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The modern world is arranged around the idea that we are just here for this brief life, a moving form of dust, whose reality disintegrates and is obliterated at death.
In contrast to this, this page demonstrates that the association of atoms we call our body, which at death falls into dust, is merely our vehicle, and that we ourselves are each an immortal, conscious soul whose existence is unaffected by the ups and downs of the material world or the destruction of our body.
The basic approach used, is to gaze at one's own consciousness, recognise it has a conscious vision of a whole, and after some reflection, by recognising that a conscious vision of a whole cannot arise from things made of sub-parts (from our material brain), we conclude that consciousness is from something un-dividible; and recognising that a thing un-dividible can never die, we realise our own immortality and survival beyond material and bodily disintegration.
In exploring Consciousness, first we must distinguish from it a few entirely separate ideas which are often confused together into one.
In particular, we shall look at Intelligence, Reasonable Action, Awareness and Consciousness. When we realise what each of these are, we will then be able properly to explore our consciousness, and afterwards look at notions of Evolution.
People regularly confuse Intelligence with Consciousness. For example, people look at human development over millions of years, see our increasing brain size and intelligence, and then ask at which moment during this expansion we became conscious.
However it is clear that consciousness and intelligence are unrelated. Anyone who can think back far into childhood will realise we were just as conscious at age 2 as we are at 40. Though our intelligence, knowledge and wisdom, and just about everything else, has markedly changed between the two, being at an early age scarcely wiser than a monkey, yet, our vivid clarity of conscious experience of the world has remained entirely unchanged and constant. My own memories go back to 9 months old, and I was just as aware then as now: not more, nor less: but the same.
We could also tie you up today, put a black bag over your head, fill your ears with a din of noise and tickle you, and your intelligence and understanding would fall to zero amidst the dire chaos of experience - less than that of a rat - however your consciousness would be unchanged, quite the same: you would be conscious of noise and chaos. Similarly, people with Down's Syndrome and the like are just as conscious as you or I.
Thus, despite conventional assumptions, an increase or decrease in characteristics such as intelligence, does not give any indication of consciousness. Therefore there is simply no way of ascertaining when man became conscious: he may have been conscious when he was still a small monkey darting about the undergrowth, or a fish crawling out of the sea, or even a cell of jelly floating in the ocean. You cannot show if they are or are not conscious because, quite simply, you cannot tell if anything except yourself is conscious. Any statement of consciousness can only be made as a subjective statement of one's own inner world, which only the conscious being itself is qualified to know, whether or not it has the intelligence or knowledge to state it. There is no external objective test of consciousness that we know of or will likely ever know of.
All you can definitely say, by experiencing your own personal awareness, is that your own self is conscious. If you say other people are conscious, perhaps you are right, perhaps not. It is natural to assume they are. If you ask, they will say they are; but so might a robot. A human shrinks from pain, but so does a caterpillar. Does the caterpillar "feel" that pain? is it conscious? The fact is, if a person eats a strawberry, you have no idea what it tastes to them. You have, in a material world, no access to another's inner world. Outwardly, a conscious and a non-conconscious being may act the same way, but inwardly, only if our consciousness were of a nature transending material form and could see or had access to a greater Consciousness that transended material form and could intimate the answers, could we in any way know.
We are all familiar with Reasonable Action; it is when someone does something beneficial and purposeful, and we say, "that's reasonable". Superficially, you'd think performing a wise action is a sign of its consciousness. In reality, it is an indication that you, the observer, not it, the performer, are endowed with consciousness. As a result, trying to determine consciousness through looking at beneficial action, is of no more use than trying to gauge it through studying intelligence.
Let us look at some examples, that show this quite clearly.
Reasonable Action can be exhibited by computers; for instance, a computer can be programmed, or trained by example, to remove bruised apples from a conveyor belt, or to correct itself from falling over as it walks across the surface of the moon looking for rocks. An amoeba may turn around to go after a piece of food. This shows that reasonable action is quite happily performed by conventionally non-conscious entities.
Of course, someone conscious programmed or guided the robot to this purpose and nature selected (some might say under the conscious influence of the Spirit) the amoeba to work that way, but always you in your consciousness then watch it and see a purpose or benefit to the action, and so with a little thought, Reasonable Action can be seen as an indicator of the consciousness of you, the observer of the action, not the thing that performed it. From what was said, it may perhaps be that consciousness originates all things purposeful, like the programmer of the robot, without which there would be chaos and no meaning, but that question is currently beyond this analysis, as it would involve looking at how a conscious God or some such thing initiated all things and empowered human consciousness.
