WHAT MAKES FOR REAL? WHO DECIDES?

WHAT MAKES FOR REAL?

WHO DECIDES?

For his insights and inspiration I acknowledge with gratitude Dr. Deepak Chopra – a quiet giant of the consciousness growth movement.

The most common element in every possible experience is our awareness of it. If we are aware of something, it is ergo happening. If something is not happening in our awareness, then it is not our experience; for us it is not happening. Now it may be that someone tells me about something that happened in his/her experience. That's fine. But it was not my experience. At best, for me, it is only a belief in what someone else recalls from their experience, filtered and screened as it has been since by their prejudices. And nothing could be further from reality than a belief in an indirect experience.

For anything that happens directly in your awareness, belief is not required. It's happening, you are conscious of it happening, you are experiencing it first-hand. It's real.

But how does consciousness of a real, first-hand experience happen? Despite centuries of searching and inspection, that “how” has kept itself a tantalising secret, currently traveling under the name of “the hard problem.” Philosopher David Chalmers, who coined the term, says, “There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.” 

Now before I walk you into this maze I need to explain two things clearly to you. The first is that I don't have an answer; we are going into this unknown together, and without the benefit of Innocence, because we now have the baggage of all our preconceptions, beliefs and prejudices that may get in the way of clear-seeing. The second point I want to make is that I maintain and use a very clear distinction between the terms “awareness” and “consciousness”: pure, undivided “awareness” is that state which has always existed, without beginning or end, and therefore no middle point either. Awareness is indefinable and un-measurable. On the other hand, Consciousness in my lexicon is, thanks to Dr. Harry Palmer, “Awareness” with limitations inherent in the sentient being that is “aware-ing” at the time. Harry talks of “human limitations”, but I have more than a sneaking suspicion that humans are not the only beings in creation that have a limited and limiting self awareness.

One morning during soaring lessons a curious young eaglet asked its mother, “Where does the sky come from?” Interesting question, and one way outside the elder eagle's knowing. It's a bit like a fish asking “Where does water come from?” or a human wondering “Where does conscious awareness come from?” Does it indeed “come from” anywhere, or has it always been just “here”? Quantum physics has already proved that nothing shows up as real until a sentient awareness notices it.

Does the Mind - yours and mine - produce consciousness and awareness? Or does conscious awareness produce the Mind, and the trappings that go with it, including the brain and the orchestra it conducts? This is a chicken-or-egg conundrum to top them all. Or maybe not; it may be that both possibilities co-exist: brain and mind as they are forming, even pre-natally, create an awareness that later develops into several forms of consciousness -AND - all of creation, including minds, brains and intelligence systems in all their forms, arises within a pre-existing Awareness.

My money as usual is on the “and/and” possibility. Yes, I know it's illogical and impossible to reason. But maybe I'm drawn to it precisely because it doesn't make any sense. When I take a long, broad, reflective view of my corner of the cosmos, things that don't make sense actually fit fluidly and work better than those that conform to supposed “laws”. The world and people around me have this perplexing habit of not comfortably accommodating laws that make sense, except sometimes. The riddle of Awareness is as paradoxical, irrational and deeply mysterious as we are.

Dr. Deepak Chopra reminds us that the mystery is especially frustrating because we all depend upon at least a basic level of consciousness for everything. It's obvious that if we were suddenly unconscious, the world would literally disappear in a puff of “Uh”, then nothing, just like it does when you're “knocked out”. This obvious fact implies a few possibilities that are not so obvious: 1) Maybe Awareness existed before the universe, and morphed into Consciousness ( Awareness with limitations) as the universe showed up within it; 2) Perhaps consciousness and the world appeared at the same time; 3) Perchance the holy trinity – Awareness, Consciousness and the Universe co-exist in no-time.

A cosmos devoid of consciousness isn’t conceivable. That doesn't mean it's not possible, but since we are creatures of awareness, then a world without it is not somewhere we need worry about this time around. If the world were to suddenly lose its awareness we, as creatures of awareness, would be gone with it.

As we grow out of childhood and gradually abandon the pure conscious awareness we came with, you and I both know the feeling that we're ceasing to exist to ourselves. You know that dread empty feeling; so do I.

But while we do exist, we exist in our own awareness, but the reason for the all-pervading awareness that we live in, and that lives in and through us, remains completely hidden from sight. I am aware that there is “something” there that is simply aware of what I am “aware-ing”. But when I roll my eyes back and try to catch a view of that awareness, there's nothing there. I can't see it, but I know that it IS. I liken the feeling to being a camera. I know there's a “cameraman” here, but I can't catch sight of him/her.

