Introspective Investigations of the Complex and Rare Events of Consciousness

Life has sought to understand the world of experience since the smallest organism began to interact with its environment. Even the smallest interactions possible are a form of elemental “knowledge” of the environment. The purpose of the organism is contained in the detection of some quality of the environment in relation to the response it gives—this constitutes its knowledge. Knowledge is initially shaped and refined in biology by mutations and death—nature experimenting and building itself. If you take knowledge as the goal of evolution, man is at the apex. There is an advancement/nonrandom quality built into supposedly random evolution. Mankind is the most refined and qualitatively different organism existing at the top of the knowledge “food chain” in this search for truth. Ultimate knowledge gives ultimate adaptive flexibility to organisms. Truth is the destination and goal of life. By moving quickly towards this goal of knowledge with our large flexible brains, we overtake all other species and avoid the pitfalls and ecological niches that narrow the repertoires of lower forms of life. Having a great way of getting food now can divert and kill later—dependency on narrow aspects of the environment means narrowing adaptive flexibility for future scenarios. Looking far into the future, learning by the past, is human knowledge. All knowledge seeks to transcend time and space. Consciousness is the result of the transcendence of time and space.

Our unique mind allows us to speed up the process of evolution toward this end of unity and transcendence, and today we are exploding into knowledge not dreamed of even 100 years ago--an extremely short time for such a radical change in our relationship to the environment. Even though our bodies are stuck in the evolutionary past to sustain us, our brains have distilled and discovered some great ideal of evolution and are rocketing toward this goal. Epistemology, psychology, anthropology, chemistry, biology, physics, etc. are really the study of the apparatus and records of our search for truth—intimate studies of ourselves. These are the methodologies we have used. These are how we built the modern worldview—expanded our consciousness. All of these different areas of knowledge are tied together by some future ultimate unification of knowledge we seem to be moving toward, if you take this process to its logical conclusion. Our consciousness is already a unity—the only unity currently binding these things together, as it binds all things in our experience together. Looking at this unity, are there important phenomena available to our consciousness that are not available to methodologies such as science and logic? This question is extremely important because consciousness seems to be the prototypical unity that the building of knowledge has been moving toward—some ultimate ideal of meaning (unity and meaning really being the same thing). Meaning is a unity of potential possibility woven into complex relationships seen at once in the minds eye.

If you accept that all life seeks the unity of meaning as its goal, you can see that the history of science, and logical description in general, is marked by a set of repeating flaws. From the idea of Phlogiston in objects (a substance thought responsible for their combustive properties) to Godels incompleteness theorem in mathematics, these flaws are intrinsic to the process of building knowledge, or descriptions of the world, via scientific methodology and verbal logic. The easiest way to conceptualize this problem is that science and logic are subsets of reality—subsets of the reality we perceive in our brain, which is itself a subset of the reality we surmise is “out there”. These subset-of-reality-describing-reality problems are analogous to the problems and functions of language as an information-encapsulation of reality. As a metaphorical or representative “echo” of actual reality, language is an elaborator—teacher, bookmark, and trigger of the relationships we have in our brains from the billions of years of evolution in this universe. It came into existence because of the unity taking shape in us. In this view, language is a subset of a subset of reality (made possible by the “logos echo” principle of “reality” formation--see my “logos echo of unity” poster). We ratchet ourselves up on the steps of these subsets to higher knowledge. Each form of life is really a step in this pyramid. Our brains are a moving, colored, 3 dimensional language describing reality. Our brains are an “echo” of reality nested within reality. We can see this because we have an introspective consciousness. Even in the grand scheme of things, the universe could not have arisen in the form it takes without some great introspective consciousness that ours reflects—that “breathes fire into the equations”, as Stephen Hawking says. This is apparent from the nature and unity of consciousness as the interpreter of languages, and also as the interpreter of the very nature of languages themselves--which are woven into the fabric of reality itself. Since no language has meaning without a reader who gives it life, our consciousness is necessary for existence, and as a component of all descriptions of reality.

