Implications (and Limitations) of Consciousness

Once, in rural central Florida, a man named Ted lived alone in the countryside. His only company was a small dog that had lived with him for a very long time.  This dog was a great companion and a wonderful and dedicated  friend to Ted.  After many years the dog, like all living creatures, made his transition.  Ted, with a heavy heart and feeling of tremendous loss, went to a local church in town to meet with the minister.  He asked the minister “Reverend my faithful dog and my best friend recently died.  Could you possibly have a brief service to aid in the transition for his passing?”

 
Realizing how set in their ways his congregation was and not wanting to offend them but yet wanting to ease Ted’s pain, the minister thought for a moment and then replied:  “We just can’t have services for an animal in this church, but I’ll tell you what, there’s a new denomination on the other side of town, and I’m not sure what they believe in, but maybe they’ll do something for your beloved pet.”  Ted replied “Thanks, I’ll go to that church right now.  By the way, do you think $50,000 is enough to donate for a service?”  Upon hearing this, the Reverend quickly replied “Why didn’t you tell me the dog was a member of this denomination?”

The moral of the story: Isn’t it amazing that, in spite of long-standing traditions, beliefs or habits, how quickly we can change our minds when we are motivated to do so?  The key is to see things from a new perspective,  whether self-imposed or pushed into it from the outside.  In whatever way it happens we must be open-minded about questioning our beliefs and habits so we have the motivation to change.

 
But, there’s even so much more to this story than that.  We must also consider how we interpret our experiences. We communicate to each other in symbols (e.g. using language).  We often forget that language is not the thing in itself that we are describing, but merely a representation of what is being described.  And that description is clouded by our memories of prior experiences, by hidden and unspoken assumptions, or by underlying beliefs and associations of meaning  we make with the symbols (i.e. language) we use.  These are only a few of the things that influence our thinking - there are probably even a lot more that we cannot even consciously recognize.

 
Let’s say I try to describe the taste of an apple to you.  Words are inadequate to come close to describing it but  if you experience a real one for  yourself and you instantly know exactly what I am trying to convey when I talk about an apple’s taste.  The same goes for everything else you can think of: the beauty of a sunset; what it feels like to be in love; the beautiful music of a great orchestra.  Language is a model; it is a description. It is not the thing in itself.  The actual apple is the thing being described.  It is the actual territory; the thing being experienced. As the old saying goes “The map is not the territory”.

We assign quantities (e.g. numbers) to everything to provide descriptions to help in our communications with other people and even in our own thinking. The wavelength of a subtle red light is an example of that; let’s say its wavelength is around 700 nanometers.  That does not really explain what the experience of seeing a red light is like.  It’s a hint, that’s all; a pointer to what it would be like to actually experience it.   In a similar manner quantities like the weight of an object in kilograms, the sound or a car horn, or the distant view of a dog as seen from the top of a hill one half of a mile distant are crude descriptions of what the actual experience would be like.

 
Quantities help in providing a feel for what to expect when you or someone else experiences something (e.g. like picking up a heavy object) but, until you actually do it (e.g. have the experience) you will never truly “know” exactly what the experience will be like.  And, so it is, for everything in the world we experience or even think about.  We describe objects quantitively, but we actually experience them qualitatively.  Why should we not expect that everything we experience in the world works that way – easy to get only partial view or understanding?

 
So, I hope I have convinced you - we view the external world through a series of filters and representations that greatly influence are interpretations.  Its why people make such poor witnesses. Great mystics wisdom teachers, and sages have been telling us for millennia that if we really want to understand the universe, we must first understand ourselves.  Now scientists are telling us that to understand the ourselves we must first understand the universe.  So, which is it?  Well, it turns out both views are correct.   We live in an interdependent universe; one where we experience it representationally internally.  That means that everything is subjected to our own interpretations.

 
On top of that, as scientists now tell us, our world and everything within it is interconnected in very fundamental and profound ways (through quantum properties like entanglement and  non-locality).  So, it seems that it is literally true that not only are we in the universe but it is also in us.  We cannot be separated from it nor it from us.  
By now, it should come as no surprise the way we perceive our world is heavily dependent on our conscious thoughts, our beliefs, our understandings (and misunderstandings), our cultural traditions, our use of language, and our prior experiences all represent what we perceive and interpret.  But consciousness is not just passive;  it has it has the causal power to affect our own bodies (e.g. the placebo effect, etc.)  and the external world in ways we are yet to fully understand.  So, we live in a participatory world – it works in both directions – we affect it and it affects us; and it works that way for both our minds and for our bodies.  Science is just now beginning to catch up with what the ancient mystics and wisdom teachings have been telling us for so long.

Why has it been so difficult for most of us in the western world to understand and believe in the role that consciousness plays in experiencing and influencing both our internal and external realities?   It turns out that it is largely a matter of limitations due to our cultural conditioning, our enduring institutions that want to maintain the status quo, our incomplete and insufficient knowledge and understanding of how the world actually works, and, lastly, the unwillingness to challenge or change long-held beliefs.

