WHAT'S DRIVING EVOLUTION?

CONSCIOUSNESS – THE DRIVER OF EVOLUTION

Charles Darwin got a really handy handle on Evolution but, as often frustratingly happens when we try to nail down a truth of something, there turns out to be more yet to be discovered. And to an open mind, it is these “more-yets” that prevent a truth becoming entrenched as The Truth.

There is always more. Let mystery deepen......

Dr. Deepak Chopra says, “An emerging view alternative to Darwin’s random mutations and natural selections is that consciousness may be the driver of complexity in evolution. Consciousness is the key to evolution and we will soon prove that.”

Well, fine, I’m up for change. But before we go digging deeper, let's get a clearer idea of what it is that we're looking for. Good idea?

What precisely is this no-thing we call Consciousness?

I don't have a definition – actually I have several. If I may, I'll put them out here so that you can join me in finding one or more that suit the situation you're in at the moment.

1.    Consciousness is Universal Awareness with (human) limitations. I say “human” limitations because, on the evidence of what I see in the bedroom mirror and similarities I see between my “thinkings” and “feelings” and those of human beings around me, I have my limitations and I claim to be human. (But I could be wrong about that. Time will tell).

My point is twofold. Assuming that I am human, my consciousness is Pure Awareness, distorted by my particular limitations –

a) The level and quality of human consciousness depends very much on the vibrational frequency level and resonant quality of the individual human, just as the social consciousness of a grouping of humans depends on the levels of mental, spiritual and psychological vibration of the group. You can feel this for yourself. Compare your experiences of being in the presence of one or more enlightened masters with your experiences of being in the presence of one or more members of an ultra right-wing lynch mob. All human beings, but not homogeneous.

Notice, too, the difference between your experience of driving into, say, Mullumbimby compared to your experience of driving into, say, Footscray. Compare your experience of watching someone on TV sitting with the Dalai Lama and, say, listening to someone trying to talk with Peter Dutton or Scott Morrison. Two entirely different levels of consciousness, and I am NOT saying that one is preferable to the other – I leave that to you.

b) Secondly, I apply the same definition of consciousness to all sentient life. For a scribbly gumtree, consciousness is Awareness with the limitations of being a scribbly gum tree. And so it goes for kangaroos, amoebae, lichens or rocks.

We can never get everyone to agree on what the definition of consciousness is. But here's another possible one:-

2. Consciousness is one’s perceptiveness of first person experience, as it is happening.

Right now you are having a first person experience of reading something written by me on the internet, and only you can have this experience that you're having right now. Someone else could be reading this, too, but their experience is not going to be precisely the same as yours. I guarantee that.

I could also have a third person guessing about the experience you're having by putting you in an MRI machine and then looking at which part of your brain is being activated, and if that person had enough information he/she could say, “Oh, your auditory cortex is being activated. You’re probably having a conversation with someone.” That's about as close as anyone can get to knowing, let alone having your experience.

Hardly close at all, is it? (Oh, I know how you feel! – Close, perhaps, but no cigar)

The worst thing about our Experience is the illusion that we are actually having all of it.

A being with more acutely developed awareness skills will always see things differently from a being that has its perceptions blocked in some way. And the more sensitive person will be more likely to acknowledge his/her limitations than someone who’s blocked off.

The level of your consciousness shapes what you can experience; mine shapes mine. And no being on earth can get the whole thing at once and still keep talking. Which is bad news for people who may think they're Jesus Christ. Even He wasn't the whole thing, but He had access to it. That was one purpose of His coming – to point out that we too can have direct access to divine awareness. We don’t need a middleman or mediator; we are closer to God than we think. If he’d been allowed to live longer, priests and bishops could have been put out of business.

But I digress…..

I could check the various GPS devices in the world, could even guess where you’re having your experience of reading this, and maybe actually describe a bit of what is going on for you right now. But, anything I say is going on with you right now could not possibly be your first-person consciousness experience. Anything I say would be, at best, a second person, or even third person description of what I think is going on for you.

So, we all have some grasp of what we mean by the term “first person experience”. It is as unique as your fingerprints or genes. What happens to our being when we taste a strawberry, how we feel the emotion of a story that we're reading, or how we feel when we think of somebody we love, or an image that we experience somewhere in our consciousness, or a sensation, or a thought -- that’s first person experience. So, that’s a good definition for consciousness that maybe we can agree upon sometimes. But there is more.....

3.    In Eastern wisdom traditions, which tend to dig deeper, consciousness is cast in a somewhat different mould to that. Consciousness is an answer to the question -- What is the source of this present experience?