Words are dead patterns without the unity of meaning. Our consciousness has been building to be the interpreter of the languages of reality for billions of years, really. It seems to be the purpose of creation itself—this meaning, or ultimate unity. Introspection is the only way, a sort of “Rosetta Stone” for the hieroglyphs of truth echoing through existence. These echoes exist everywhere at all levels of our perceived reality like a hall of mirrors, or a set of nested forms echoing small to large like the repeating patterns of the Mandelbrot set as you zoom in and out of the picture, or the repeating cragginess of fractal coastlines. This is described as a new natural law of the universe, which is only apprehensible through introspection. (Explained in my other poster here; “Logos Echo of unity in the universe”). This principle is behind all analogy, metaphor, and allegory in all language, and is simply symbolized by the spiral—life moves along the lines in space-time. These linguistic-poetic devices of language are actually very basic natural laws of organization for language, brains, AND the universe itself--supported by evidence available only through introspection of the meaning contained in the unity of consciousness.

Towards the end of this path, there is great danger obviously because a little knowledge most certainly IS a dangerous thing! All things happen for a reason on the grand scale across space-time. Since it is all about introspectively interpreting language, it is intelligible. Meaning is reflected in the universe by unity—symbolized by gravity, suns, etc—stages on the path. The real mass that was like a weight dropped in the center of reality—warping space-time so that everything moved toward it—was ultimate meaning, or what people like to call “God”. Of course, lots of people participated in this at one time or another, and we called them “gods”. Processes at work all through this were partially apprehended and also called “gods”—such as the dance of creation and destruction of Shiva in Hindu mythology. All religions are based on the teleology of the invisible “sun” of God through time. The Bahaii’s Baha u llah said “the source of all learning is the knowledge of God”, I liked this so much that I put a card that says this over my computer desk at home. Like the sun up high (ahead) with many hands coming down over the people (into the past) symbol of Egyptian hieroglyphics, The great unity of the future demands certain things of the past—building civilizations and what not—to build the knowledge and consciousness fast enough to avoid destruction, etc. by partial truths—such as atomic weapons, fanatical religions in conflict, and cultural differences. You really have to love unity to get past all the pitfalls and fears—which are the fist of the devil, or destruction, the “judgment” of God. In Hermann Weyl’s book on symmetry of forms in nature, he cites Goethe (from “Faust”) about how he banishes Mephistopheles, the devil, by using a highly symmetrical pentagram: “Space itself has the full symmetry corresponding to the group of all automorphisms, of all similarities. (as the spiral illustrates) The symmetry of any figure in space is described by a subgroup of that group. Take for instance the pentagram by which Dr. Faust banned Mephistopheles the devil.”

External reality outside our brains may seem unapproachable as an idea until we see the clues within our experience, and across our history, as to what the nature of the reality beyond our brains is like. All of these clues are knitted together by the unity of our consciousness. Once you knit them together, and weave all the strings into place, a picture forms on the tapestry like an M.C. Escher painting, a Bach fugue, or a programmer’s nested loops. All religion has been the attempt of the processes and unity of higher (more unified, meaningful, and true) consciousness in the future to express itself in the flawed, nested, languages of brains and speech. Religion is an apprehension of the meaning given to the process of cosmic and biological evolution by the teleological goal of consciousness. This is not some pie-in-the-sky concept, but something very real here and now that animates and binds the universe together—the literal source of all meaning. This meaning becomes clear only when we realize that the character of consciousness is time transcending in every aspect. It is not just the oneness behind things in our minds, but also the oneness behind all things—from the absolute, unexpressed unity of the big bang expanded into our universe, to the creative unity of the consciousness once again in the future, and born in us (really both beyond time) that all evolution moves toward.

