Category Archives: Conscious Universe

The Theory of the Conscious Universe: The Roots

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Featuring: A Movie in Your Mind

Originally posted July 11,2011

The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014 .  

An area in which the Human Effectiveness Institute focuses is the interface between psychology and physics. The ultimate nature of reality is what all of us assume physics is studying, while the nature of mind is what psychology studies.

However, picture a future in which psychology reaches what we might call the complete circumnavigation of the mind. Everything about human psychology is understood, and animal psyk too. Psychoanalysts working with the new perfect model have the same success rate as today’s hip replacements, and in about the same turnaround time. People are pretty much always happy, except for short lapses so as not to forget what the other emotions feel like, or lose their functionality through disuse. Got that envisioned?

Okay, we are together living in that future world and we have all read the popularizations of the ultimate psychology. We get it, it makes our lives work better, we are proud that the human race has achieved such an accomplishment.

Then, in this sci-fi movie we are playing in our minds, a problem arises: physics arrives at the same place as psychology. Physics, too, explains everything in its field. We know how the Big Bang happened and why. We know why there is a universe at all. Our picture leaves nothing out, everything is solved. We finally solve the 400 BC conundrum of which came first, matter or mind.

The problem is this: the physics picture totally overturns the psychology picture.

Then what do we do?

Obviously, at that point the hero/ine gets to work and we see time cuts of the hard work it takes (movies are great at condensing that part) and – voila! The old theory is ingeniously twisted 90 degrees and it clicks perfectly with the new model, and now the population is not always just happy, the entire population rises to the level of genius, is always in flow state, art flourishes and enriches culture, each individual becomes fully realized in all good potentials inherent at birth, the awe and magic of life is restored and never again forgotten even for a moment, psychic and/or telepathic abilities bloom gradually in everyone, and – most important of all – each individual is in total fusion with God.

Yes I said the dread word that causes materialism-philosopher-scientists (MPS) to stop reading. You see scientists have always been philosophers too. We have always had a segment of MPS and another segment of idealism-philosopher-scientists (IPS). Daniel Goleman or David Brooks might well write a book about the relative contributions to science of MPS versus IPS scientists – it would make fascinating reading. Newton of course was IPS. Quite capable of debating fine points of IPS with Leibniz, another idealist philosopher of the time who was a mathematician rather than scientist (Newton was all of these things). Mathematicians and scientists have always produced greater science by working together, and probably greater mathematics too.

The word “God” has meaning to IPS but causes shutdown to MPS. My guess is that those MPS still reading to this point are only reading so as to refute whatever my point might be in all this.

Before I get to the point, let’s stop for a moment to make a fix that has been long in coming. Roughly 2500 years overdue. The term of art “Idealism” when used in juxtaposition with “Materialism” is a confusing misnomer since the word “Idealism” has other meanings used far more frequently. Time to change the term, so let’s first understand where it came from. It was Plato.

Plato of course had heard similar thoughts and was putting them together more concisely and less mystically so everyone could understand them. Qabala contains similar thoughts, for example, and everything thinkable exists somewhere in the tradition of India, captured in written language since the Vedas.

The Idea is that there are multiple levels of reality. In the Absolute Plane of Reality, Ideas exist. They are the perfect embodiment of themselves. The Ideal Chair is the most often used example in philosophy courses –that’s sure getting old. “Ideal” in the sense of “Idea” and also in the sense of “Perfect Embodiment” and “Archetype”.

At any rate, there are these Ideas floating around in the realest plane of reality, and down here on these lower planes (Qabala has four levels, some Indian texts also, but other interpretations have infinite levels – Qabala calls this Jacob’s Ladder) we have shadow imitations of those Ideal Ideas, imperfect replicas intermixing all the Ideas in sort of a stew.

Here on Earth we exist in the lowest of the planes in hard material reality, sometimes called the Visible World. To Plato we are as if in a cave watching shadows on a wall cast by something outside the cave we cannot see.

Without attaching to the history of the term, I’ve laid it out here to show the trail. This is how the great debate got to be called “Materialism versus Idealism”.

What instead should it be called? The debate is trying to solve the question of which came first, mind or matter — which of these is the actual basis of reality, the ultimate quantum plane from which the universe arises.

About 400 years ago, by the way, Hume and Berkeley, Leibniz and Spinoza and Kant and many others drove a period of philosophy where mind came first, before matter.

Today the view that is baked into the average person including scientists is that matter is the supreme substance of the universe. Ironically, the most far-out physicists are now heading back in the other direction toward mind or an intermixture, and gradually the culture is slowly following them. This is not discussed philosophically by the average person, who may nevertheless detect a drift back into what s/he would call a spiritual direction.

We would prefer that the debate be called “Materialism vs. Mindism” or “Materialism vs. Consciousness as Prime”. That’s what it always has been about. The “Mind Came First” position in this debate does not necessarily have to be locked into Plato’s multiple-levels theory, as there are many theories that could be built around the “Mind Came First” position.

