Approach

I have been brought to comprehend that the transmission of a living language (of light) is not something which can be experienced by a logical or mechanical process of retracing from the abstract or alphabetical to that which any letters or symbols designate. If that were not the case, then simply speaking, hearing or reading about the sacred would instantaneously evoke an experience of that and there are numerous examples of texts which have been poured over and spoken to no avail and which are able to testify to that truth. 

I am given to understand that the reason for this seeming predicament is that the content of the human mind – the psyche - can be incoherent and is unable to comprehend reality or any direct transmission from that source until it has moved into coherence within itself. To invite coherence, the mind has to be willing to open itself and receive, just as if it were a still lake and allowing the ripples of reality to inform. Another example of this would be of a receiver which is unable to pick up on any radio transmissions until being appropriately tuned in.

I could begin by asking ‘why do I have an interest in a living language?’ and I can say that it is not the language per se, but the knowing that I am already engaged in dialogue and there is an intention to comprehend that; it is a dialogue that is building a new way of thinking. The beauty of a living language being that it does not communicate or transmit any knowledge at all but awakens perception in the beholder.

I am sensing that quantum physics and its view of entanglement and a collapse of the wave function could offer a clearer interpretation of this than I, given as I am in early stages of comprehending and learning how to communicate a shifting world view. 

Nevertheless, unless we are already in the midst of evolving into a consensual experience of knowing and telepathy, the written and spoken language remains important and in order to incorporate a living element, so too is an appreciation of the quantum and of how it relates to consciousness.

For this purpose, Peter Russell who has a background in physics and psychology and who practices meditation, gave a presentation at SAND a few years ago pertaining to ‘the reality of consciousness’. I would like to include here some pointers which I picked out from that presentation: 

Peter began his presentation by picking out two major revolutions of modern physics: 

Space, time, matter, energy not absolute. There is no fixed material world

Consciousness, observation, knowing play a crucial role

He drew attention to a current predicament of humanity as being that nearly all of the ways in which we are trying to understand these phenomena is with a mindset that thinks there is a material world and from a paradigm which says that consciousness isn’t really important. So it is no wonder that we are getting stuck: as modern physics is pointing one way and we are stuck in a pre-20^th century way of thinking and can’t seem to bear the implications of what might happen if we began to take these implications seriously.

He asked the question ‘what do we mean by reality?’ and said:    

There is the physical reality and the world ‘out there’

The experienced reality that appears in consciousness

How are we perceiving a world out there and generating any concept of reality?

Peter pointed out that an ultimate goal of science is to understand what the world out there is like and how it functions, but is doing this from taking data from actual experience and projecting it onto a world out there. He pointed out that all we can ever know of the physical world is an inference from our experience. This is important because we make statements about reality and a world out there. 

He said that some of our problems can arise when we imagine that the world out there is just like our experience of it. To touch upon the mechanics of this, he said that even if we think we are seeing ‘green leaves over there’, there are no green leaves over there; there is something over there which gives off light of a certain energy or wavelength (which is another concept of the brain) and that light hits the retina of the eye, which sends impulses to the brain. What is out there isn’t sending any impulses which actually are green, rather it is the brain which is processing the impulses and coming up with green as an experience.

He said that this is true for everything of the senses, whether it is smelling a flower which is sending out molecules and the brain creating a reality of an aroma or hearing a voice and air molecules moving backwards and forwards and being picked up by the ear drum and the brain giving a reality of hearing a voice - it is all only in the mind.

He pointed out that we are actually living in a virtual reality which is being created by the brain. What we are seeing is not actually the world out there, but representations of it. So as well as being an ‘information processor’ we can say that the brain is a ‘reality generator’ and is continually generating experience for us. 

The representations being created by the brain are inferences of reality but the map is not the territory. In fact, were we were to look at an actual map of a country for example, it would be very different from the country itself; we understand that the map is only a representation. But when it comes to a map that the brain makes of reality, we get to live inside of it by way of our having an experience of it.

The quantum and what it can inform us

He pointed out that we used to think of matter as mostly solid but composed of tiny particles. Then we realised that atoms are composed of sub-atomic particles and later again, that this is mostly empty space. Now, even what we think of as the elementary particles: protons, neutrons, electrons aren’t actually particles and we don’t know what they are, given as they don’t exist in any permanent state – Peter referred to this as ‘no-thing there’.