From the birth of the natural laws in the universe (sort of a computer hardware right after the big bang—based on unity, but without it’s own independent meaning), to our consciousness today, there has been an evolution of another sort—of consciousness in us. Anthropic cosmology (specific, fine-tuned, laws and constants of nature that must exist or we would not be here to consider this) is the same impetus as that which drove biological evolution. Consciousness is like the future reaching into the past through our minds, but it is really something beyond time in its effects—it helps to think of it as in the future where it comes together. I’m not simply being poetic by saying this, but rather it is literally the case. Perhaps this is the reason behind the fervor of those who want to literally interpret scriptures, etc.—you DO need to take the language seriously, and literally, but you need to be reading the book of life written across the entire universe—not just our written language. All subsets ARE tools, and dangerous to the future if we do not realize that all work is done from within—a work that needs to continue to progress toward wholeness in order to exist. Consciousness, at first glance, is most obviously unified—NOT separated by either time or space (time and space are the same thing really—since Einstein anyway).

Memory is the past being used to construct the future (from the future), and consciousness seems to be our will—which is the future echoing down through the past. The processes in the world we see are the past, while building the future. When we see an object in the world out there like we normally do, we can move to it via space-time by walking, riding a bike, driving, etc. We already knew of it in consciousness via light/eyes, then later we are actually in contact with it. The consciousness we used in the example of moving toward something we see by walking, etc. worked MUCH faster—at the speed of the “light” that entered our eyes. What this really means is that the contents of consciousness travel at the speed of light everywhere we look, while our “logical” bodies are required to “hoof it” at painfully slow speeds—to state things colloquially. We can see the past with telescopes looking out into space, like the memory of the universe, because it takes time for light to travel. The stepwise-meaning and forms example of the “logos echo” allows you to make the leap introspectively to the true meaning behind all the light traveling and time stuff. For our bodies, light is something so fast we can never go that speed. For the ultimate unity of the universe to exist, it travels instantaneously anywhere in the universe at once, while light is agonizingly slow by comparison—like walking compared to our light vision. Analogy—apprehensible only by consciousness is the key to ultimate knowledge of even the unseen beyond the universe by following the path of analogy logically to its conclusion in ultimate unity. What I am trying to do with all these examples tying cosmic stuff and consciousness together, is to show that the MAIN FEATURE of consciousness, and the KEY to understanding BOTH the universe AND consciousness is the extremely salient unity and its character within our own subjective consciousness.

First person accounts of experience, and introspection, are OBVIOUSLY the most powerful tools for the investigation of consciousness at this point in our science because our theories of how the brain works to give rise to consciousness are obviously incomplete, and our current theories of how the outside world works are also logically incomplete as a consequence. Like the (logical) Zeno/Greek paradox of moving half way to something before you can get there, then moving half of that, etc.—the problem is that all descriptors have an intrinsic flaw. They are always only partial descriptions like some theoretical Rube Goldberg machine. These machines are problematic because they leave out the creator—the unity behind the machines. They leave out the consciousness that brought it all together—the UNITY that guides and tweaks these relationships. This is the will, the creative force of intellect and subjectively experienced as consciousness. The unity of the universe is the same as that in our consciousness. The logos echo, and the symmetry of natural law and forms, are two large external signposts to this unity. Space-time must be a trick of smoke and mirrors—a wilderness of consciousness. Reality is always incomplete without unity, and its expression from within that unity as consciousness. God, or what we non-technically describe as God, is actually ‘hiding’ in us and behind the universe—thus the conception of “gods” and “God” in history.

Certainly the one driving force behind evolution—in my view the MOST important—is not selection--that’s the down side of the process for many species. The evolution of the universe, of life, civilization, or a man within a life recapitulating this process of creation, ALL are driven by one thing CONSCIOUSNESS. This is the beyond space-time unifying force that pulls us forward--like gravity pulls matter into concentrations, planets, suns, black holes, quasars, etc. Consciousness has a gravity that pulls it into higher concentrations by its own creative force—by will. Will is the gravity of consciousness—the reactor of life. The unity of the big bang is right here with us now all around like the very air we breathe. It informs the shapes of matter, and provides our consciousness with the basic intelligibility of it all like a vocabulary and grammar. Like a mechanical drawing of a living consciousness. I call this coherence the logos echo (see other poster). Obviously, this idea of future consciousness explains a lot about the struggles of mankind, civilizations, religions, science, etc. All has really been a holy quest—one of those incredible journeys of the soul. Every symbol, all meaning, derives from this gravity of unity. The imperfections inherent in realities including space-time, or any language attempting to represent perfection, are a quality of their existing itself. If we fear oblivion, it is because we do not love perfection, we do not love something higher than ourselves—a greater truth or unity. You cannot talk about reality, and especially not consciousness, without referring to the unseen—the holy even. All conceptualizations of anything fall short without consciousness—including evolution (seen here as the struggle of imperfection to reach perfection—symbolized by the Christmas tree with it’s star on top, and all the ornaments who strayed in order to provide noble markers and language, or support for further growth of the ultimate unity of consciousness. Truly, all things have the element of the one consciousness in them—they are only incomplete, or flawed, when viewed separately. Just like we know language taken out of context is almost the same as lying in some cases. This flawed view is a natural consequence of science, because consciousness is an inextricable part of nature. Three characteristics of consciousness especially point up this incompleteness:

1) Things have meaning to us, and this meaning selects the terrain of our consciousness. We are most aware and most conscious of meaningful things. Meaning can be conceptualized as the instantaneous nexus, without regard to both time and space, of unimaginable amounts of data.

2) Consciousness is unified, whereas brain functions, and action potentials correlated with the experience of consciousness are distributed (the binding problem).

3) While statistically rare events, or complex combinations of events, have great meaning, and control over consciousness, science focuses all its attention on the repeatable. Such rare events are important for understanding the role of consciousness.

Experience tells us that certain patterns are repeated and echo throughout our world and languages (see my “logos echo” of unity poster), and we even construct our own patterns in language that echo the world of our experience. Science can tell us that certain patterns exist as long as they are stable, isolated, and repeatable. Experience tells us that patterns exist in complex contexts, nested within other patterns—all in motion. We can choose to be aware of more or less of these patterns at will—unless we are insecure or overcome by fear. There are certain relationships within these patterns that science will be forever blind to because they are multidetermined. In some relationships, things we see in the present are meaningfully correlated with past events, like metaphor, instead of causally. These are not repeated, and are marked by statistical rarity. Only conscious experience can go into this realm. Science thus far has studied the “grammar” of our existence, while meaning seems to come from some message contained within this grammatical arena of natural laws and processes that ensure our existence. Meaning is the dynamic relationship of these things in interaction with the unity of consciousness, memory, reflection, and behavior. I have collected years of data showing these rare, complex relationships. Any one of them might be explained away eventually as coincidence, from a scientific perspective. Science is hopelessly inadequate for the task of inquiring about these events because they have no repeatable linearity to them.

Stable patterns exist in multidetermined complexities—much as chaos in mathematical theory shows. In our everyday life, we know things like the “hope” diamond, or the “heart of the Ocean” from “Titanic” have intriguing meanings for us—we pay attention to (and sometimes lots of money for) rare things, things of meaning. Meaningful things tend to be portents of the future, or transcend time in their meaning. We call these things “timeless” or “priceless”. They are products of, and physical symbols of, consciousness and its nature. When something becomes a focus of our consciousness, becomes woven with meaning and portent from past and future, it becomes the pinnacle in the topography of the current map of our consciousness. For example, a trained guard dog was once accidentally let out at an estate where I worked some 15 years ago. It had been straining its chains to get at me every time I came into view for a week, my first week of work there. I focused intently at the form of the dog—legs and turf flying behind it, hysterically snarling—I crouched down and braced for impact while protecting my neck. I got ready to grab the dog by the throat and break its neck. I was staring intently at the dog, and remember the incident well—even though it was 15 or so years ago. Fear can have a big effect on what you are conscious of. What you remember. Even fears like lack of food and shelter, social fears, etc. can have huge effects. Consciousness allows us to overcome fearful situations—that is why it comes into play and intently focuses (see topographical map) during, and its topography tends to conform to, things which have a bearing on our survival or existence. Fear carves up our consciousness according to our survival needs, but at some level of learning these walls for our consciousness based on desire or fear (same thing really—greed stems from fear for example) can be transcended. A transformation or metamorphosis occurs. I had no choice as long as the dog was attacking—it was a matter of survival. I had to focus. Our older, more mechanical brains are kept active by by being effective, and maintaining a fear of the unknown.