 
We artificially separated our inner and outer worlds over 400 years ago.  Recall that those were the days filled with superstition and where daily life was controlled by the inquisition.   Starting with the Polish intellectual Copernicus who showed that the Sun was at the center of the universe and not the earth, and then later confirmed by Galileo, the inventor of the telescope, evidence began to mount that the universe followed known and predictable laws and that events were not subject to the capricious will of deity.  As this evidence continued to build, needless to say, this placed the church in an increasingly difficult position as it began to undermine long established doctrine.

Change never comes easily.  In the modern era we have to deal with all kinds of misinformation from both personal and so called trusted media or institutional sources. For several hundred years, misinformation or poor understanding of how nature behaved fueled all kinds of superstitions. Copernicus waited until he was on his death bed before he published his results for fear of upsetting church authorities.  Soon after his passing, one of Copernicus’s followers, Gordano Bruno, was burned at the stake along with countless other intellectuals for promoting such heresy.  Galileo spent most of his later years under house arrest after he published his findings that showed that the heavens consisted of stars, planets and moons.

 
Eventually the great French Philosopher Rene Descartes convinced the church that it was OK for scientists (natural philosophers as they were called then) to study the outer natural world as long as those studies did not also address the inner realms of consciousness and spirituality. The inner worlds were to remain in the domain of religious control and doctrine.  This so-called Cartesian duality began an uneasy truce between science and religion that has pretty much lasted to this day.

 
Although some of the founders of modern quantum theory in the early 20th century speculated on the role that consciousness played in all quantum states of the universe, they couldn’t explain exactly how.  So, the mantra “Shut up and compute!” quickly became the rule of the day.  It has only been in the last few decades that science has disregarded this long-standing truce and has begun to investigate an integrated view of reality based on the role of consciousness.  This is primarily because of recent paradigm shifting discoveries in several fields of the sciences (quantum physics, medicine, microbiology and the latest in the neurosciences).   It seems that consciousness does have a fundamental role to play in interacting with reality in all living creatures, just as the fathers of quantum theory were predicting over 100 years ago.

Remember that historically, thanks to Descartes, science was relegated to focus on what we can know only by studying objective reality.  This is the reality that exists outside of us, one that we can only know about through our five senses.  Contrast that with our inner world, our subjective experience.  Because of the Cartesian duality, it was believed that our minds had no influence over it.  But we now know that consciousness does influence it and is influenced by it, and there is even much more to the story than that.

 
There is even a more intrinsic way of experiencing reality that some of us may be  aware of although we often tend to dismiss it especially when it conflicts with long held beliefs.  This is our intuition and our insights which have also been referred to as our so-called “sixth sense”.  They are what our religious and spiritual traditions have referred to for millennia as that “still small voice within”.  Our externally focused perceptual mechanisms (e.g. our senses) and our internal intuitive insights are both ways of knowing reality and are what many wisdom teachers have been trying to tell us about for a very long time.

 
The issues of how we know what we know, how reality outside of ourselves affects our thoughts in our heads and how our inner thoughts affect our external reality (including our bodies) are some of the topics that this website explores. Other sections are much more practical and provide the tools and insights to a fuller and more wholistic life.

 
Once we understand many of the  principles outlined in this paper, we can practice them and utilize them to affect change both internally within our body/minds and externally onto the outside world.  This section of our website will review some of the compelling current scientific evidence about what it is suggesting about how these interactions work, the role consciousness plays in that process, its implications, and especially how these effects may be utilized in our own lives.

 
Parts of the contents of this web site is very practical and the information provided there will help us along the path to wholeness.  Some of the information we present can be experienced through actual intentional practice, some can be experienced through altered states of consciousness, and some of it can be experienced through the practice of meditation or similar means.  In whatever way it happens, we hope this website will give you some of the information and tools needed to facilitate your exploration and pursuit to wholeness.

 
Finally, one exciting aspect of understanding consciousness from the perspectives outlined in the paper includes the possible explanations for parts of the human experience known over the last 400 years that were either disregarded (and perhaps not even acknowledged) previously by science.  These include such things as the phenomena in patients with severe dementia or brain deterioration referred to as terminal lucidity as a patient approaches the last few hours before final death, near death experiences (so called NDEs) , out of body experiences (OBEs), savant syndrome, synchronicities, strange phenomena after certain types of brain injuries, many types of psi phenomena and even mystical experiences.  Some very credible and reputable scholars, scientists and medical practitioners are even offering convincing evidence about the possibility of survival or some aspects of our consciousness after our body dies.  Of course, many of our religious teachings, and sages of all ages have been postulating this since the dawn of history.

All of these areas, and several others, have been ignored by science until very recently and some even still are.   As they say “times, they are a changing”.  Stay tuned as we will present additional information and the latest understanding of these phenomena in future postings to this website.