how do you like your consciousness?

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.” Albert Einstein


Meditation: “Meditation is like being suspended by threads from a billion suns to the centre of your soul vibrating in harmony – a universe within a universe … like Russian dolls.”


Via Transformativa

unitive-consciousnessAfter Descartes set a cat amongst the pigeons with his deceptively simple and simply divisive ‘cogito ergo sum’ separating ‘mind stuff’ from ‘matter stuff’ modern philosophers responded with various approaches to explain consciousness. How can the chasm between a ‘thing that thinks’ (subject) and the thing that is doing the thinking (body object or specifically a brain) be bridged?

They came up with not one problem but two – the ‘hard problem’ and the ‘easy problem’. The ‘easy’ problem is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. In other words how do the physiological mechanisms of an objective body get translated into a perceiving subjective ‘I’? The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all. As Anil Seth asks “why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe?” Beast-machines as he calls it.

The study of consciousness is the last great frontier as yet bamboozling reductionists. The standard view of scientists is that it is an ’emergent characteristic’ of the brain i.e. through the mechanism of evolution at some point the brain reaches a critical point of complexity and consciousness emerges. Consciousness is seen as one more adaptation for the survival of the species.

This ‘hey presto’ assumption that increasing complexity leads to a self reflective conscious ‘I’ seems as much a leap of faith as the Genesis 2:7 version: “Then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living (i.e. conscious) person.”

Was the first Adam self conscious? Apparently not until after the apple incident since he wandered around the garden naked in mixed company without batting a fig leaf. “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” Genesis 2:25.

With self consciousness comes the sense of a separate ‘I’. This may be the original sin – the fall from sharing the same consciousness as union with the divine spark into the consciousness of a separate ember. How can this union be recovered? There are two schools of thought. Either the separation is real and you need a Saviour or Redeemer to bridge the gulf or the separation is an illusion and to recover union only requires that you dispel the illusion. To apply the solution you must correctly identify the problem. In a world of separate atoms and separate individuals you may lean towards a Redeemer – a Fixer.

But what if we aren’t ‘broken’ in that sense? What if we always were and always are fixed – we just forgot. Or we dropped out of united consciousness into separate consciousness. One of the most powerful words I ever heard was in one of my German girlfriend’s favourite recordings by an English spiritual teacher – unfortunately I can’t remember his name – where he said “you don’t need fixing.” And if we come from God how can we be separate from God unless by our own mis-perception?

Maybe we aren’t separate after all. In his article in Psychology Today ‘Connectedness – Are we really Separate Individuals?’ Steve Taylor PhD identifies three different types of interconnection. The first is ‘interconnectedness of feeling’, or ‘empathic connection.’  The second type of experience is ‘interconnectedness of being’ reported in many awakening experiences in which people experience a transcendence of separateness. The third type of experience he calls ‘interconnectedness of knowing’ famously documented by Rupert Sheldrake in his controversial experiments with the dog Jaytee who anticipates his master’s return.

Taylor suggests it is possible that what we know as consciousness is not produced by the brain at all but is a fundamental quality of consciousness like gravity is a fundamental quality of matter. “This is what is sometimes known as the ‘panpsychist’ view, and it is becoming increasingly popular amongst philosophers and psychologists who struggle to explain consciousness from a materialist perspective. According to panpsychism, consciousness is not dissimilar to mass or gravity – a fundamental, irreducible quality which has always been ‘built into’ the universe.”

In this view, consciousness is the fundamental reality underlying both mind and matter our brains being manifestations of consciousness. Philosopher Keith Frankish is not convinced. “It (consciousness) is a highly localised phenomenon that is specific not just to brains but to particular states of brains. It appears to be a specific state of certain highly complex information-processing systems, not a basic feature of the Universe.”

Can anyone save us from our fall from unitive consciousness? “Who can deliver me from this body of death (separation)?” pleads St Paul. (Romans 7:24)

Danah Zohar can. In her synthesis of quantum physics, philosophy and new age religion – ‘Quantum Self – Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics’ – she claims that bosons are the basis for the conscious life, and fermions for the material life. The Bose-Einstein condensate is the extreme example of “bosonic” behavior (relationship, sharing of identities). Zohar imagines that such a condensate is the ideal candidate to provide the unity of consciousness.

I can see the t-shirt now: “Bose-Einstein condensates of the world unite”.

 

out of time

“Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love. At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin


Meditation: “Saying the mantra is like greeting a line of silent monks on their way into the sanctuary.”


Via Integrativa

time-in-mindTowards the end of the documentary about the passions of artist César Manrique which you can watch at his home in Haria, Lanzarote he lets slip an extraordinary statement. “I wasn’t born. I won’t die. Time is a creation of the mind.”

