Archive for March 2010

Consciousness Precedes Reality

March 30, 2010 Consciousness, Evolution 4 comments

For years I’ve had this idea about the ultimate nature of reality: consciousness precedes reality. As I’m not a philosopher (yet), I wasn’t exactly sure what that really meant. My conception of it was that reality as we know it requires humans to know it. Without human consciousness, reality looks very different. What is reality to a fly, a kangaroo, or a tuna? Certainly not the reality we know.

Now, in an interview in the most recent issue (Spring/Summer 2010) of the unbelievably great magazine EnlightenNext, consciousness researcher Stuart Hameroff, MD, puts forth a theory that a “fundamental field of protoconscious experience has been embedded all along—since the big bang…”

According to Hameroff, other renowned thinkers such as Betrand Russell, William James, and Baruch Spinoza, have put forth this same basic theory, known as neutral monism. “Neutral monism says that there’s one common underlying entity that gives rise to, on the one hand, matter, and on the other hand, mind.”

So even though I never read any of those philosophers, I had the same intuitive sense of the universe; the notion that reality is a transactional process between matter and mind. Perhaps we are necessary for the protoconsciousness embedded in the universe to manifest, just as humans are a particular configuration of the same sub-atomic particles that make up everything else in the 4% – 5% of universe we live in—the part that isn’t dark matter or dark energy. Or maybe protoconsciousness is part of dark matter and dark energy that doesn’t yet exist for us, because we haven’t yet gotten our minds around it.

Lost in the Flood

March 28, 2010 Communication, Evolution, Politics, Values No comments

I wear my iPod when I go for a walk. Today, when I heard Springsteen’s “Lost in the Flood” off his first album from way back in the 70’s, a new meaning occurred to me: Lost in the flood of thoughts.

All of us, unless we take great pains to step outside them, are lost in a flood of conscious thoughts that prevent us from connecting with our true selves. We’re focused on the things that are right in front of us, right off the front bumper of our awareness, instead of looking down the road and getting a more comprehensive view of what’s actually affecting all of us.

We get absorbed with our own self identities instead of the fact that we are all human beings on planet earth. We are all the same.

All of the hate and separation we feel from others is based on a belief that we are all different and that those differences are dangerous. They are dangerous because the others may want to hurt us, or because the others have ideas that if correct, would make us wrong, or cause us to question what we believe. And no humans are really in love with being wrong or having to change.

And that’s the point, under the superficial differences of appearance, culture, religion, class, gender and politics; we are a single species that is way more the same than different. We are all here together on this planet, an infinitesimal oasis in a cold and empty universe (so far as we know). After billions of years, we are the highest example of life-based, matter-connected consciousness that exists (so far as we know). And we’re in danger of destroying ourselves because we see our own personal survival and that of our group as being in competition with other humans who are exactly the same as us.

I believe the highest calling we have as humans, is to recognize that all of us are responsible for getting our species through to the next stage of evolution. This can be a world in which we cooperate together by acting from a set of beliefs based on we are all the same, we are all valuable, and we are all deserving.

The alternative is a set of beliefs based on I’ve got mine, good luck to you. That belief is not going to move humans forward. That belief will keep us divided and invested in fighting with each other, because it is based on a fundamental untruth—that I, my family and my group are better and more deserving than all the others. It is based on denying the truth that we humans are all the same underneath.

Not Equivalent, but the Same Underneath

March 26, 2010 Evolution, Politics No comments

Sarah Palin is right. There is a major problem with the main stream media. The problem is that they assume an equivalence between the right and the left. I’ve heard people I respect say that the problem is polarization. That we have the rantings of Glen Beck on the right and Keith Olbermann on the left. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the insane, deranged, lunatic ramblings of Glen Beck are given equivalence to the insightful, beautifully written, calls to inspiring action of Keith Olbermann. One guy from the left and one guy from the right and their views are supposed to be equally valid. They’re not.

A friend of mine told me something he thought was particularly insightful. The Democrats are playing Jeopardy, trying to be smart about the facts. The Republicans, on the other hand, are playing Family Feud, trying to figure out what a random selection of not too well educated people might answer based on their gut instincts. These things are not equivalent. One is based on rationality and one is based on fear, superstition and the propaganda of Fox News.

But here’s the thing. Underneath, at the core, all human beings are the same. Emotionally we all want validation and respect. But what we don’t realize is that we don’t have beliefs, beliefs have us. Once we adopt a belief that government is bad, or that liberals are trying to take away our freedoms or that Southern fundamentalists are unsophisticated rubes, we are trapped in beliefs that make dealing with those with opposing views very difficult, if not impossible.