Let's come at this from yet another direction. Think of sunlight. Let's assume that “our” sun can’t shine unless stars exist. Our sun is just one of them. We tell each other that we know quite a bit now about how stars form, what they are made of, and how light and heat are produced in the incredibly bright-hot cauldron at the core of a star. So the secret of the awareness of sunlight, whether it's ours, or a plant's, probably doesn't lie with the sun. Let's follow the sunlight trail.

As beams of it travel the 93 million miles to Earth, there's no evidence that the light radiation gets any sort of awareness infusion before it penetrates the atmosphere and bounces somewhere on the planet. In this case, the only “somewhere” that we’re interested in is what bounces into our eye. Photons, the packets of energy that carry light, stimulate the retina at the back of the eye, starting a chain of electrical and chemical events that leads to the part of the brain that we've labelled as the visual cortex.

The difference between being blind and being able to see lies in the mechanics of how the eyeball picks up the photons and the brain processes the blips triggered by them — that much is clear. But then the trail goes cold. The step in the process that matters the most, converting electric blips into vision, is totally mysterious. We can convert electronic blips into a picture – the screen you're reading this on does that well – but how you get to “see” this picture, as the King sang, “Is a Puzzlement”! No matter what you see in the world—an apple, a cloud, a mountain, or a tree—we know that sunlight bouncing off the object makes it visible. But how we visualise it -- no one knows.

The secret of sight is inextricably convolved in the phenomenon of Consciousness itself. Without being conscious of light, photons are invisible to us. To a blind person, photons are invisible. Yet it is mistaken to say that, to a sighted person, light becomes bright in the brain through some physical process, because the brain has no brightness, either. Until something opens up your skull, your brain remains as dark as outer space. And because there is no light in the brain, there are no pictures or images, either. When you imagine the face of a loved one, nowhere in the brain does that face exist like a photograph, or an etching, or anything else for that matter. You and I can both see, even in our “mind's eye”, but we have no idea how we do it. For most of us, seeing came as part of the “givens” we were born with. And it's worth noting here that our lack of understanding of the process is no barrier to seeing and using what we “see” for whatever purpose we conjure. And the same applies to every one of our other senses. We don't know how these things happen, but not-knowing has never stopped us from reaping the benefits.

At present no one can explain how invisible photons being converted to chemical reactions and faint electrical impulses in the eyeballs, optic nerves and brain create the three-dimensional reality we all take for granted. Brain scans pick up electrical activity, which is why an MRI contains patches of brightness and colour. So  when we see, hear, feel or smell something, whether actual or imagined, MRI's confirm that something  is going on in the brain. But the actual nature of what's happening is as elusive as the memory of the scent of a long-lost loved one.

Sir John Eccles, a famous British neurologist and Nobel laureate, declared, “I want you to realise that there exists no colour in the natural world, and no sound – nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.” What Eccles means is that all the qualities of Nature, from the luxurious scent of a rose to the sting of a wasp and the taste of honey, is produced by human consciousness. Nothing can be left out. The most distant star, billions of light years away, has no reality without our consciousness of it, because everything that makes a star real—its heat, light, and mass, its position in space and the velocity that carries it away at enormous speed—requires an observer with a consciousness system for it to exist in any subjective reality. Without the presence of an Awareness, nothing happens. This is at the nub of the philosophical thought experiment “If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one is around to witness it, does it make a sound?” If no one is around to experience heat, light, mass, and so on, nothing could be real, as we know reality to be. (At this moment, may I remind you that an estimated 6 billion neutrinos pass undetected through our bodies, but since we have no direct experience of this phenomenon, it doesn’t have the same “realness” as a burning match. Neutrinos exist through inference using mechanical means of detection.)

By the same token, there are a squillion things going on around me as I walk down the street to the shops, but even in my most alert and alive state, I pick up on only an infinitesimal percentage of all that's available. Even the lowliest bitzer of a dog gets more from his sensory apparatus than I do on my best days! I am aware of that.

Because we are aware – conscious participants in the process of living -- we get to be the co-creators of all reality, and the sole creators of our own limited and limiting “seeing” of reality. And yet we have no idea how we do it—the process is effortless. So effortless that most humans take it for granted and allow it to erode from lack of exercise.

Because we are vital participants in creating reality, it follows that the more sensitive and aware we school ourselves to become, the more powerfully we create our world. When we see awarefully, light gains in brightness and clarity. When we listen attentively, air vibrations turn into audible sound. When we smell consciously, chemicals turn into odours, scents and stenches. And the more consciously aware we become, the more sensitive we become to nuances and subtleties (ask a perfume tester or a wine taster). Life in the areas we pay attention to reveals more of itself to us and becomes fuller and richer.

