But what is consciousness? Where is it located? And what does an understanding of it mean? Particularly the larger or “non-typical,” “cosmic,” or “special” types of consciousness?
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.
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.
How Panpsychism Can Explain Consciousness | Rupert Sheldrake
what is conscious?
well I mean there's certain fast question the code. I think consciousness is the realm of possibility and you can't know about possibilities unless they're in a conscious space. I think Minds are containers of possibility. possibilities are not physical facts they're just possibilities and they can only exist in something like an imagination. so I think
our conscious minds, you know, that's what they do. they're to do with choices among possibilities our unconscious minds are about habits, things that we just do automatically we don't need to think about them. and I think all minds really are spaces of possibility even the mind underlying the cosmos. so I think that think of Minds in general as conscious spaces or realms or containers of possibility units on the road there -
oh. I'm pro pan psychism. I just think those panpsychics don't go far enough.
oh those pan psychic’s talk about the consciousness or minds of electrons or protons or and atoms and things like that. which is fine the reason they do that is because they're trying to explain how we come to be conscious.
standard materialism is the doctrine that matters unconscious. the whole universe is unconscious. and then they have the problem everything's unconscious and everything's made of matter including our brains, how come we're conscious?
so they only have to say well, the consciousness somehow emerges out of complex arrangements. but how can something totally different from unconscious matter emerge?
that's called the hard problem in the philosophy of mind. so to get out of that some pan psychists, some materialists have become pan psychists by saying okay well let's have a little bit of consciousness in electrons and atoms and things,
so consciousness can emerge from something that has a much much lower of mind or consciousness even in subatomic particles. and therefore we can
overcome the problem of how something
different in that it's a difference of degree not a difference in kind, the emergence of consciousness in human brains.
so I think that's fine I don't have a problem with that but the question I then asked them is well what about the sun? the sun is a self-organizing system what does the sun think about what's the mind of the Sun like?
I'm personally I think the sun's conscious and indeed the entire galaxy and the whole universe.
so I'm in favor of pan psychism but pan means everywhere psyche means mind. I'm in favor of pan psychism, I just think it's so much too limiting to confine it to the realm of subatomic physics.
so this is not an emergent property of material?
well emergent property I mean what does it mean?
it means that something comes from something that wasn't there before it's a way of conjuring something out of like a rabbit out of a hat.
You see there are three main ways of thinking about it one is top-down the whole universe is conscious and even before there was any matter there was consciousness or mind.
and the evolution of matter in the universe is the the universe has lower and lower levels of consciousness as it evolves.
the Big Bang the entire universe is one system one mind as it were, then the fields of physics and things separate art and stars and galaxies and whatnot.
so then you have the emergence of many forms of consciousness and then on life a life on Earth you have they I dare say in biology there is an emergence of higher forms of consciousness, I mean we have more than a worm or a bacterium. so in that area in then you could say that there is a kind of emergence but the top-down consciousness means you start with consciousness and it goes down from the bar as it were. the bottom-up materialist theory is you start from subatomic particles and atoms and you work your way up. and then you have said well it emerges but you could just as well say it descends. the third position is say well it's both. there's a sense in which there's a an emergency or an appearance of high levels of complexity with more complexity. but it's not that it was not there before . and after all, our evolution has happened within on the planet Earth within a galaxy and what if the whole galaxy and what if the whole solar system are conscious and what if Gaia the earth is conscious? then our consciousness has appeared within much larger conscious systems. so you know these are philosophically different ways of looking at it. there's a prejudice in modern science in favor of materialism and reductionism and bottom-up explanations but that's really a kind of philosophical fashion it's not the truth.
