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Jon Notabot's avatar

I'd like to share a quote from one of the keenest observers of our contemporary moment, the late Bill Hicks (Dec '61 - Feb '94). I think it dovetails with the subject matter in this beautiful piece by Thom Hartmann - and takes a slight poke at our media for focusing so much of its energy on the negative facets of nearly every issue:

"I'd like to see a positive LSD story. Would that be newsworthy? Just once? Hear what it's all about?"

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

"Wow! Did you see the news?"

Recorded Live at The Village Gate, NYC 1990

Bill Hicks is so dearly missed, but his perceptions, like ours, are eternal. He taught truth and compassion through humor. I miss the honest comedians.

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Elementstew's avatar

Oh boy, where to begin...oh yeah, at the beginning...which is the title of the post...

Original consciousness? Maybe we can tap into it, but I'm not sure about that "original" part of it. I'm not even gunna attempt to address what it means to be human, but here's a little bit of history from this human...

About 20+ years ago I was a huge fan, a zealot really, of Ken Wilber. Wilber came up with quadrant theory which details and maps out 4 aspects of panpsychism or cosmopsychism and I really can't recommend checking it out enough although it's about impossible to find the original diagram posted anywhere on the web. It is printed in the beginning of his book titled A Brief History of Everything. I came across it browsing for something interesting to read in a bookstore one day and I liked the title. I opened the book and found the diagram. I stared and contemplated it for several minutes until the lightbulb turned on in my head. I was hooked.

I became an inaugural member of the Integral Institute and spent years immersed in the community and theories until it became cultish and Wilber slipped off the deep end. There was lots of discussion about enlightenment in those days (Ken Wilber is a proven expert meditator that could easily manipulate his brain waves, proven with EEGs) and in those years I also became more and more familiar with Thom's works.

I often thought about what Jesus or Buddha would do if alive today and I eventually came to the conclusion that they would behave a lot more like Thom Hartmann than Ken Wilber. Yeah, with global warming and the sixth extinction coming into focus, GW as the appointed President, it seemed clear to me that what was going on in the world was more important than that other esoteric stuff.

So dear reader, check out "quadrant theory" and "holon" and you'll get a very cool education. Okay, I'll give y'all a quickie on it: draw a vertical line; everything on the left is subjective, all on the right is objective. Draw a bisecting horizontal line and the top stuff is individual, the stuff on the bottom is collective. The universe or Kosmos (the K is distinctive honorific for divinity) Quadra-evolves...from micro to macro and visa-versa. There, now you have four lenses to examine different aspects of freaking everything in existence.

As far as consciousness goes; I find it annoying and amazing that so many people think it's some mystical mystery. Come on, its just awareness. Of course there are an infinite number of things that one can be aware of, but that's no good reason to treat consciousness like some great mysterious divine thing or to think that it's some special sacred gift only available to humans. That's crazy.

The subjective and the objective in both individual and social forms get enfolded into creation in increasing formations of complexity. The greater the forms of complexity, the greater the awareness or consciousness. Also autonomy and cooperative ability...agency and communion as KW said. More complexity = more consciousness. It's that simple. Animals are more conscious than plants and plants are more conscious than minerals.

As far as the radio metaphor goes, yeah, that's a good one. There's some pretty cool new research indicating that our brains actually create quantum fields, so it certainly seems plausible that our brain-fields could entangle with other quantum phenomena. Personally though, I'd rather be aware of what Kosmos thinks/feels now, not at the moment of the Big Bang birth (original consciousness?) That would be way too intense and billions of years from bearing the fruits of this moment.

People have been talking way too much about higher consciousness when they should be talking about expanding consciousness. What's up with that upward directionality bias? And lastly, it would be far more prudent to understand that conscience is the treasure within consciousness so if we need to elevate something, let that be conscience, as we grow our conscious in all directions.

That's what I like about Thom, he has a great conscience while growing his and our consciousness of so many things.

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