If the thing acting reasonably, sees its own purpose to its action, which may well be entirely different from yours, the observer, then it, too, is an observer of purpose in the same way, and can be well said to be conscious (although only it knows this).
The important thing to realise, is that Reasonable Action requires a conscious sense of concept and quality in order to distinguish reasonable action from unreasonable action, for without this, leaving bruised apples is just as reasonable as removing them, and falling over and breaking is as reasonable as staying steady and whole, because without worth and value, no thing is better than another, and nothing is therefore more reasonable than another.
Consider how, without a conscious beholder somewhere who feels beauty and value, a rose or nightingale has no beauty. If there is only human consciousness, then beauty only exists when a human looks, and ceases to exist exist when he looks away, and would disappear when the last human died. If there is a Conscious Spirit that sees all things, then beauty has an existence at all times, past and future. For it is the conscious beholder who possesses awareness of beauty, and an object, however beautiful it seems, is devoid of beauty without an observer. When you see a beautful rose, you are seeing the beauty within you.
Awareness can be appreciated when, looking through a window, you are clearly aware of the entire scene outside as a single unified experience, and then closing your eyes, you no longer see it. First you were aware (of the scene), and then you were not. You have not lost or diminished consciousness in any way by closing your eyes, consciousness just focussed somewhere else: your consciousness ceased to act upon the scene outside and simply trained itself upon an inner scene of your mind, breathing and hearbeat, which in a sense it was always doing. In a sense, you could say your consciousness had something to act upon, and then had nothing to interact with. Of course it actually had your hearbeat and breathing to interact with, but in the extreme case of consciousness actually having nothing to interact with, consciousness would exist but clearly have no experience - there would be no awareness. Consciousness possesses a potential for awareness which only comes about when it has something to be aware of. So we see, whilst awareness means there is consciousness, the opposite is not true, consciousness does not mean there is awareness.
As a useful comparison, think of the sun and its gravity. The sun has enormous gravity, and the planets and dust whirl in motion around it. If you remove the planets and material, the sun's gravity ceases to have any action. Yet its fundamental power still exists just as much as before, but without something to interact with, it has no expression or action, like an artist without a pen. Here gravity stands for consciousness, the planets and rocks are the things to be aware of, and motion is awareness. So, awareness is the expression of consciousness interacting with externalities. Gravity is, indeed, a mysterious thing. Matter is clumpy and divided, whereas the law of gravity is a mystery that is uniform across the entire universe, acting effortlessly as if, for it, the universe is a single point, much as the clumpy and divided world is for and in comparison to our consciousness which effortlessly sees a single unified vision rather than a meaningless jumble of splinters and fragments of colour, sound and shape. What enforces gravity (or the Law of nature) is an unknowable mystery, the whole universe is its object; and likewise, as we shall see, the cause of consciousness is a similar, great and unknowable law or reality whose nature and scope is beyond comprehension, and whose object in life includes the universe of the mind.
People generally confuse consciousness with awareness, and because awareness is connected to the world of forms (the material world), they then form mistaken views about consciousness. So for example, they will say they are conscious whilst they are awake, and lose consciousness during sleep; so they conclude consciousness arises from the brain, and therefore dies with its death. Let's consider and understand this common example.
If you consider every day of your year just gone by (or indeed your whole life), you will discover that, put together, you can maybe remember a few days' worth, if even that; and for your whole life, you can remember maybe a few months'. Does this mean during the whole of last year, and for your lifetime, you were unconscious almost the entirety of every day? of course not. You were quite conscious throughout those days, but only a little of it was retained in your memory, and when you look back there are no memories to experience, and most of your lifetime seems a blank as if it were skipped. It is the same when you awake from sleep. Most of your experiences are not stored in any memory, and when you awake all you see is a blank. Even things happening just a millisecond before, if they are not put into any memory, a millisecond later there is no trace left of them. For your consciousness experiences the forms available to it in the present, and during sleep it has some forms available to it, and in awakeness other forms, which involve only threadbare memories of most of your sleep and your wakeful past.
You are conscious during your entire sleep, of different things at different periods of sleep, sometimes the bright landscape of dreams, sometimes the subtle beingness of a person with eyes and senses closed; on closing your eyes, senses and memories, awareness changes, but not the power of consciousness.
So far we have looked at Intelligence, Reasonable Action, and Awareness, and found none of them in any way measure consciousness. What, then, can we say of Consciousness?
Suppose in a field, you form a line of two year olds, who have just learnt their alphabet. Each child holds up one letter of the alphabet, and there are occasional gaps in the line. The letters of the alphabet form a beautiful passage of poetry, and the gaps between children are spaces between individual words.