well it's been the fashion since the late 19th century's science became dominated by materialism in the late 19th century and in many ways our views of matter have changed since then. they had an old classical physics view of matters little atoms as little billiard balls. quantum theory changes that very radically. and they didn't know about the galaxies beyond our own or the Big Bang or modern cosmology. so all these things have changed but the philosophy of materialism is sort of locked in a 19th century worldview. and of course you can have an updated materialism and in a sense pants cyclists are trying to update materialism. but as soon as you admit psyche or mind into matter then it's not really materialism it's really a form of animism. animism is the belief that whole of nature is alive and they hold universes like an organism not a machine. I think that's a much more reasonable view of myself. so what we're at the moment in is a kind of conflict between old-style materialism and the kind of animism or panpsychism struggling to get out, and so far it's only got as far as atoms and molecules. but one reason I like to ask panpsychists about the consciousness of the sun is that I think they're on a slippery slope and I'd like to push them down it a bit faster than they go on their own. and discussing the consciousness of the sun is a very good way of accelerating this slide down the slippery slope into a full-blown animism.
it seems to me like there's a what was what was the basic definition of consciousness then what is this thing that the materialists and animists are scraping over?
well I mean there's hundreds of definitions, but it has to do with awareness and as I said to start with possibility. I that's my own definition it's about a realm of possibility. they would say it's about perception, awareness, algorithms in the brain. you know, as soon as you get into modern cognitive neuroscience then the brain is a computer, consciousness is just the software programs running it. but they of course needn't be conscious in fact they're not conscious. so in the materialist philosophy of mind consciousness is either an epiphenomenon that does nothing, like a kind of shadow of physical activity in the brain that has no role and has no freewill, it doesn't actually do anything. that's the majority of you or else it's an illusion produced by brains because it might have some conceivable evolutionary advantage but it still doesn't do anything. the problem is that to call consciousness an illusion doesn't explain it it presupposes it because illusion is itself a made of consciousness.
so, philosophers of mind and the materialist school go round and round in circles like dogs chasing their tails trying to explain it never succeed. and any one of them comes up with a theory, another one will point out the flaws in it and that's why it's called the very existence of consciousness is called the hard problem.
it seems to me one major part of that is just the limit of language of word to adequately describe a phenomena. the way I think this the heart problem is will show many things one of it is just how limited English or languages to describe them stuff.
I don't think the problem the consciousness is a problem at language. I mean language itself of course is a product of consciousness and language is inadequate to explain many things, including the ultimate nature of reality at the beginning of the universe, and so forth. but I don't think that the problem is with language. I think the problem is with worldviews. and if you have a worldview that's essentially an atheist materialist worldview there is no God, there is no consciousness out there, the universe is unconscious, it's purposeless, meaningless, everything's happened by chance or accident, the laws of nature have no particular reason to be one way or the other, we just live in a universe where they happen to be right for us,
evolution is a matter of blind chance mutations and blind natural selection. that's a worldview that says that consciousness has just emerged in our brains and doesn't actually do anything. also that we don't have free will is a deeply depressing worldview. and I think that when you have whole societies based on it like ours what you'd predict is that lots of people would suffer from depression. and the facts actually bear that out if you think you live in a meaningless world where your mind is just in your brain and it's nothing more than what's happening inside your head not truly related to anything else, deeply depressing. whereas if you think that consciousness is primary that we live in a universe that's purposeful that our minds are part of something much greater than ourselves that mystical experiences connect us with greater Minds than our own they're not just serotonin levels changing inside our brains. then you have a completely different view of the universe it's not just a matter of language.
Hey Nature, nice post. I recently read The Transcendent Brain by Alan Lightman which I highly recommend and is relevant to this discussion. His thesis is that consciousness is a spandrel, an emergent feature of extremely complex systems. I like his thinking, but he doesn't seem to realize that the Kosmos itself is a complex system. I'd write more, but there's the biosphere here in desperate need of our love and protection so I'll return my attention to revising and expanding my swan song, integrativeactivism.com.
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.
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.