In each of our lives, if we let our consciousness go where it may and pay attention to what we see in ways contrary to accepted patterns (more truthfully using objective memories—letting more information come to bear than we are trained to by objective testing, etc. in schools—a voluntary “loosening of associations” beyond our conditioning), personal meaning comes forth. Moreover, the uncanny nature of these events when compared to other events or contents of our consciousness minutes or hours before, shows a side to the functioning of consciousness covered over by the daily grind and hustle-bustle of our modern civilization and its demands of worldly organization. The sheer volume of these incidents I have collected serves to paint a definite picture of some other principles of consciousness at work beyond the pale of science as we know it. Certainly these events lift some sort of veil off of a possible purpose and direction of consciousness as an evolutionary process. Also, this makes ancient civilizations and religions much more intelligible. Makes the very existence of life more intelligible. Science has nothing to say about religions and religious symbols, but the phenomena of consciousness certainly can shed some light in this area. Maybe at some future time, we will be able to feed enough data into a computer to allow it to calculate the probabilities of these events and therefore bring these real relationships and principles to light, but until then, their ephemeral existence in consciousness is all we have to go on.

It is difficult to see these things because all the organizations we see, live in, and are taught in life—from our learning of words, to our learning of history and the “objective” nature of the existence of things like colors, to our cloistering in cities away from nature, --leads us to pay attention to the narrow path tread before. Leaves us in a giant chrysalis mentally. Keeps us as children—always looking to others for sustenance, engendering fear and cruelty. There is a time for children, but we must also go out into the raw world of experience and make our own way. The history of life on earth is much the same story—merely recapitulated and echoed in our life (see my “logos echo of unity” poster). People like to repeat the saying that we only use 1/10 of our brains, even though that is not technically true. From this standpoint, it is true in a way. Even the idea of a subconscious, or the “collective unconscious”, becomes intelligible if we consider that memory transcends time and consciousness has a terrain that can be constricted by fears or various parts and subsets of the unity of our subjective experience. A GREAT definition of fear is “narrow focus” for survival. Fear robs us of our own meaning.

Anything we are focused on narrowly is direct evidence that we are fearful in some way. It is difficult to imagine your brain merrily wandering through existence like some fantastic realm of infinite possibility, but that is the direction that all life and all consciousness has been headed. Consciousness has three aspects to consider—reminiscent of the trinity in Christendom, or the Trimurti in the Hindu religion. Our written language, our brains, and the universe itself constitute the three systems of existence—the primary “Logos Echo” The black form of Mecca is reminiscent of the Black holes—intense gravitational centers. The list goes on… Consciousness solves all the misunderstandings and makes these “languages” of mankind intelligible. Mankind has been sort of crazy for truth which was not yet available—that’s why we had so many wars and horrors. I, for one, am really glad we made it. I’m glad I found the words to express these thoughts “of God”, as Einstein said so succinctly. The alternative is the suicide and death of insanity—echoed on the grand scale by wars and other horrors of various cultures through time. We certainly can’t afford that now. Nuclear weapons are God’s ultimatum—the written version at least—actually a foreknowledge of what happens if we don’t “have faith” and continue on the path of overcoming via higher knowledge. The “mercy of God” is that the future echoes into the past. We should all really work to avoid this particular future foreshadowed in weapons of mass destruction.