Each child can only see its own letter, and maybe one or two of its neighbour's; at any rate, the child cannot see enough letters to see even a word, certainly cannot see the whole passage, and lacks the comprehension to know what the words or passage mean. So even if you revolved all the letters so that each passed in turn through every child, the children would still not comprehend the poem, just an experience of a succession of letters, one replacing the last, and as each new letter came in they would forget the last.
The children cannot see the poetry, or even a part of it. It would be a bizarre thing to try to claim the "line" or any of the "words" could see the poetic passage: for the "line" is an abstract idea in the mind existing only in the mind of a (conscious) observer. Of the line, words and the children, only the children have any possibility of experiencing anything, and since they can only see their neightbour's letter, there is nothing, whether line, word or child, that can see or experience the poem or any meaningful part of it: a child experiencing its letter at one end of the line, does not help a child experiencing its letter at the other end.
Now the line in that story is the brain, and the children are its cells, and the poem is an everyday scene such as when you sit on a beach, its words are objects, and the letters are glints of colour. The brain is just a three-dimensional line, and each cell in the brain, like a child in the line, has an infinitesimal shard of information with no comprehension of the bigger picture. Just as the children have no experience of the poem, the cells have no experience of the awesome vision of the beach. And even if you were to channel all the information about the beach through a particular cell, it would not have the capacity to "see" the whole because it could not juxtapose the information in one moment of time and space. Much as the "line" of children cannot see the shakespeare and its poetry, so the "volume" of cells cannot see the beach, both "line" and "volume" being abstractions in the mind of an observer.
And now, too, each brain cell, is like a brain, with the information it holds being distributed across a myriad organelles and components, or even their components, so even the cell has no vision, any more than the "line" of children, or the "volume" of cells, and this is especially so if you want to imagine the cell as being more complex than science describes.
This destruction of vision into smaller and smaller elements continues until the fragment of information is held by something that is indivisible. Then that indivisible element has the potential to conceive that information.
It is clear from this, that nothing in the brain large or small has any awareness of the conscious vision you see and feel, for the simple reason that the brain is made of complex, divisible matter. The conscious vision you see, is conceived by a singularity that is able to bring together all information together in a single point of time and place. These qualities of divisibility and indivisibility are the same qualities of mortality and immortality, because mortality is the division of a complex structure, and immortality is the inability to do so. It is in the nature of all matter and all forms to be divisible, and whatever is immune to the process of division is beyond matter, just as we saw how the nature of the law of gravity is beyond matter, in so much as it is unaffected by the existence, reordering, or absence of matter.
Just as the only thing that can perceive the poem is a conscious observer that stands apart from the line and looks at its whole, so the only thing able to see the letters and words of information configured in the volume of cells we call the brain, is a singularity of consciousness that stands apart and perceives it from a distance.
Another helpful comparison, is to imagine a huge area of water pipes, covering the surface of a large planet. The water pipes increase and decrease their flow and are able to impinge upon their own behaviour in such a complex and intricate way, that they are able to compose poetry like shakespeare, written in a morse code of water flow. Like the children, no individual water pipe is conscious of the water flowing through it, no pipe is able to juxtapose the "entirety" of all flows so that it can be conscious of "the whole" poem it is processing. There is nothing about the system large or small, that has any consciousness whatsoever. They are just metal pipes. In a similar way, the brain with its nerves and neurons is incapable of consciousness. If the parts are not conscious - nerves or individual water pipes - then the whole will not become conscious just by increasing the number and complexity. A graveyard of 100 dead bodies does not become alive by increasing it to 10,000 dead bodies.
Even if the volume of brain cells, area of water pipes or line of children produce some unified field that create some kind of superposition of information, there's nothing particularly conscious about that, without some reality to experience that information. A chemical signalling pain in the brain cannot create the feeling of pain, any more than the most violent chemical reaction has any feeling. It all requires a conscious experiencer, and the only options are to conclude that all matter is dead, but there are conscious beings (of which we are some) able to experience the world; or that all matter is conscious - every atom, pebble, cell, flower, slug, rat, monkey, and human; or that along with individual conscious beings, a universal consciousness in all things is mediated by a universally conscious being (which we might call God or similar).
Do we see evidence we are a consciousness, separate from our body and unaffected by its disintegration? We see it quite clearly, when people "leave" their body, such as when they lose their attachment to their body on the hospital operating theatre, and at times show how they experience vividly events they could not guess in another place or in the future, and when their body awakes and they recover their attachment to the body, they describe those events, and find they are quite true. This is clearly impossible if consciousness is fixed and limited by the material world of the body and brain, but is entirely in accordance with ourselves being a singularity of consciousness separate from the body.