OK, we now have three “statements-about” consciousness, which is about as close as it’s possible to get near what is essentially indefinable. We can say that experience can be perceptual, which means “I” sees an object. “I” sees a sunset. “I” sees a mountain. “I” sees another person. “I” hears a song. “I” tastes chocolate ice cream. “I” smells a rose. “I” feels a breeze on my skin. Those are perceptual experiences. In one way or another they have to do with what we call the outside world. So, we can say sound, taste, smell, texture, colour, are perceptual experiences of consciousness.

But then there are other varieties of experience, which are mental, and/or emotional, or you might say an image in consciousness, or an idea, and a bunch of feelings, in reality or in imagination. There are also our reactions to of all of those. And just to make things really interesting, you can add to the mix experiences that appear out of “nowhere”, and extra-sensory experiences.

Whew!

BUT......

What is the source of them? Where do they happen? Where do they come from?

And, here's a killer question – Is there something prior to experience? Is there something prior to the consciousness within which an experience arises?

So, given these questions, Eastern spiritual traditions go further. This is when you look at the traditions of Vedanta or Kashmir Shaivism, or the transcendentalists, or what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy, In these contexts there is pure awareness that is prior to consciousness, prior to perception, prior to thought, prior to mental activity, prior to emotional feeling – in fact prior to everything including the big bang. This is the pure Awareness that is the space in which all being-ness arises.

Awareness is the ground zero of existence. Without awareness, there is no existence. Another way to say this would be “perceptions and points of view are many, mental activities are many, emotional movements are many, but that Awareness of it all is one”.

So, there’s a common ground of experience where Eastern wisdom traditions go. And that common ground is not only a common ground for you and me as human species, but also for a bird, or for a tree, or for a bacterium, or for a paramoecium, or for a plant, or for even a rock. In Eastern wisdom traditions, consciousness, or a very simple form of sentience – sentience means the ability to feel and to respond, or to be aware and to respond – that sentience pervades the cosmos from atom to galaxy and, of course, in between somewhere. Because consciousness permeates every level of all being, somehow we are integral with it.

This is not a new idea. It has existed for as long as men have contemplated possible truths or principles underlying being (philosophy). Plato spoke of it in the cave allegory; he spoke of a hidden reality, an organising programme of ruthless, inherent principles that govern our daily lives from within the observable world. Eastern wisdom traditions have spoken of the un-manifest domain of consciousness – ie. the one outside the range of what we can pick up with our five senses.

In the morning when you slowly open your eyes after a good night’s sleep, before your bio-computer has fully backed up out of “sleep” mode, before you realise you’re who you think you are and that you’re in your bedroom, or whatever, there’s a dawning-moment of awareness where there is no thought content, no emotion content, not even perceptual content or cognitive content, but there is some kind of a ground of being of contextual, unclouded awareness. And then slowly, or rapidly, you become more consciously aware of superimposing details -- “I’m thirsty.” “I’m in my bedroom. I need to go to the toilet. What time is it? OK. This is what I’ve got to do,” etcetera, etcetera.

So, there is Awareness prior to Consciousness. Whether there is consciousness prior to experience is a question I have gone into elsewhere, but –

• the here-and-now co-existence of consciousness and experience is the common ground of all experiences in all species. This is the definition of consciousness that I have used all my life because I have been obsessed with the questions: What is existence? What is consciousness? What is experience? What is the universe?

Today, there are two hard problems that are considered number one and number two in science. Number one is what is the universe made of?

Well, nothing. The kind of “nothing” that is everything, but suspended as potential.

To make a long story short, the universe is mostly invisible, with dark matter and dark energy combined. That’s 96 percent of the universe. Four percent is atomic, but when we look at atoms, then those atoms are particles. And when we look at particles, they’re also waves, and their waves have no units of mass or energy. People are still struggling to define what is the universe made of because our current science says it’s made of nothing. That would be no big deal, except for the fact that our minds simply cannot, and most people will not, embrace or be with nothing. In other words, we're an idea called “something” living in an incomprehensible, unreasonable, unknowable “nothing” that we can't be with. And we're made of the same incomprehensible “nothing”, insisting that we're “something”.

When you look at the sky and you see these vast, empty spaces between the stars and between you and the galaxies, these empty spaces are not really empty. Nothing there, yes; empty, no. They’re the womb of creation. Some invisible forces are manifesting out of nothing, gradually lowering their frequencies and ultimately showing up as atoms and star stuff and everything that we call “material”. I see the universe as an eternal process of “nothing 'mattering'”.