What does this mean in terms of what we can definitely say about what’s out there? 

It is not homogeneous i.e. it is not all the same – there are variations in the structure or the signals coming from a flower as being different from those of the air next to it; whatever the structure of an electron is, is somehow different from a proton

This variation of structure changes over time – there is movement

It is a field of ‘is-ness’ of some nature

What this boils down to is that all that is out there is information and what we can do is analyse and find out how the information is interacting with itself.

Information

Our senses are responding to patterns of information. Corresponding patterns of information are arising in the brain. Information is being experienced as forms in the mind. We could say that experience is an ‘in-forming’ of consciousness. 

The Hard Problem

The brain affects what appears in consciousness but we cannot say that the brain creates consciousness. The philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers called this ‘the hard problem’ and asks: “How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter?” because most of the scientific world is stuck in this idea of trying to explain it and nothing works. The other question is where do we draw the line: can we say that animals, jellyfish or bacteria have consciousness and also does consciousness extend all the way into the universal field, into the big bang and beyond?

An anomaly is something which troubles the paradigm and the one that is currently troubling a predominant world view is consciousness itself. We cannot doubt that we are conscious and yet there is no way of explaining it. The unquestioned assumption of the current ‘metaparadigm’ is that matter is insentient.

A Different Approach 

Peter put forward an alternative metaparadigm: 

‘consciousness is a fundamental quality of the cosmos – as fundamental as space, time, matter and energy’

Something else in regards to a world out there:  there is awareness - which means that we can say ‘there is a dynamic structured field of being/is-ness that is aware’

He said that one of the problems with ‘panpsychism’ (which is a philosophical view that consciousness, mind or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things) is its dual aspect i.e. it says that everything in the physical world has a mental aspect. 

But, he said – is there any ‘thing’ there? It is a fundamental assumption of modern day science that that there is ‘something’ out there of some form or another, but we may need to question and let go of that fundamental assumption.

If there is ‘nothing there’ - given that ‘thing-ness’ is a representation of the information field and is a construct in the mind, then what would remain is ‘an aware field of consciousness or being, whether we call it Spirit, Brahman, God’ and also that ‘the universe is a dynamic structured field of being observing itself, and in observing itself creating a representation of itself as a material world’.

In this new paradigm - consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of matter, but matter is an epiphenomenon of consciousness!

Peter finished his presentation by saying that new paradigms usually include an existing paradigm, explain the anomaly and other problems and make new predictions.

Does the new paradigm hold up?

If the cosmos is an aware field of being, then it allows for the laws of physics as still being valid. But - we must change our assumption as to what such laws are about; they are not laws of the unfolding of the physical world of space, time and matter but they are the laws of the unfolding of consciousness.

It also offers a new approach towards understanding quantum theory – in that there is no fixed material world and consciousness/observation/knowing plays a crucial role. Further, it would mean that ‘paranormal’ phenomena e.g. telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance aren’t prohibited anymore based on our simply not understanding them. It also offers a bridge between science and spirituality. The essence of spirituality is the whole nature of ‘I AM’ – and if it is a field of being, then ‘I am’ is a first person experience of being.

The physicist Erwin Schrodinger has asked, “What is this “I”? You will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by “I” is the ground-stuff upon which all experiences and memories are collected.”

Why isn’t the new paradigm self-evident?

Why don’t we see everything as conscious? The reason comes back to the concept of the ‘map and the territory’. What is out there are dynamic structures in an aware field of being – but what we see inside us are the representations of this, that which appear in the mind as shape, colour, sound, texture, smell etc.

So the reason that we perceive an unconscious, material world and wonder where consciousness comes from is because consciousness is not part of the map; it is with consciousness that we create a whole representation of the world, but we don’t see that the map itself is a representation in consciousness. 

Interestingly, earlier in the presentation Peter had pointed out that the word ‘science’ comes from the Latin word ‘scire’ meaning ‘to know’ and also that the word ‘consciousness’ comes from scire and means ‘to know with’; so in its purest sense, science looks at ‘what is known’ and consciousness is ‘what we know with’ – we can actually say that all of our knowing takes place in consciousness.