I have collected a lot of observational data that shows some backward-looking phenomena in consciousness that linear-causal models of science cannot possibly explain. These happen daily, and are sometimes so thoroughly embedded in and woven into other events that they can’t be adequately transcribed in all their subtle detail. Also, there cannot be the possibility that you saw a glimpse of something before, say a TV commercial, which subconsciously triggered a particular thought for which you then consciously see the imagery in the same TV commercial--That sort of thing. It takes a while to learn to attend to and rule these things out before hand. Also, I have found that these don’t take a lot of thought, in general, to recognize them, but usually if you do start thinking about it, the meaning becomes only deeper. For example, I had been thinking recently about Mary Shelley writing the story of “Frankenstein”. She had been on heroin at the time, or opium, I think. I began thinking about this because my wife talked about the absinthe the artists used in the “Moulin Rouge” movie she saw recently. I had been turning the idea over in my head about what “Frankenstein” symbolized, and how the drugs might have figured in. I had thought before that (before Moulin Rouge) how it seemed like an allegory for science (albeit a macabre one) that creates a larger living thing out of the toil, or remains, of generations past. The lightning could be sort of like the force of the future reaching back to give life by tweaking probabilities, etc. Anyway, what is important is not the accuracy of the analogies, but that while I was considering this I saw several things that coincided with it. The first was a Tiger Woods car commercial where he comes driving out of a castle with lightning etc. and says something like “you were expecting Igor?” the car was portrayed as combining disparate elements of different kinds of vehicles—a clear Frankenstein analogy. Then I saw a commercial for Honey Nut Cheerios with Frankenstein eating that cereal within a day or so of that. It is not like its Halloween. I don’t watch a lot of TV either. Then, on top of that—further solidifying the coincidence of events into consciousness—I picked up a book to read a few pages before bed (one of several I am reading off and on) and read this passage in Stephen Kings book “On Writing”:

Imagine, if you like, Frankensteins monster on its slab. Here comes lightning, not from the sky, but from a humble paragraph of English words. Maybe it’s the first really good paragraph you ever wrote, something so fragile, yet full of possibility that you are frightened. You feel as Victor Frankenstein must have when the dead conglomeration of sewn-together spare parts suddenly opened its watery yellow eyes. Oh my god, its breathing, you realize. Maybe its even thinking.

I put the book down shortly after that and decided to write a paragraph or two as an intro for a novel—just off the cuff. I used the name Barry—I had never used this name before, but I had a friend at school once with this name, so I thought why not? After that I went to bed. When I woke up, I got on the web to check something and two headlines appeared talking about tropical storm “Barry” the very next morning. These things can happen rapidly and complexly—making them exceedingly difficult to record adequately. Something invariably gets left out that was part of the experience. I am convinced that these events happen much more frequently than we know, we simply cannot attend to all of them and have a normal life—even though they are intrinsic to the nature and function of consciousness and a reflection of universal, transcendant unity. If I really pay attention to them—to the exclusion of everything else—they are constant. Like life was one big organism, and conscious thoughts tweak the past somehow. Since I could have picked up any of the books laying here, it just makes the coincidence that much more improbable. The idea of fortune cookies having anything to say and the I Ching in oriental mysticism is based on similar events, I’m sure. But you don’t need a cookie or a special book. LIFE is like that.

Some of the events are so improbable, and they are so frequent, that there must be something behind them. Rare and complex events like this are not able to be investigated by science—especially since it seems like consciousness is traveling in the opposite direction to the one-way linear causality upon which all science is based. Also, science is based on consensus and repeatability. It has nothing to say about the hope diamond or intricate, nested, personal meanings for interacting groups of people. These things are rare, one-time events. If you let your consciousness flow, and let your eyes wander while thinking freely, paying attention to where your eyes settle, and keeping track of these things, you will begin to notice some pretty amazing stuff. Several days ago, I was thinking about a friend of mine named Henry in traffic on route 40 west of Knoxville. I was thinking about what a good friend he was when I started working at FedEx. The next thing I saw was a big truck with “Henry” in huge letters all across the side of the truck! Then, I drove up next to it, and noticed that the cab was from St. Louis—where Henry had moved to after he left FedEx. Sometimes they go like that—you look at more, follow them up, and the meaning gets deeper. One event like this was really startling. I was driving a friend home from a party one night and it was raining really hard. We were just talking, and I started talking about how I wanted to paint my car (a Karmann Ghia) sort of a pearl white, and how I wanted to put a certain kind of wheel on it. We drove up the entrance ramp and there was a car coming in the dark. As it drove up and passed us, not 30 seconds after my description, it was a Karmann Ghia exactly as I had just described—the wheels, the color, everything exactly the same. The road was pretty deserted otherwise—it was raining hard late at night. I don’t even want to begin to try to figure the odds on that—science says that was a “coincidence”, nothing more. So many of these startling events have happened, which I have documented and learned to pay attention to (even in others’ consciousness!), that this scientific view must be simply wrong. I think there is an untapped wealth of data to be had in this type of introspective, stream of consciousness and meaning “study”. It is the essence of the nature of consciuousness.