But, the vast realm of reality is sub empirical, where the usual methodologies of science -- which are measurement, observation, experimental validation – are useless. Scientists cannot go there because there’s nothing to measure. There’s nothing to observe. There’s nothing that you can do any experiment with. There's nothing to validate.

All experiment starts once a measurement is made. Type out the phrase, “interpretations of quantum physics,” or “quantum mechanics” in Wikipedia. You’ll see one big fact that stands out: quantum mechanics is a mathematical formulism.

It explains basically the statistical likelihood of observing particles. That’s it. And it’s very successful because all our technology is based on it. It’s probably the most successful science so far, but when you look at the interpretations of quantum mechanics you will see there are at least, at the moment 15 to 20 of them, which means we know certain facts around quantum mechanics, but we don’t know what it means because we are ending up with a domain that is unobservable.

That’s true of most of where science is going right now: Superstrings, a theory that can't yet be validated or falsified; or multiple universes, a theory that can't yet be falsified or verified, because science has brought us to the door of that which is beyond observation and measurement. And that’s 99.9 percent of reality. The .01 percent that we can observe is, in fact, somehow just a manifestation of the invisible realm of the universe.

Are you starting to get the possibility that people who are “certain” of something might be a wee bit shallow?

Un-answered Question #.1. How much can we really conscious of?

Truth is up for grabs. We live on a huge, huge, huge iceberg and the tip of your little finger is the tip of that iceberg. The tip of your pinkie is the size of the physical, observable world. The rest of you and the world you're standing on is way out of sight. The whole “world” is so huge that we actually have no idea how big it is, and it's expanding faster than we can run. So, that takes care of the number one unanswered question. How much are we conscious of? We do not know what we're conscious of. We can't even have an idea about that because what we have available to think with won't stretch that far or fast.

The second unanswered question I ask today is: What is the biological basis of consciousness?

And here there’s also a problem because everybody assumes that there is a biological basis of consciousness. That’s the prevailing scientific paradigm: that your thoughts, your imagination, your perceptions, your everything that you experience every day as your feelings, intentions, introspection, intuition, rational thought, imagination, and also everything that you experience as a perceptual world is a biological phenomenon.

But there’s a problem with that assumption because, first of all it’s just an assumption based on no evidence whatsoever. Nobody has ever actually proved that biology produces consciousness, or any experience for that matter. Biology may be peripherally involved in the process of picking up and conveying some signals from an experience of something, but the experience itself? What causes that? What's driving it? What's driving us? What's looking though the viewfinder of our senses? What's looking over our shoulder at us and what we're picking up? 

Nobody has the vaguest clue. When we look, there’s nothing there – but we can feel there is some “no-thing” there. In the meantime, the best we can do is agree that while “biology” may be one of many, many means of things happening, it is only part of the mechanics; it is not the cause of anything.

When you look at a beautiful rainbow, or you look at a loved one, or you look at your teenage daughter's room, or you look at an exquisite building with intricate architecture, all that’s going to your eyes is strings of photons. Those photons are colourless and have no dimensionality whatsoever. When they reach your retina or your brain, all that happens is – an electric current oscillates in some kind of mysterious code. Whether it’s any of the five sensations in your experience, all that happens in your brain is electrochemistry. You don’t experience electrochemistry or photons or electrical currents, though. You experience a rainbow or a messy room, and your reactions to those things. How that happens, I don't know, neither do you, and neither does anyone else – yet.

You experience a three dimensional world, which is evolving in time. And no one knows how that happens. It’s called the hard problem of consciousness. If I ask you to imagine a beautiful sunset, in your mind's eye you see a picture of that sunset, but there’s no picture of the sunset in your brain, or anywhere else that a surgeon can locate. There’s just a product of electrochemistry being driven by --- what??. And that's no more your experience than a graphic equaliser readout is Beethoven's Ninth!

So, where does experience happen, any experience? People will say it happens in the brain. You say, “why?” And they say, “Well, if you knock somebody on the head, then they lose consciousness,” or “If you give the man anaesthesia, he’ll lose consciousness, or, you know, if they take a drug, or have a hallucination, they experience a shift in consciousness.” OK, so experience happens in consciousness. But where's the seat of consciousness?

So you conclude, consciousness must be a brain phenomenon, which is a pretty good argument, until you ask, “Then how does the brain do it?   How does the brain produce imagination, or creativity, or intention, or any volition, or a thought, or even the colour red when all that comes is colourless photons. How does the brain produce the experience of a sound, or the smell of a rose, or a taste of chocolate? Then we get stuck. We don’t know where to go. In confusing the operations of “brain” and “mind”, we fail to notice that a lot of our experiences happen in every cell of our body, not just the brain.