This implies that separating and setting “consciousness” and “awareness” apart from experience as a problem to be worked on, the so-called “hard problem”, will inevitably turn out to be counter-productive. This isn't a job for forensics – the subject has to be alive. Once you begin to dissect a flower, you kill it, and destroy the beauty and the scent you wanted to explore. Even the most intellectual fish can’t set the ocean apart to study as an interesting topic, because a fish's total life is totally involved in water. Therefore, if a fish/scientist asked, “What makes water wet?” the question would be pointless. The answer would be “'Wet' is simply how water is.”

Can we say the same of the cosmos? I reckon we can’t set consciousness apart as a “problem to be solved” because we are part of the “problem” we're trying to investigate. That would be like a heart surgeon trying to do a quadruple bypass on himself. Cosmic Consciousness is innate, like the wetness of water. You can't get water without “wet”; you can't get anything without awareness. Consciousness is a universal, intrinsic precursor to reality. And the quality of the consciousness you bring to your here and now determines the quality of the experience you're having. Perhaps that explains, in part, why low-level consciousness will not reward you with high-level experiences. It's certainly why my message is always the same – “Wake up!”

Having lived so much of my early life at low levels of conscious awareness, and spent the last 3 decades raising them, I'm convinced that consciousness is the same as existence. This profound knowing isn’t new. In ancient India the Vedic sages declared  “Aham Brahmasmi” , which can be translated as “I am the universe” or “I am everything.” They arrived at this knowledge by diving deep into their own awareness, where some fundamental discoveries about the unity of all life were made.

Contrary to the dictates of old-school science, there is more than one reality, existing “in parallel” as it were with this one. I've seen flashes of it. But given that my relatively clunky human perception apparatus usually allows me to experience only one level of reality at a time, and I have to go predominantly with this one that I was born into, at least for a little while longer, I'm happy to stand in this possibility -- If “I am the universe” is true, a complete description of reality cannot take place without “my” consciousness as a primary component of it. This is where I stand at the moment, and what's showing up in this wonder-filled space beats the hell out of what showed up in my life before the alarm clock woke me up.

There is enough evidence out there now to indicate that science must at least take seriously the hypothesis that this is a participatory universe depending for its very existence on sentient beings, including humans, noticing that it exists. But they don't -- not yet, anyway. And I think one of the reasons we remain shuttered out of our own creations is that 99% of current scientific thinking is still welded to the allure of separating ourselves into subjects and objects, into "me" and "not-me". The habit is dying very slowly, and is keeping us a bunch of retards. As a result of this pandemic presumption of separation, we treat our environment as a something to be exploited at our pleasure, and we treat the universe as an object “out there”. The resulting ground-base presumption that human beings came to inhabit Earth billions of years after the Big Bang seems self-evident, as do all beliefs. “Of course there was a cosmos before there was planet Earth, and Earth existed before the emergence of life. It's self-evident”. Yes, as long as your definition of “intelligence-capable life” is restricted to a limited range of forms that exist on this planet. It was also self evident once upon a time that the Earth was flat – until we shifted our point of view. When we shift our perspective, nothing changes in things as they are – AND - yet everything changes. Ideas and concepts that were once “self evident” start to sprout evidences of “except sometimes”. Sooner or later (usually much later) we reach the stage where it's embarrassing and quaintly laughable that we once based so much of our "reality" on such a flaky perception as "separation".

But this hidebound assumption that “of course there was something before” is now invalidated by the inconvenient discovery that every component of the universe –time, space, matter, and energy – is knowable by humans only through a human consciousness system that is not just “connected” but is actually as much a “a part” of cosmic consciousness as one drop of water in the ocean is to the ocean. What our tiny mind, brain and nerves can't handle, is rejected by our ego so that “it doesn't exist” as real. We have to filter out just about 100% of What-Is to avoid exploding from overload. But to lose awareness that most of creation flies right on past us, unnoticed, to the keeper, and little what we do know and experience is only a miniscule part of the whole, is to fool ourselves that "I am IT" We're disastrously wrong about that, but we persist in kowtowing to our self-imposed limitations and “being right” about our beliefs. 

How else do you explain the fact that people, ourselves included, sometimes don't see what is right in front of their noses? American Indian medicine men, it is rumoured, didn't see Christopher Columbus' three ships arrive because there was nothing resembling “ship” in their accumulated awareness. Perhaps it took one of their kids whose alertness was less stultified (as is often the case with children) to screw her eyes to a squint and ask “Daddy, what are those things out there on the water?” One of the frustrations of living in this century is having to deal with people who go into overload at the growing awareness around them, bring down the shutters, and consequently just don't “get it”. We have a Prime Minister like that – in fact we've had a string of them in the last decade or so, elected by people who've retired to a reality shaped by deliberate ignorance.