“But how could that possibly be?” one thinks, still in the current culture that assumes materialism without even knowing that one is doing so.

After all, Carl Sagan told hundreds of millions of viewers that after the Big Bang occurred due to forces we do not yet comprehend, bits of matter started to assemble due to electromagnetic forces we do understand. At a certain point they formed the Replicator molecule – akin to viruses – robotical pseudo-life. And then just impelled by these random collisions of electromagnetic forces, this process continued to evolve and build itself up until consciousness emerged.

We all mostly bought it, didn’t we? I must confess I didn’t – it seemed like random waves on a beach could build beautiful sand castles if I just sat around for a googletillion years. I still can’t convince my gut of this.

So what is this Theory of the Conscious Universe I was supposed to talk about? Please excuse the tease, but I promised I would lay out the roots here. Now that I’ve established the roots, in the next postings I will get on to the theory.

Best to all,

Bill

I would like to invite you to a free ARF webinar I am presenting next week on April 18. A featured section will propose standards for ethical use of psychological data.

Three Books with the Same Name

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In April, 2014 my book You Are The Universe: Imagine That was published, but I held back from marketing it, awaiting a feeling of the right time. The Universe obviously saw no reason to wait to have Its coming-out party, thus stimulating the re-recognition among its many self-parts of Its One-Selfness.You Are the Universe by Bill Harvey

So this year the dean of positive nonfiction writers Deepak Chopra and leading light in physics Menas Kafatos published their version: You Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why it Matters.

I discovered that Masami Saionji also published You Are the Universe in print in 2004 and as an ebook in 2014. (For that matter, my You Are The Universe came out to friends as The Theory of the Conscious Universe in 1976.)

These are three great books about exactly the same point. The same point that is made by all the original source books (e.g. the Vedas, Torah, I Ching, et al) from which modern religious texts have drawn. Underlying the material appearances is one consciousness at play. When a being becomes established in this perspective he or she enjoys life to the fullest, and is a fount of constructive encouragement to others. Helping as many people as possible to get into this headspace is what motivates writers such as ourselves to write and disseminate books like these.

It’s of course personally fascinating to me, to compare what my esteemed colleagues (what an honor to feel like in some way I’m in this group!) and I did differently in approaching delivery of the same message.

My friend the genius Chuck Young, inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking: Fast and Slow, analyzes and measures advertising based on its ability to get into three different long-term memory systems: thinking, feeling, and procedural. Thinking and feeling are processed in the cortex while procedural is processed in the cerebellum. The body can go through its motions by second nature even without a cortex.

Chuck might see my version of You Are The Universe (especially with its companion volume Mind Magic) as more procedural than the other two. Both of my nonfiction books are aimed at getting people to try things themselves and observe what happens, in their actual lives.

In a workshop with top officers of the U.S. military, I guided a meditation aimed at erasing all assumptions and using the senses to focus on what the individual was actually experiencing, for many minutes of silence. Trying to come at that experience as if for the first time, with no prejudgments, and observing without interpretation or naming. This is the shift one must make from the subconsciously-assumed materialism that is baked into us, in order to begin to realize that all we know exists for certain is our own consciousness. Making that shift based only on spiritual advice, or scientific theory/experimental findings, is very difficult. That’s why my version of YATU has mind experiments (and the companion volume is all mind experiments).

Another thing is different about my version. It explains in the lens of science exactly how conscious experience relates to the world of matter, in a way that anyone can understand and picture without the need for understanding advanced mathematics.

I recommend reading all three books, each comes at it from a different pov, and that itself is interesting. Also these three books with the same name are talking about the most important thing in life: What does it all mean?

When mainstream science gets the point of what we are saying in these books, it will be a bigger scientific renaissance than the world has seen.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, In Terms of ROI at Media Village, Myers new site. Here is the link to my latest post.

Humanists May Not Be Using All of Their Powers

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Volume 3, Issue 16

Humanism is a wonderful thing. As a teenager I came to the conclusion that people’s decisions reflect not only pragmatism and ethics but also one’s aesthetics. Based on all three sets of criteria, pragmatic (getting the job done), ethical (doing so with least harm and most gain to all), and aesthetic (delectation of the beauty of the solution as it unfolds), I loved Humanism.

I was still an atheist and worshipper of science at that point. The realization at age 12 that “I am God and so is everybody else” was still an unassimilated revelation in my mind, not integrated with everything else in there. (The word “God” turns a surprising number of people off and so I typically say “Universe” instead.) I had experienced the Conscious Universe but could not explain it logically to myself. Humanism was therefore to me the highest philosophy on the planet. I still love Humanism, but now see that the Conscious Universe perspective gives me more ability to achieve the aims of Humanism.

With the Conscious Universe, one is open to get creative solution ideas from events around oneself that would have no special meaning to a Humanist not open to the Conscious Universe. It is as if the Universe is trying to clue you into something. It goes right past you unless you are open to the possibility. I call this Noia, the suspicion that the universe is out to benefit you. This word popped into my head in the mid-70s and I’ve been using it ever since. In 2005 Rob Brezsny came out with a book Pronoia about the same idea.

