are part of the processes of creation,
are only half-truths, which we must build further on. There is a higher,
meta-organization to things which I call the “logos echo” (see my later
poster). This is a basic principle to the organization of things in the
universe and on earth. If it were not, our very brains could not have formed at
all. We could not have consciousness. It is an echo of patterns nested within
patterns which enables our literary devices of metaphor and analogy. Patterns
echo back through time like ripples on a pond from a mass dropped in the
center. That center has always been ultimate consciousness. From the rise and
fall of progressively more advanced civilizations, to the construction of
pyramids, and the burial of treasures in the sands of time, to the fact that we
orbit a single sun, There is a reason that patterns echo, and that is because
all things were once one beyond time in the singularity of the big bang, and
the progression of time is an evolutionary illusion of brains. The underlying
oneness of things beyond time allows meaning, consciousness, and
“ghosts” of future structure to inform the processes playing out, and evolving,
in our universe. Coherence itself—whether of language, or reality, comes from
the kind of unity found in consciousness.
From heliotropism in plants, and a beetle
flying toward the light, to those worshiping the sun-god, to our modern
metaphor of light as truth, all have the same basis--a past echo of future
higher consciousness. Part of the implications of this idea—explained fully in
another article—is that all the life on earth is also fundamentally us,
in a holding pattern of information and support, providing both food AND base
metaphors upon which we can be enlightened and surreptitiously communicated
with by that supreme intelligence in the future by the manipulation of
probabilities. There is a reason our literary metaphors are there—“hunger” for
truth, “path” of knowledge, etc. (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, and Sacks, 1979
for excellent discussions of metaphor). There is a reason for the metamorphosis
of butterflies, etc. Messages—like the people who became books in
Ray Bradbury’s “Farenheit 451” (1995)—these are living information systems.
Living books. The extinction of the dinosaurs is a message to us automatically
because that is the way the universe works—this information is a natural
component of our universe not apprehensible until our consciousness and
science reached current levels, just as we could not have known light had a
speed without a telescope. It has necessarily been a covered-bridge of sorts.
Certainly dinosaurs were not concerned with truth, and they are gone. The
origin of species is not just chance and selection, but the manipulation of
chance by the necessary, creating, future of consciousness. Consciousness is
marked mostly by unity (meaning), and higher consciousness gives more meaning
(which is unity) to things. Extrapolation from the nature of consciousness into
the future of consciousness brings new principles of the universe into focus.
Those seen as “enlightened” in the past
were considered god-like. They were the ones doing the work of the future
consciousness—hence “sun-god”. Alexander the Great’s own mother thought he was
the son of Zeus—the sun god, for one among MANY examples—throughout all
religions and times. All the world IS a stage, and the future beyond our
conception of time is the probabilistic playwright, and eventual viewer. We
must interpret the play. The playwright was not “dictating”, but most obviously
from a certain viewpoint of the nature of consciousness, drawing us ever near
to our destiny. Holy men go up on mountains (toward the sky, on a symbol of the
convergence of the many into the one) to get direction for the future. The
future point of unity and unlimited possibility is the object—ultimate
flexibility. Philosophers have called this the “Omega Point” (Chardin, 1959) or
the birth of the “Superman” (Neitzsche, 1884 in Hollingdale, 1969). Our Future
ancestors! They must be the true source of life. The people who are “at one”
with God. Religions have called it
“sun”, “son of God”, “kingdom of heaven” (which, incidentally, is already here
from this view—we just need to expand our vision to see it—just like the
prophets said), Valhalla, Nirvana, self-realization, etc. We have a feeling
that all religions share a commonality deep under their doctrines. They do, it
is this top-down, transparent organizing force seen in Anthropic Cosmology
(Gribbin and Rees, 1989) which is consciousness at work. This view logically
follows from the processes of life, and the nature of our own consciousness in
relation to these processes. All religions are all drawn towards the greater
truths to come in the future.
Kingdoms of the past have echoed this
theme—one monarch directing a kingdom echoes the unity in the future (and the
past—beyond time is the same everywhere) directing us forward. An atom has a
central structure with clouds of probabilistic electrons around it, and
everything is built upon this centralized structure. Solar systems are also
reflective of the apparent nature of consciousness. The Sun in the sky is
symbolic of consciousness supreme over the things of the earth in the future.
Our linguistic metaphors in our language are based on these types of meanings.
We are on a path to ultimate flexibility and transcendance. If we fall from the
path, we are destroyed utterly (obviously), as if some important constant of matter
changed slightly—unbalancing the forces of the nucleus of the atom, flinging
all atomic structure apart into oblivion. Our very existence depends on these
“centers” holding together—everything from the unity of the solar system down
to the unity of life and our cells, and even the unity of atoms. Even getting
partially stuck along the way is dangerous—for example the “dark ages”. We like
to call ancient peoples “cave men”, but the real caves they lived in were caves
of ignorance upon which the shadows of the future played. In the bible it says
that “my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”, and necessarily so. The
future echoes into the past—the future of higher knowledge and consciousness.