The “real” reality, the source from which everything in creation emerges, is without dimensions. It has no time or space. Its constituents precede matter and energy as they exist all around us. It isn’t possible to observe this hidden reality, and yet it is there, and modern physicists theorise about it all the time, for the simple reason that time, space, matter, and energy, they argue, must come from somewhere. The word “somewhere” implies a place in time, and Place can’t literally exist before space emerged. Therefore, the origin of the cosmos must be, not a time, not a place, but a state of aware being.

This state of timeless, placeless being-ness can’t be thought about or spoken of, because thinking and language depend on a mind and its P/A (the ego) and its control system (the brain and central nervous system), all of which which were created later in the context of time, space, matter, and energy.

I find it helpful to call Awareness a transcendent state, and insofar as it has any properties whatever, only two are plausible: The first is Existence. It’s hard to believe that our origin does not exist. The second quality of Awareness is Consciousness. Some scientists find it quite easy to believe that the quantum vacuum, the multiverse, God, or whatever name you give to the transcendent state, isn’t conscious. But to believe this is simply jumping to conclusions for which there's no evidence. What would be the point of God creating everything, but not being able to be conscious of its handiwork! I contend that Awareness is exactly what this transcendent state is. Pure, unadulterated Awareness -- nothing else is needed. If Awareness is, everything else arises within it as an expression of Awareness – the Big Bang, the cosmos, the dragonfly perching on my window sill in the sunlight – all are Awareness Expressing itself in one form or another. The expressions and the forms may come and go, but the Awareness that is being expressed in an infinite number of forms remains eternal. Without Awareness -- nothing. Without Awareness as both subject and object, it does not exist.

Negatively speaking, we have no proof that consciousness isn’t universal, a state permeating all of creation. On the other hand, there are many suggestions that consciousness could be inherent in the cosmos, and that the cosmos itself might even be self aware. The first is positive, in the form of our own consciousness, which exists, but for which no one can find an original cause or set of causes. (If there is anything that is not Awareness, then awareness does not exist.) The second clue as to consciousness being inherent in all creation is negative: it's impossible to explain how physical atoms and molecules somehow learned to think, reason, and become aware without there being some model, some inspiration to draw from. At this moment there’s a growing body of cosmologists developing theories of a completely new view of “universe”, one that is living, conscious, and evolving. Such a universe fits no prior standard model. It’s not some extension of the cosmos of quantum physics, nor is it remotely like the Creation described as the work of an almighty God in the Book of Genesis. 

This perception of a cosmos that is made up of nothing but awareness is mind-boggling. Good. Let your mind be boggled and pay it no-mind. Minds are only good for "understanding", which is just the activity of sorting things into existing pigeonholes. Mind is the wrong tool for contemplating awareness. Trying to use your mind to comprehend pure awareness would be a bit like trying to navigate and drive blindfolded along a busy city expressway from inside the glovebox with only an unconnected toy steering wheel to hang onto.

One thing that the mystics have been saying for centuries and that scientists are now beginning to grapple with is the emerging evidence that we are party to a conscious universe that responds subtly and infinitely to how we think and feel. This particular truth licks all the candy of the complaints of victims and the promises of saviours who say “You're hopeless; stand back and I'll save you from this”.

From where I stand, this universal consciousness thing is as ruthless as, say, the Law of Gravity. It doesn't give a hoot whether you believe it or not: it just IS. If you know about gravity, you can use it to enjoy a rollercoaster ride. If you refuse to accept it; you might just die if you step out of the rollercoaster while it's at the top of the tower. And “Nobody told me” is no defence should you feel like suing the inventor and operator of the fun park. It's your mission here to find out the rules and how it works. And if you choose not to, you might just have to keep getting knocked around and repeating the year until you “get it”.

Similarly with the reality of universal consciousness. Whether we are aware of it or not, the universe gains its shape, colour, sound, and texture from us. If my “world” is dysfunctional, then it's up to me to do something about it. Therefore, I feel one good name for what I am is The Conscious Universe Showing up as “Me”. Its existence isn’t a pet theory. It always has been this way; we're just beginning belatedly to wake up to ourselves. The Conscious Universe, as long as it exists, is the real universe, and the only one we presently can be sure that we have. I'm certain there are others, too, but my stance is “Let's take better care of ourselves in this one first, before we head off in our ignorance to discover and wreak the same damage on another one.”

The solution to “the hard problem” is to realise that the problem was an arbitrary creation, and like the mind that created it, it doesn't exist. The idea seemed logical at the time but, like everything else when our perspective shifts, it becomes null and void.

How do we do that? Well, you must find your own way. But transformation started for me the day I stood in the question “What is the problem with this world?” After three decades, an answer is still dawning on me. It sounds something like this –

“There's no problem with anything unless I think about it. As soon as I stop thinking, just observe, and get back into balance, there is no problem. I was mistaken about that.”