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, and see more of it, you see that the spiral is actually formed of one single line. The way it is laid out, combined with a narrow view of the curving parallel lines, 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. It was an awesome coincidence.

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’m a surfer—thus the shirt). 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. One of the most meaningful evenrts of my life, and one of my favorite people I ever met. Lots of conceptual, and physical parallels there.

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. I bought it because it looked like the “Matrix” green in the framework on 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—obviously a home paint job. It was the first time I wore the shirt, and I was slightly self-conscious about the garish colors—they were salient in my consciousness at the time, producing the instant recognition of MEANING I was talking about earlier, then I began thinking about how unlikely that combination of events was, etc.

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, and 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 with SURVIVAL tasks. 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 “The Kingdom of the Sun” for this very paper a couple of days before. If we extrapolate from these events, it is easy to see how a larger consciousness might automatically “pull the strings” woven behind the scenes back in time top bootstrap itself up to existence—creating both our religions and our science at the same time.

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”. He read my article, and saw the centrality of meaning to the concepts there, while just prior to that he had been thinking about that very topic himself to the point of writing that word on the blackboard. How many times do you have to see something happening before you will acknowledge it as real? Especially if you can point to factors which might naturally obscure these perceptions—like scientific methodologies and survival contingencies competing for our attentions.

8) I had read about H.G. Wells “Time Machine” on page 208 in Stephen King’s “Hearts in Atlantis” book. I had started thinking about time travel as a metaphor for consciousness, etc. and so the reference was meaningful for me. The next day, 08/03/01, I went out and got the mail. As I was looking through the Entertainment Weekly magazine of August 10, 2001, I saw a full page ad for “A Hallmark Channel World Premier Movie Event” called “The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells”. It shows a man (Wells) with his hands surrounding a sphere with lightning running all through inside it. Meaningful on many levels, considering what I have been writing about in these papers the last few days. MORE than just coincidence—a function of the principle of consciousness and its power in the universe.

9) Another very recent event happened as I was preparing for this conference. I had bought an unusual-looking metallic gold “Phoenix” computer case on ebay about a year ago. I put in special blue LED’s in it, and generally customized it as I built the computer inside it. It is very artistic-looking with swooping lines and shapes. I had been having trouble with my old 1X CD-writer, so I asked for a new one for my birthday. I went to Best Buy to get a new keyboard (I spilled coffee into mine!) and saw a cheap Philips brand writer as I walked by the display simply noting the price. I usually shop around carefully and research brands, but I was very busy getting ready for this conference, so I told my wife “lets go get that writer—there’s a rebate, its cheap, and it HAS to work better than my old one. After we left the store, I noticed that it was METALLIC GOLD of the exact hue of my unusual case, and furthermore had the exact same swoopy line design as the shapes on my case! (see photo). I have a lot of these events written down, this was just a recent one that I could take a picture of and illustrate easily. (see pictures at end of article)

It seems like consciousness does commerce with the past beyond time and space, or else there is a consciousness in the future that perceives us back in our time and sets these events up that we have called “God”. The simple explanation that fits with the transcendant nature of consciousness and the unity threaded through the universe is that our consciousness is connected to the world of reality in ways we cannot directly see, and furthermore this connection has an effect, or coordinating power, over the past which partially shapes the meaning and coherence of the present. The stone dropped in a pond analogy applies here. Perhaps these events are just the coherence of a greater ocean of consciousness of which we are a part. That explanation is a bit more (needlessly) complex, however. The best explanation is the efficacy of consciousness on the past—whether ours now, or someone elses in the future. Consciousness and reality share echoes of meaning because of the oneness threaded through everything--which gives rise to the “Logos Echo” effect described in my other paper.

c 2001 Steven Eric Romer