Rupert Sheldrake (Sheldrake, 1981) calls these formative forces “formative
causation”, but views them from a non-consciousness, and present-time
viewpoint. Seeking truth, unity in science and all knowledge, is the key to the
success of life. Moreover it is the life force itself: The impetus that
drives us forward, The ultimate commodity, The REAL gold running in the veins
of life. Certainly it is obviously the impetus behind both science and
religion, and the connection between them. Consciousness is the “grand unifying
theory” of everything. All life is one in this future, extrapolating from the
symbols we know.
Consciousness, and meaning, could not
exist given the current scientific paradigms (describing our brain function) we
operate within. By using our knowledge of what it is like to be conscious
(introspective phenomenology), we can see the limitations of our fine-tuned,
limited-variables empirical science. Science is an externalization of one
aspect of normal brain function—learning and testing “hypotheses” about the
world. Science is like life—only in nature, species and members of species die
when they are not right.We are extremely flexible in this adaptation—most
animals and insects have workable “theories” according to whatever niche they
are in that are quite successful. We need to look at the evolution of things
from an internal perspective. Ants and cockroaches are two successful,
long-lived, excellent living “theories” about the world. What they do is what
the world is like to them—they are built for it, they sustain that part for the
whole. A giraffe, a whale, and an eagle all live in different worlds. Put one
of them in the environment of the other, and they don’t live very long. The
things they pay attention to, and the “world view” they hold, serves them
well—literally, because they get food, and defend against invasion well with
them. They do not progress, however. They have become more like the static
natural laws of the universe, rather than the force which draws life forward.
The force of meaning and truth.
Humans are very different than most life
on earth because they are flexible, and can learn well. We can learn all other
behavioral, and survival strategies of the lower animals, and of other humans
as well. Some do not keep going—they settle into a comfortable pattern we call
personality, or they acquire habits because they can (or must). Some get off
the path to truth and write a book about what they have seen—like the pharaohs
burying treasures for the future life, like the very diversity of species
itself. They constitute the book of life. Instead of looking at the universe as
“out there”, we need to see it as “constructed” by us so that we might continue
to exist. Animals live in smaller worlds contained in, reflective of, and part
of ours—actually part of us. Right now, we are at a crossroads—we see that our
view of the brain and how it works is seriously flawed. Certain patterns of
nature and the universe speak of a higher consciousness that built the
coherence we apprehend right into the universe that it might be created, and this
higher consciousness is part of the natural order and natural law of the
universe. The progression of life, and the nature of consciousness in relation
to brains points directly to this idea. It is my contention that humans too
have worldviews, blindspots, and limited inner environments. We are flexible,
but also limited. Strength,
fearlessness, and love of truth are not the highest virtues for nothing—they
all lead to higher consciousness.
This currently limited state of our brains
poses a huge problem to future inquiry, because we are built to perceive the
world according to our survival. We are
flexible (just beginning to move away from this “automatic” mode characteristic
of matter and lower animals), but also still limited--limited in ways that are
transparent to most of us because we get everything we know through our limited
“apparatus” and our theoretically, and conceptually, provincial brain. We also
have to admit to ourselves how primitive we still are, and that can be painful
(unless you have absolutely no ego). The picture painted by our brains that we
see is a complete one for most aspects of daily life of mere survival. That is
the nature of a totally interrelated culture of information
(Hall, 1981). The question we want to ask ourselves, is whether we just want to
be fed and sheltered, which leads to death, or do we want meaning. Do we want
to know truth—do we love truth? This is the faith of both the true scientist,
and the holy man on a remote mountain. I believe we have the brainpower and
resources to bring a new age of understanding literally only dreamed of by
previous generations. People say we have advanced scientifically, but not in
our wisdom or spiritually enough to handle our new technology of nuclear
weapons, genetic engineering, etc. In the viewpoint I propose, we can see that
this might logically and literally be correct.
Understanding consciousness will require we leave the bounds of these
comfortably coherent conceptual homes provided by culture and brains—somewhat
like trying to get a bat to look through a telescope. We are much more flexible
and adaptable than a bat, thankfully!
Brains encompass only partial segments of
reality, but nonetheless make that segment feel complete and internally
consistent. Expanding the degree of perception within our segments of reality
advances science, and exposes our obvious “perceptual degree” shortcomings,
such as the narrow range of light we perceive. We need to look beyond these
things because of what the phenomenon of consciousness itself shows us about
our perception of the world. We have internal theories of physics, AND internal
theories or representations of GOD (see recent “God and the Brain” article in
Newsweek—Begley, 2001). There are large
things missing from our world view that are not just a matter of degree, but of
the kind of perception we seem limited to. Several years of observational data
(dealing with coincidences and relationships beyond science) that I have
collected show this. Synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence (Combs and
Holland, 1996) are another way of looking at these events. Arthur Koestler
states in this book:
There
exists a type of phenomenon, even more mysterious than telepathy or
precognition, which has puzzled man since the dawn of mythology: the seemingly
accidental meeting of two unrelated causal chains in a coincidental event which
appears both highly improbable and highly significant.