How Panpsychism Can Explain Consciousness | Rupert Sheldrake
what is conscious?
well I mean there's certain fast question the code. I think consciousness is the realm of possibility and you can't know about possibilities unless they're in a conscious space. I think Minds are containers of possibility. possibilities are not physical facts they're just possibilities and they can only exist in something like an imagination. so I think
our conscious minds, you know, that's what they do. they're to do with choices among possibilities our unconscious minds are about habits, things that we just do automatically we don't need to think about them. and I think all minds really are spaces of possibility even the mind underlying the cosmos. so I think that think of Minds in general as conscious spaces or realms or containers of possibility units on the road there -
oh. I'm pro pan psychism. I just think those panpsychics don't go far enough.
oh those pan psychic’s talk about the consciousness or minds of electrons or protons or and atoms and things like that. which is fine the reason they do that is because they're trying to explain how we come to be conscious.
standard materialism is the doctrine that matters unconscious. the whole universe is unconscious. and then they have the problem everything's unconscious and everything's made of matter including our brains, how come we're conscious?
so they only have to say well, the consciousness somehow emerges out of complex arrangements. but how can something totally different from unconscious matter emerge?
that's called the hard problem in the philosophy of mind. so to get out of that some pan psychists, some materialists have become pan psychists by saying okay well let's have a little bit of consciousness in electrons and atoms and things,
so consciousness can emerge from something that has a much much lower of mind or consciousness even in subatomic particles. and therefore we can
overcome the problem of how something
different in that it's a difference of degree not a difference in kind, the emergence of consciousness in human brains.
so I think that's fine I don't have a problem with that but the question I then asked them is well what about the sun? the sun is a self-organizing system what does the sun think about what's the mind of the Sun like?
I'm personally I think the sun's conscious and indeed the entire galaxy and the whole universe.
so I'm in favor of pan psychism but pan means everywhere psyche means mind. I'm in favor of pan psychism, I just think it's so much too limiting to confine it to the realm of subatomic physics.
so this is not an emergent property of material?
well emergent property I mean what does it mean?
it means that something comes from something that wasn't there before it's a way of conjuring something out of like a rabbit out of a hat.
You see there are three main ways of thinking about it one is top-down the whole universe is conscious and even before there was any matter there was consciousness or mind.
and the evolution of matter in the universe is the the universe has lower and lower levels of consciousness as it evolves.
the Big Bang the entire universe is one system one mind as it were, then the fields of physics and things separate art and stars and galaxies and whatnot.
so then you have the emergence of many forms of consciousness and then on life a life on Earth you have they I dare say in biology there is an emergence of higher forms of consciousness, I mean we have more than a worm or a bacterium. so in that area in then you could say that there is a kind of emergence but the top-down consciousness means you start with consciousness and it goes down from the bar as it were. the bottom-up materialist theory is you start from subatomic particles and atoms and you work your way up. and then you have said well it emerges but you could just as well say it descends. the third position is say well it's both. there's a sense in which there's a an emergency or an appearance of high levels of complexity with more complexity. but it's not that it was not there before . and after all, our evolution has happened within on the planet Earth within a galaxy and what if the whole galaxy and what if the whole solar system are conscious and what if Gaia the earth is conscious? then our consciousness has appeared within much larger conscious systems. so you know these are philosophically different ways of looking at it. there's a prejudice in modern science in favor of materialism and reductionism and bottom-up explanations but that's really a kind of philosophical fashion it's not the truth.
well it's been the fashion since the late 19th century's science became dominated by materialism in the late 19th century and in many ways our views of matter have changed since then. they had an old classical physics view of matters little atoms as little billiard balls. quantum theory changes that very radically. and they didn't know about the galaxies beyond our own or the Big Bang or modern cosmology. so all these things have changed but the philosophy of materialism is sort of locked in a 19th century worldview. and of course you can have an updated materialism and in a sense pants cyclists are trying to update materialism. but as soon as you admit psyche or mind into matter then it's not really materialism it's really a form of animism. animism is the belief that whole of nature is alive and they hold universes like an organism not a machine. I think that's a much more reasonable view of myself. so what we're at the moment in is a kind of conflict between old-style materialism and the kind of animism or panpsychism struggling to get out, and so far it's only got as far as atoms and molecules. but one reason I like to ask panpsychists about the consciousness of the sun is that I think they're on a slippery slope and I'd like to push them down it a bit faster than they go on their own. and discussing the consciousness of the sun is a very good way of accelerating this slide down the slippery slope into a full-blown animism.