Manrique was an artist (born and died on the island), sculptor, architect, eco-activist and bon viveur whose personal mantra was ‘nature-art art-nature’. He practised in his art, his politics and his life a strong conviction that we must co-habit sensitively with our precious environment and even built his first house not only on a lava flow but under the lava flow in five lava bubbles or ‘burbujas’. This is where the Via Integrativa meditation walk on The Five Paths is conducted.

I don’t know if Manrique also practised meditation but through his connection with nature and his almost mystical – one might say shamanistic – earth paintings he definitely explored and inhabited the timeless dimension you can experience in meditation. One without a second.

The great thing about meditation is anyone can do it. You don’t need to enrol on a course and you don’t need to pass an exam. No-one is excluded from investigating their own consciousness. It lies there – hidden in plain sight – below the surface of things awaiting discovery and exploration. To my mind it is the last great uncharted territory of human activity. We have Hubble to explore the galaxies. We have MRI scanners to explore anatomy. You don’t need an expensive telescope or body scanner to explore your own consciousness. You only need time. And a cushion. And one of the most pleasant surprises is the timelessness and deep peace that is discovered when you learn to quiesce the thinking mind. It is similar to the state you find yourself in when you get so absorbed in a pleasant (often manual) task that you “lose all sense of time.”

I would distinguish five states of consciousness: sleeping, dreaming, day dreaming, waking with directive thought, waking with non-directive thought. Only one of these is practised with a sense of time. All of the others are practised ‘out of time’ – an altered state of consciousness. Some people refer to meditation as moving to a higher state of consciousness but it gives me a sinking feeling – my centre of being sinks from the head into the heart or ‘the cave of the heart’ as French crossover Benedictine/swami Henri le Saux likes to call it. Following in the footsteps of Ramana Maharshi, the renowned self-realised advaita sage, he spent many days in the caves of Arunachala mountain in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu which you can read about in his spiritual diary ‘Ascent to the Depth of the Heart.’ You won’t find it on Amazon – its extremely rare and he uses his sanyasin name Abhishiktananda.

When I first arrived in Tiruvannamalai or Tiru as regulars call it I visited the four towering temples in town – a cross between ziggurats and the Aztec temples in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto – and was immediately drawn to an underground chamber with a line of devotees entering down narrow stone steps. At the bottom there was a tiny chamber with shiva lingam altar being sprinkled with rice, milk and petals by an orange robed monk who I noted had two leather pouches on his belt – one for the money offerings and one for his mobile phone. I slumped on my haunches in the corner and sunk into what I can only describe as a waking trance. I was completely conscious but completely out of time. After a couple of hours which passed by in what seemed minutes he took me for lunch of thali and lassi and we returned to repeat the experience. I was amazed to read in Abhishiktananda’s diary in the ashram library the next day that he had had the exact same experience in the underground chamber when he first arrived in Tiru. I’m not planning to change my name yet though.

Maybe the title of his diary describes meditation best after all – Ascent to the Depth of the Heart.

“Awakening is attained when I have realized that the centre is as truly everywhere as it is in ‘myself’. And God himself is not this centre, for God is without place, as he is without time.” Abhishiktananda, Ascent to the Depth of the Heart p. 49

 

consciousness

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

Meister Eckhart


Meditation:

“Saying the mantra is like dismantling a wall that separates your true Self from union with God … each syllable a brick … each word a course.”


Via Positiva

eyeEinstein was a realist. As he said, “I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it”. Does the full moon shine in the forest if there is no-one to witness it?

Not if your name’s Deepak Chopra. He is not a realist he is an an idealist in scientific terms when talking about consciousness i.e. it takes an observer for anything to be ‘real’. This stems as much from his deep understanding of quantum physics as much as his deeply Indian influenced advaita – non-duality – philosophy.

In the recent Science & Non-duality Conference he delivers a very clear presentation on what science can tell us about the nature of the universe and the nature of consciousness … almost nothing. He makes the observation that our scientific observations reveal that 70% of the universe is dark energy leading to the expansion of the universe, the edge of which is apparently unknowable at 47 billion light years away, 26% is dark matter which glues it together both of which cannot be observed. Of the remaining observable 4% almost 99% is made up of hydrogen and helium (invisible to human observation) and the 1% of 4%, or less than 0.01% of the (un)known universe, is made of ‘stuff’ – atoms in galaxies, stars, planets and bones.

The most powerful MRI scanner exploring the “nooks and crannies of our neural networks” has not yet located consciousness. Deepak’s conclusion is that we know very little about what makes up the universe and what makes up consciousness. Either consciousness is, as Daniel Dennett argues, an illusion of a biological robot or a priori the ground of our Being … ”die Grunde’ as Meister Eckhart refers to it.

“There is existence and there is awareness of existence.”

Enquire into this your self and see what you find – who is the observer?