Now eastern traditions and many other systems of science or philosophy will say there is just consciousness, and its multitudinous varying states of excitement, just consciousness and its modulations. If that is so, then our mental and emotional experiences are an excited state of consciousness. Biology is an excited state of consciousness, and our experience of the world is an excited state of consciousness. Everything is consciousness excited at different frequencies, and the only problem arises when you just assume that the world is solely physical. That's when you run yourself into a dead-end.

If you assume that the world is consciousness, arising in consciousness, then the universe is consciousness as well. It’s during the objective experience of consciousness that biology, etcetera come into play.

So, then if this is true, if this philosophical assumption or ontology is true, then we are just a species of consciousness, as is a microbe, as is a bacterium, as is a paramoecium, as is a monkey, etcetera. Then the evolution of species is in fact the evolution of species of consciousness.

I am proposing “another” interpretation of evolution – That we are all agents or manifestations of consciousness coming from one universal domain of Awareness. I think Charles Darwin’s great contribution was that he identified from his observations and introduced to us the concept of “evolution” and the word to label it.

His main critics at that time hailed from the creationists' bandwagon. I've lived a lot of my early years as an unquestioning disciple of the Genesis' version of creation. Thanks to Darwin, however, I was prompted to look at the world around me working itself out, and I found that creationism could not be relied upon as a viable theory of it all. It looked more like an excuse for dogmatic religious (as opposed to spiritual) agendas. So, definitely, I’m not proposing a creationist theory. I’m just saying evolution in each of its forms appears to be more true than creationism, and that on closer inspection the evolution of species seems to be the evolution of species of consciousness.

When Darwin wrote his theory of origin of species, he had no knowledge of DNA or genetics. He had no idea that such a discipline as epigenetics would come, He had no idea of how genes get activated, or expressed, or regulated, or changed. So, yes, random and quantum mutations are intriguing theories when coupled to natural selection.

If you talk to some of the evolutionary biologists today (those who don't belong to the 99 Percent Club who are still wedded to the old mechanistic paradigm), but to biologists like Dr. Rudy Tanzi, or other people of his calibre, they say that the periodic mutations that created sideways leaps, breaking linear evolution, don’t seem to be random at all. They theorise that mutations follow certain probability patterns. An individual mutation can be unpredictable, but when you look at the multiple mutations, they follow a distribution pattern. But, is there a discernible probability distribution? and is there room even for purpose driven mutation (teleology)?

“Random” is sometimes a convenient word to excuse passing on further digging. If I go to Spencer Street Station in Melbourne I see people apparently at first sight to be moving about randomly. But if I come every day and pay close attention I may see that, so many people are coming from or going to Albury, so many are going to and from Geelong, so many to Bendigo, and so many are going to Adelaide In fact, I could even plot a distribution pattern and create a business plan out of it, Are evolutionary mutations like that? Can I plot a distribution pattern and say that, OK -- there’s the evolution of species going on with natural selection, but that evolution of species is also being driven in a direction of complexity and purpose?

This is dangerous ground to tread in if you’re with traditional biologists because they will immediately accuse you of creationism and teleology and all the old terms that are used to attack the most traditional model of evolution. Our view of Evolution right now needs revision.

I’m beginning to see that it is possible to get a sense of some directions that the evolution of certain things (change) may be taking, and deliberately merge myself with that flow.

Could intentionally participating in evolution like that make a difference?

Yes.

Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Rudy Tanzi are doing studies where they take people through various practices of meditation and then look at their genetic expression. And it changes! It changes because of epigenetic modulation. Epigenes are factors outside the gene and the epigenetic information is all there in the sheet of proteins outside the genome. Epigenes are influenced by everything – influenced by persistent thought, by stress, by relaxation, by meditation, by diet, by sleep, by emotions. So, for the first time, we now have a very clear handle on mind, brain genome,…..

And even microbiomes. 90 percent of the genetic information in your body is in bacteria.

This includes your gut and your skin. 90 percent of your DNA is bacterial. Only 10 percent is strictly human. Even in the human cells – the 10 percent human cells that you have – the mitochondria, which are the energy producing organelles in your cells, they’re all derived from bacteria. It could be said that you are, as a human being, the awakening in consciousness of bacterial colonies that got together to produce human beings and they said, “Okay, who am I now?”

Let’s now focus on consciousness itself.

University studies can now show that the thoughts you entertain, your emotions, your mental activity, which obviously arise from and within the ambience of your consciousness, are influencing the behaviour of your genes, not only your human genes, but your microbial genes. The work is still ongoing, but so much is plain to see already.