Openness to the Noia-type event reveals that synchronicity is actually happening a heck of a lot more to each of us that we notice in our pre-Noia state. Noia is not the totality of why the Conscious Universe tends to lift time spent in Flow more than Humanism does. Noia is a subset of the use of intuition. Intuition is actually ESP (Extra Sensory Perception). Carl Jung listed intuition as one of the four functions of consciousness (intellect, feelings, and perception being the other three). To science, intuition is the sudden synthesis of an idea in our mind without the intervening steps that intellect would take, and as such the scientific definition does not link intuition to ESP. However, my sense is that the continuum of intuition starts at the lower end in the subconscious/autonomic mind simply putting ideas together for us, and moves up into drawing information from outside the local mind we call our own. The upper end of intuition is blocked if one’s worldview does not allow for it, and this is why the Conscious Universe is a useful theory linked to decision making.

Again, the Conscious Universe is put forth not only as a theory explaining the world including consciousness, the paranormal and Quantum Mechanics, but mainly as a useful lens for staying observant of second-to-second experience. Unlike religion there is no command to believe based on faith or authority or tradition. Instead the idea is to keep an open mind and not to lock oneself into Material Accidentalism, because if the Universe is Conscious (which, contrary to popular belief, Science has not ruled out) one is limiting one’s powers unnecessarily by taking a fixed action stance based on what turns out to be, ironically, faith in an anti-religion religion. Some have dubbed this anti-religion “scientism”, the layman’s mistaken belief that science has ruled out the possibility of an intelligence behind the universe (I usually refer to this as Materialist Accidentalism) — which by definition is a faith-based belief since there is no proof for its position.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

Humanism and the Conscious Universe: Impacts on Decision Making

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Volume 3, Issue 15

In our last post we began to clarify the main themes of this blog and their inter-relationships. Ultimately our purpose is to help you make better decisions and to spend more time in the more effective states of consciousness where better decision making happens automatically. How does our Theory of the Conscious Universe help you achieve that?

Motivations are the drivers of all decisions. You don’t know what decision to make until you have a goal, objective, desired end state, or whatever name you wish to put on it. Your view of reality itself is what shapes your motivations. Therein lays the primal linkage between a worldview and decision making.

On the surface, the motivations are similar between two individuals, one of whom is a dedicated Humanist, and one of whom lives and experiences the Conscious Universe. Both have the highest ethical standards as regards human beings. Both are capable of holding the nose of their ethics and pulling the trigger on a Hitler or Bin Laden. So why not leave Humanists as they are, and leave out the idea of a Conscious Universe? Would that not be a more Occam’s Razor elegant solution to improving decision making?

After all, this Conscious Universe stuff is sure to turn some people off, seeming to be religion. Religious people who feel brand exclusivity for their beliefs are most certainly going to be wary of our theory. So why create barriers to the acceptance of the Human Effectiveness Institute toolware (improving decision making, optimizing consciousness, and enabling Observer state and the Zone or Flow state) that can be of great benefit to everyone (regardless of their religious beliefs)?

Our theory of the Conscious Universe is not religion, by the way, as it does not extol faith but is instead predictive and testable, i.e. a scientific theory that we are all one software-driven entity. Our recommendation is to believe nothing but to keep one’s mind open to everything not ruled out by science.

Let’s face it: it’s already pretty bold, without sufficient academic credentials (mere degree in philosophy, lifetime of applied social science i.e. media research), to put forth a theory that explains the ego as a sub-sentience that takes over the self, and to offer toolware that enables the real self to take back over, creating a state of Holosentience where the whole self is working together in the higher states of consciousness, Observer state and ultimately Flow state. This is the basis for our nonprofit work in improving decision making. Interestingly, the toolware appears to work, according to letters from more than 2000 Mind Magic readers.

It is even more daring to claim that a condition of Acceleritis has existed since cave paintings and written language caused a shift 6000 years ago into Piaget’s Formal Operational level for the human race. Inventiveness has run wild, causing information overload defined as the number of question-producing sensory impressions (proposed metric: P300 waves received by the average human per day.

Why then not leave it at that rather than go further and expound a theory of reality? Do we know no bounds?

There are two reasons why it’s worth opening Pandora’s Box. One is that in the hunt for truth, one cannot be shy. If a person stumbles upon something that seems worth saying, it should be said, and not held back out of timidity. It’s better to be shown that one is wrong than to choke back one’s deepest intuitions.

The other reason is purely practical.  We are attempting to improve decision making in a world that is racing through a thicket of complexity. The fact is, the Humanist and one who is consciously living in the Conscious Universe do not act identically in all circumstances. There is for one thing a huge gap in the way they respectively make use of their intuition or hunches — both being the same thing. More on this in our next post.

Best to all,

Bill

 

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.