Cosmic Consciousness
	January 2019
	The Cosmic Web of Energy Cosmic Consciousness? What Next
The Cosmic Web of Energy
	A pressing question for most of us is this. When I die do I cease to exist, or do I continue to something else? Most people I know seem to have quietly chosen the first of these. This means that they consider death as something to be delayed as long as possible. Oddly, some religious folk believing that they will continue in some form, still consider death in the same way. This extreme view of death seriously distorts our lives and society. Taking death to be extinction instead of graduation (as we shall see), we expend huge resources prolonging life at any cost, and in so doing condemn many an individual to an increasingly disabled and suffering dying. And the answer to that question is simply this. It is meaningless because its premise is false - that there exists an "I", a separate entity which could cease or continue. Our everyday view of reality is of a vast empty space with things, separate objects, scattered here and there throughout it - suns, planets, ping-pong balls, people, and what have you. Quantum science tells us this is wrong. These supposedly separate things are made from molecules, which are made from atoms which are made from so-called subatomic particles. However, quantum physicists would mostly agree that subatomic particles are not really particles at all in the sense of tiny bits of something. A subatomic particle is a mysterious item, actually more akin to an event, an energy connection between neighbouring particles. Here is Henry Stapp (a physicist at the Lawrence Berkely Laboratory writing for the Atomic Energy Commision) …
		An elementary particle is not an independently existing unalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach out to other things. (S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory 1971)
	These "other things" in turn reach out to still others, and so on to the furthest limit of reality. Each particle/connection is exquisitely conditioned by, and conditions, all the others. Reality is one thing, an undifferentiated cosmic web of dynamic energy. Consider a snooker ball. Its shiny red surface seems to define very precisely the boundary between what is "ball" and what is "not ball". But that precision is a matter of scale. At smaller scales the boundary becomes less smooth, lumpy. Smaller still and it is downright fuzzy until at subatomic scale the boundary vanishes. There is no boundary. There is no ball. It is part of a continuum as is everything else in the universe. Including you. You are not an independent entity. You are a process, part of a greater process. Think about a swirl of foam on the surface of the ocean. It can be considered to exist but it is not an independent entity. When the conditions in which it arises cease, it is absorbed back into the encompassing water. "Swirl" is only a name we use to talk about the appearance or nature of water and in just that same way "human body" is a name we use to talk about the appearance or nature of the undifferentiated energy web which is all of material reality. Alan Watts in "The Book" puts it like this:
		[When we are born] we do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
	When all the conditions for a leaf are present a leaf emerges. When these conditions are no longer present the leaf dries and drops and the life energy is reabsorbed into the tree. Nothing is lost. There is no you. There is no me - what a relief!
Cosmic Consciousness?
	In science circles, consciousness is known as the "hard problem". It is the elephant in the lecture theatre - demanding attention but too tricky and impolitic to address. But a few scientists are beginning to think that whereas science has concerned itself with space, time and energy, it is going to have to concern itself with human consciousness as well. The primary scientific models of reality including Einstein's spacetime and quantum mechanics are static. While they take account of time, it appears as an axis, another dimension, albeit one with properties not found in spatial dimensions. And this works fine, to predict when the artillery shell reaches it's highest point, or when it lands, or when a "particle" emits another. But science has nothing whatsoever to say about a present moment or how time gets from t1 to t2. There is a tacit acceptance that time is tenseless as shown here. Why then do we experience it as tensed? Consider a short film clip of an event, say a bird flying to the branch of a tree. The result of shooting this film is a sequence of static frames each a snapshot of the bird in flight. Look into any of these snapshots and you will not find a present moment. Everything is silent and still. For the dynamic event of the bird in flight, this set of snapshots must be experienced through some device or process external to them. In this case a film projector. It is the projector which supplies a present moment - the frame in the gate, and its apparent passage through time - the passage of the frames through the gate. Consider now your direct experience of seeing the bird flying to the branch. In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (see here) for example, that experience consists of your brain states in a sequence of static universes, one per unit of time. Just as for the film frames, these snapshots contain no present moment. For you to experience the dynamic event of the the bird in flight, the set of snapshots must be experienced through some device or process external to them. In this case consciousness. It is consciousness that supplies the present moment - the current snapshot, and the apparent passage throught time as it passes over the snapshots. So consciousness is external to the physical world, beyond time and space as currently understood by science. Which is why science has so much trouble with it. Science is looking in the wrong place. Being external to physical reality makes consciousness, on a par with mass, energy, time and space, a fundamental attribute of the arena where physical reality is laid out. It is surely singular.
What next?
	Supposing that your consciousness was an integral part of one cosmic consciousness. What would that be like? Consider this ...
		I now became lost, and absorbed into the being or existence of the universe … and losing thus my separateness of being, came to seem like a part of the whole. Richard Jefferies, ca 1870, Christian
	That might be something like it. And there are many more like this, from different times, places and religions (see here). They use different words to express it but the story is the same - the breaking down of the barriers between self and non-self, becoming part of a larger whole. This suggests that with the acquisition of some unfamiliar, or as yet unimaginable mind skills, you might grow to have that experience. The human race might grow to have that experience. What then? But from our earliest remembering, our normal experience is limited entirely to this one body and mind? Why? The remembering is the key. From personal experience I know that amnesiac anaesthetics work. That means we do not experience pain directly but only when it is processed into short-term memory. As pain is the sense we most urgently need to be aware of, it seems likely that all our senses are the same. If so then we do not experience reality directly. What we experience is a construct in memory, that construct being determined mostly by reference to a model, learned from our parents in early childhood, and reaffirmed from moment to moment thereafter, of "what the world is like". To the extent that memory is personal and limited then, so is our conscious experience. What do babies experience before memory and language begin to close it down - "trailing clouds of glory"? The science of consciousness, our understanding of it, has not yet really begun. But it is in the air.
	Jeanne Guyon, 17th century, Christian
		She must remain as something which no longer exists: and this, in order that the Torrent may drown itself and lose itself in the Sea, never to find itself in its selfhood again: that it may become one and the same thing with the Sea.
	Jalalu 'ddin Rumi, 13th century, Muslim
		Pilgrimage to the place of the wise is to find escape from the flame of separation.
	D.T.Suzuki on the Avatamsaka Sutra, ca 1st century, Buddhist.
		... a state of complete dissolution where there is no more distinction between mind and body, subject and object ... We look around and perceive that ... every object is related to every other object ... not only spatially but temporally. ... As a fact of pure experience, there is no space without time, no time without space; they are interpenetrating.
All contents ©Copyright Colin McArthur, 2004-2019