it seems to me like there's a what was what was the basic definition of consciousness then what is this thing that the materialists and animists are scraping over?
well I mean there's hundreds of definitions, but it has to do with awareness and as I said to start with possibility. I that's my own definition it's about a realm of possibility. they would say it's about perception, awareness, algorithms in the brain. you know, as soon as you get into modern cognitive neuroscience then the brain is a computer, consciousness is just the software programs running it. but they of course needn't be conscious in fact they're not conscious. so in the materialist philosophy of mind consciousness is either an epiphenomenon that does nothing, like a kind of shadow of physical activity in the brain that has no role and has no freewill, it doesn't actually do anything. that's the majority of you or else it's an illusion produced by brains because it might have some conceivable evolutionary advantage but it still doesn't do anything. the problem is that to call consciousness an illusion doesn't explain it it presupposes it because illusion is itself a made of consciousness.
so, philosophers of mind and the materialist school go round and round in circles like dogs chasing their tails trying to explain it never succeed. and any one of them comes up with a theory, another one will point out the flaws in it and that's why it's called the very existence of consciousness is called the hard problem.
it seems to me one major part of that is just the limit of language of word to adequately describe a phenomena. the way I think this the heart problem is will show many things one of it is just how limited English or languages to describe them stuff.
I don't think the problem the consciousness is a problem at language. I mean language itself of course is a product of consciousness and language is inadequate to explain many things, including the ultimate nature of reality at the beginning of the universe, and so forth. but I don't think that the problem is with language. I think the problem is with worldviews. and if you have a worldview that's essentially an atheist materialist worldview there is no God, there is no consciousness out there, the universe is unconscious, it's purposeless, meaningless, everything's happened by chance or accident, the laws of nature have no particular reason to be one way or the other, we just live in a universe where they happen to be right for us,
evolution is a matter of blind chance mutations and blind natural selection. that's a worldview that says that consciousness has just emerged in our brains and doesn't actually do anything. also that we don't have free will is a deeply depressing worldview. and I think that when you have whole societies based on it like ours what you'd predict is that lots of people would suffer from depression. and the facts actually bear that out if you think you live in a meaningless world where your mind is just in your brain and it's nothing more than what's happening inside your head not truly related to anything else, deeply depressing. whereas if you think that consciousness is primary that we live in a universe that's purposeful that our minds are part of something much greater than ourselves that mystical experiences connect us with greater Minds than our own they're not just serotonin levels changing inside our brains. then you have a completely different view of the universe it's not just a matter of language.
https://youtu.be/2xTzwLulRAA?si=DDDGeaQ0vbUtRkKA
Hey Nature, nice post. I recently read The Transcendent Brain by Alan Lightman which I highly recommend and is relevant to this discussion. His thesis is that consciousness is a spandrel, an emergent feature of extremely complex systems. I like his thinking, but he doesn't seem to realize that the Kosmos itself is a complex system. I'd write more, but there's the biosphere here in desperate need of our love and protection so I'll return my attention to revising and expanding my swan song, integrativeactivism.com.
What is the relation of consciousness and light 💡?
In Walter Russell's enlightening work The Secret of Light,
he unfolds a captivating perspective on light presenting it as the basis of all existence.
The fundamental foundation of the universe.
This isn't merely about photons or wavelengths.
This is about light as a profound living substance a dynamic force that breathes life into every corner of the cosmos.
Russell's perspective is unique and transformative.
He perceived light not just as a physical phenomenon but as the living substance of the Mind.
As he himself put it light is the living substance of Mind in action.
It's a bold thought isn't it?
To imagine light as the active expression of universal Consciousness.
https://substack.com/@lm12293463/note/c-61319398
Thank you for that: brilliant!