If you look at experiments where they take mice and they have them smell something like wintergreen and follow that with electrical shocks, then the next generation of mice will be afraid of the wintergreen smell even though they haven’t experienced the electrical shock. Or if you go to a cattle farm and you see cattle that are enclosed within an electrical fence so they get mild electrical shock when they touch it, then the subsequent generations will be afraid and will not go near that wiring, even when the power has been turned off. 

How do memories get transferred like that?

We all assume that memory is in our brain, and, of course, there are neural correlates for memory there that you can look at. If I ask you to remember the face of your mother, or the location of your house, or a really memorable past experience, or what you had for dinner yesterday; when you do that there will be activity in your brain that can be seen on an MRI. But, where is the memory at a cellular level before I asked you that question? We know that every cell in our bodies, like the pieces of a shattered holographic plate, has complete memory, nobody is able to pinpoint its origin. Where is the seat of “Soul memory”? Some people point to their heart or their solar plexus, but who really knows? Maybe there is no single residence, any more than a wave on the ocean can contain properties that are not already shared with the whole ocean.

If memories were in the brain alone, how would they be transferred? Epigenetically we don’t know yet. My theory is that all memories are in universal consciousness and consciousness is not just in the brain or just in the body. Consciousness at the very fundamental level is Sentience that pervades the entire universe.

How do “your” memories, stored in the universe, find “you”? I don’t know, but I’m looking at the possibility it might be by a code that is unique to you. Maybe your genetic code allows memories stored in “the cloud” to find you??? It’s called “quantum entanglement”, a sphere of work that arose from one of Einstein’s discoveries – a phenomenon he called “spooky action at a distance”. I don’t know much more than that at the moment – it’s an exploration in progress.

If you read Freeman Dyson’s book Infinite in All Directions, towards the end he addresses some very interesting questions. He says, “Every quantum experiment forces the atom to make a choice. That, in fact, atoms have some degree of sentience.” They’re hanging out with other atoms. Particles are hanging out with other particles, and they’re all in a relationship with each other. Otherwise you couldn’t get two atoms and molecules, etcetera. So, there’s some form of sentience. Obviously bacteria have sentience, too. They look for “good” food.

I take probiotics, and fibre, so I can multiply the biotics, the good bacteria in my blood. One reason I cultivate probiotics is that they don’t like toxic substances like petroleum products and insecticides. So, to counteract the grooblies that now get into our food chain, we can deliberately use to our benefit a degree of sentience that exists in bacteria. There is sentience, too, in unicellular organisms like a paramoecium. It avoids toxins, looks for food, and even has sex, all without a brain. You’ve got to go a long way further up the evolutionary scale before you get a brain, and then of course there are several levels of brain. You and I have the reptilian brain, the limbic brain. and the cortical brain.

There’s a long line of living organisms from bananas to pineapples to trees to other plants that display sentience. They look for sunlight. They bend away from salty winds. They select nutrients from the earth. They communicate with each other. They reproduce. Is this not a form of sentience? When and why did humans decide that sentience is the sole privilege of something with a brain? Why do you need a brain? [Homework for you.]

Freeman Dyson, one of the most eminent physicists of our times, said there are three riddles that have confused him all his life. The first is the unpredictable movement of atoms. The second is a universe that’s friendly to life and mind. And the third is our own consciousness. Then he goes on to say that some form of sentience seems to pervade the entire cosmos and that we are also part of that same sentience. Like waves on the ocean, we are each essentially “the ocean” – waving.

So, here’s Dr. Chopra's theory; the evolution of species is evolution of species of consciousness, that consciousness is the trigger for evolution, and that in some way the gaps in evolution – the so-called gaps – could be creative intuitive leaps of consciousness into complexity and emergence.

One direct experience of consciousness is self-awareness, because the self is a conscious being. Sentience may pervade all of the species, but I think we may be the only species that asks, “Who am I?” I could be blind to it, but I don’t yet see evidence of other species asking that question, even though they are sentient. It seems they’re all just happy to just be what they are. But we humans get to ask “What am I:” So, when we get to the consciousness of consciousness, which is a human trait, we then develop techniques for exploring consciousness.

Who can predict what the future science will bring?

What I'm very confident of is that we are getting very close to that Awareness that is conscious of our consciousness. Maybe one day I'll actually enter that pure Awareness. Maybe I've already had moments. But I'll never be able to remember them or tell you what it's like because language just isn't up to the job of even remembering, let alone telling the tale.

How does a car's glovebox describe the car's driver?

All it can do for the moment it know that there IS a driver, and go along for the ride.