However, if we remember that all humans have the same need for love and validation, and we understand that the beliefs others are acting out of represent what they have become as a result of their circumstances in life, it is easier to be tolerant.

Republicans are currently lying about healthcare reform (government takeover) because they are angry that they are no longer in control. Their belief is also because of their parents, their church, and the superior attitude they picked up from those who could afford to go to an expensive college. Whatever.

The point is that they are feeling bad about themselves and acting out. Underneath they are humans that need love, just like all other humans.

It’s the same with Israelis and Palestinians. They are born as totally equivalent human beings and they become hateful toward each other as they absorb the beliefs of their culture.

This site is about understanding that we are all the same. We are unbelievable miracles of evolution—the highest level of consciousness that the universe has produced (so far as we know). So no matter how unequivalent various notions of reality may be, underneath, all humans are exactly as valuable as each other. Seeing that core truth is what will save us from destroying each other.

Toward a Species Consciousness

March 24, 2010 Evolution No comments

While in college in the mid 1970’s I read the book Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton. Written in 1937 as the forces that caused World War II were already brewing, Stapleton described a mind-only astral trip through the space-time of the universe. Along the way he encountered numerous highly evolved, highly self-aware species with a level of consciousness and technology analogous to our own.

I have always remembered the main point: the planetary civilizations that survived all evolved a collective “species consciousness” (my term) at a point when they were in a global crisis. A powerful meme of recognition took the form of “a widespread passion for a new social order which should be just and should embrace the whole planet.”1

“Tribal prestige, individual dominance, military glory, industrial triumphs lost their obsessive glamour, and instead the happy creatures delighted in civilized social intercourse, in cultural activities, and in the common enterprise of world-building.”2 In the book, civilizations that continued on this path eventually developed a “psychically unified community.”3

Flash forward to today where a new meme is beginning to propagate. This meme begins with a belief that through meditation we can still the machinery of the individual mind long enough to make contact with the universal mind—the vast void of infinite consciousness that animates our true, authentic selves and all life in the cosmos. The meme continues with the thought that this universal mind is the force that is driving evolution in the direction of higher and higher consciousness (i.e. single-celled organism to human).

Finally, the meme concludes with this thought expressed by Andrew Cohen, evolutionary scholar and editor of the magazine EnlightenNext: “The next evolutionary leap, as I see it, is the leap from the individual to higher collective, a ‘higher we.’”4

In other words, humans will not only begin to see themselves as one, they will literally be one through a common sense of immersion and experience of the cosmic mind. Who is to say if this is true? But it feels true. And it feels necessary if we are to avoid a future of planetary suffering, strife and death.

1-3 from Chapter 9, Part 1 of Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton, Busy Utopias.

4 from page 32 of EnlightenNext, Issue 46, Spring/Summer 2010.

We Are All the Same

March 22, 2010 Evolution No comments

In the beginning there was the big bang. Thirteen and half billion years later the universe becomes aware of itself through the emergence of human beings on planet earth.

Some believe that human consciousness is the result of an astoundingly lucky chemical reaction that has been running on autopilot for millions of years. This life-creating reaction required heavy elements that could only have been produced in the cores stars. Flung billions of miles through space, they landed on a planet orbiting in the warm energy of a second generation star.

Others believe that humans are the creation of a divine all-powerful entity.

Which is the bigger miracle? It doesn’t really matter. Our miraculous existence shows that evolution is about producing higher levels of consciousness and awareness. This consciousness is unique and almost impossibly rare in the universe. And though it has manifest itself on different parts of our planet using different languages, ways of dressing, social hierarchies and religions, all human beings are the same species.

We are all the same in much more fundamental ways than we are different. And yet most of us seem to believe that the social, governmental, or religions belief systems into which we were born makes us superior and gives us the right to kill and enslave other humans.

If these notions of superiority and urge for power over others once served a valuable survival function they no longer do. They are causing needless suffering and hardship. Our adherence to primitive and outmoded ways of thinking is literally killing millions of humans. Unless we change how we conceive of ourselves, we will cause our own destruction.

What’s required is a new species consciousness—a clear, innate, unambiguous belief that all humans are exactly as valuable and worthy as I am. This begins by stating and accepting this simple affirmation: I am a human being on planet earth. This is an undeniably true statement for all 6.8 billion people on this planet. If this becomes everyone’s core identity it reinforces the fact that we are all fundamentally the same.