One of the things
apparent from this data, which is VERY hard to collect and still maintain a
normal life (extremely different way of seeing things) is that our very notions
of both time, and the directional causality of events within it, are
incomplete—just a VERY good theory we operate and interpret everything with. In
order to understand consciousness and its importance, we will need to change
our whole world view. Consciousness is the driving force behind the universe
which our individual consciousness reflects and models. All of the universe is
a coincidence leading to the meaning in higher consciousness.
Some
recent/selected data from years and thousands of recorded observations:
1) I was considering the significance of these
coincidental events, and thinking about the origins of human conflict when
“Celestine Prophecy” was published. It was like I had written most of that
book—very uncanny coincidental parallels to my thinking at the time, some
almost verbatim.
2) I came up with the idea of a spiral shape
as a highly simplified, but effective way of picturing the unity that we cannot
see in nature until we get enough of the picture—small sections of a tight
spiral look parallel but disconnected, just like metaphors or allegories in
language, or the underlying parallels to all religions. As you rise above the
spiral, you see that the spiral is actually formed of one single line. The way
it is laid out, combined with a narrow view, makes it look like lots of vaguely
or impossibly related things. Spirals have a center and radiate vaguely out
like ripples on a pond. That’s why I chose this symbol as one of my favorites years
ago. The cover of “The Journal of Consciousness Studies” in 1999 June/July Volume 6 is a head with a big
spiral in it. I still remember the impact this had on me when I first saw it on
the cover—something like awe of GOD.
3) At the Tucson conference last year, I went
to a poster session with a cheap T-shirt from Wal-Mart that had a surfer coming
through a circular wave—the end of which had been stylized into a dragon’s
head. It looked like a surfer surfing through a dragon coiled around him. I
walked up to a poster there by Jordan Peterson (who I had never heard of
before) and there were diagrams of circular dragons of almost the same shape
and design as that on my shirt. Additionally, I had found a one-of-a-kind “Sun”
pendant on ebay—with a spiral center—and I was wearing that. He then explained
that sun symbolism was very important to his ideas too. We talked for a long
time and there was remarkable coincidence to our ideas as well.
4) I went to the store a couple weeks ago wearing
a bright blue shirt, with a fluorescent green dragon on it in a sort of
structural framework pattern across it. On the way out, I turned the wrong way
in the car, and cut through some space in a parked car line. There directly in
front of me was a bright blue car whose only motif was a fluorescent green
thick stripe snaking across the hood—the same highly unlikely colors as
my shirt.
5) On a more mundane level, these things
happen often in ways that we may not see if we don’t know what to look for.
Certain themes run through life and your thoughts, like karma in Hindu
mythology. You think about something, then you start noticing it all over. Just
yesterday (July 31, 2001), I went to the store after work specifically to get
some ginseng and they didn’t have the kind I wanted. I looked all through the
vitamins and ended up getting some other vitamins instead. Then when I went
home, I picked up the book “Hearts in Atlantis” (King, 1999) before bed and
read within 5 pages of where I left off last time “Suspended from the ceiling
on a loop of dusty wire were cellophane packages, some marked ginseng oriental
love root and others Spanish delite. Bobby wondered if they were vitamins of
some kind. Why would they sell vitamins in a place like this?”. Normally, we
would not notice these things because it takes a lot of mental effort beyond
simply living your life—which is complicated enough. These things seemed
meaningless in the past precisely because humanity had not built up it’s own
consciousness enough.
6) These kinds of evidence—in each case—could
easily be explained away by random chance. It is only when we recognize themes
running through them, or gather lots of them together, that we can see that
there is definitely something going on there. Earlier in that same book, which
my wife bought and was just laying around so I picked it up, was this passage:
“take Isaac Asimov, for instance. Under the name of Paul French, Mr. Asimov
wrote science fiction novels for kids about a space pilot named Lucky Starr,
and they were pretty good. That was on page 75 (before the above example) and I
read that right after considering a reference to an Isaac Asimov (1962) book
for this paper a couple of days before.
7) Another time, I wrote to Francis Crick and
sent him a copy of an article I wrote about glial cells in the brain revolving
around the concept of meaning (Romer, 1994). He wrote me back saying “you’ll be
amused to know that the word MEANING is written in large letters on the
blackboard behind my desk”.
All of these examples, and many more even
better ones, show that there is something more at work in life. Some greater
purpose or meaning that ties us all together—just like consciousness ties
together the widely separated areas of brain function. A LARGER “binding
problem”. We cannot understand the relationship of consciousness to its place
in nature without attending to these larger consciousness-like themes running
through the universe in Anthropic Cosmology, linguistics, biology, linguistic
devices, etc.—which constitute the patterning of the “Logos Echo” explained in
my other poster, and illustrated by the spiral shape. These things will require
a new way of looking, using the nature and origin of consciousness both as an
observation point AND as model of a primary process of reality and how it
arose. A certain circularity is unavoidable.
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C
2001 Steven Eric Romer