As a very simple example, recently my friend, having it turns out not done so for very many years, got out all her jewellery and bangles, spread them across her table, and spent the whole evening looking at them. Eventually, at the end of the night, she put all the jewellery away, but left all the bangles out till the morning. I had never imagined her having such things; but that very night, I dreamt she brought a large pile of jewellery and bangles to me at night, placed them down beside me, and in the dream I went to them in the morning, and there were just bangles remaining. It was such a vivid and powerful dream, I emailed it to her that morning, and she confirmed she had done so. It was so vivid I could still see all their colour, having a primary colour lilac, and a secondary green; when I asked her to tell me what colours, without any conferring the two colours she told me were found to be the very same.
On another occasion, I awoke with a vivid premonition of a particular person obtaining money by emptying some poor wretch's wallet. I spent all that morning waiting for this to happen, and in the afternoon as I was walking with her, she found £350 fallen in the street.
These are just a few of the many common examples that happen to us all in life, that show consciousness has a power to tear aside the constraints of the material world and see what it should not materially be able to see. In the literature, you will find far greater examples than these two, of consciousness transcending the material world
Now whilst it is helpful to discover that we are an immortal conscious "soul", this is not everything that is desireable, for we would also like it to be immortally conscious of beautiful things rather than with its eyes of beauty closed. To extend the metaphor, if the sun has nothing to act its gravity upon or shine its light upon, or if its gravity is coordinating chaos - it is far from ideal. We may be immortal, but other things determine whether we end up in a situation of the "heaven" of perceiving beauty, or the "hell" of experiencing chaos and separation from beauty.
An appropiate understanding of Consciousness in relation to our body, helps us understand the question of evolution.
Briefly, if consciousness is not some small, mortal part of the brain, but something separate and living, an immortal singularity experiencing the interaction of the divisible world of the body, then the evolution of the body is entirely separate from the evolution of consciousness, and Darwin's theory of material evolution is entirely coexistent with the Spiritual.
A good way of looking at it, would be to think of the union of consciousness and the brain - which we call mind - as a driver driving a car. The car has its own sequence of evolution; at one time it was a set of rolling logs on which stones were pulled by ropes; then a horse-drawn cart; a steam car; a Model T; and lately, the sleek machine we see today. But the driver, despite his intimate involvement with the car, has an entirely different and unconnected evolution; first he was an egg and sperm; then an embryo; a child; and lately, an adult. So when we see that our car, the human body, has passed through an evolution from atoms, to amoeba, to fish, to monkey and to human, it is entirely different from the unconnected evolution of the soul which began in the mysterious processes of the consciousness we term God, and proceeded thereon to develop and polish the mirror of its conscious existance. Of course there is a connection, that as the car gets better, so the driver becomes a better driver, and as the mirror evolves to be more perfect, the person looking in the mirror is able to perfect themself; and so as the human body and mind is perfected, as both a mirror and car for the soul, it helps the soul understand, reflect and improve.
A lamp in a room, set ablaze by the energy that flows through it, may well gaze in wonderment at the brightness of the room and say, "how wonderfully bright this room is! what beautiful colours!" not realising that it is, itself, the source of the light and the colours, the colours around being the differing reflections and absorptions of its own light.
Because the lamp is looking outward and cannot see itself, it is ignorant of its own reality, even though it feels its greatness surge within itself. It does not understand that the honour of the blueness of the wall goes not to the wall, but to itself, for the blue rays within the white light it shines out from its self, for which the wall is but a mirror.
Yet, more deeply, the true source of light within the lamp itself, is the mysterious power of electricity that flows into it.
In like fashion, we all look around and marvel at the beauty inherent in the world of arts, nature and philosophy, and yet because we are looking outward, like the lamp few perceive that the beauty we see is simply the beauty within ourself, ascribing to the outer world our own nature. Each of us is a lamp of beauty that illuminates the room of the world with beauty, and this occurs through our subsistance on the electricity of the spiritual energy that flows into the lamp of our conscious reality.
How many times have you heard someone express the notion, that this world is all there is, but if they witnessed a miracle that was so clear and in their face, their materialism would be shattered and they would turn to a spiritual approach. That miracle is, indeed, so clear and in their face, that they cannot see it, because they are it, looking all around at everything except themself. For they, as consciousness, are themselves - each one of us - that miracle, a sign of signs, far greater than a thousand virgin births or the creation of a million material universes.