Tag Archives: Self

Because the Universe Is Conscious, Everything Happens for a Reason that Makes Sense to Consciousness

6 Replies

Originally posted on December 29, 2011.

We suspect this is what Einstein really meant in his famous quote “God does not play dice with the Universe.”

Think about it for a minute. If you’ve been reading these posts you know what I am saying is that the universe is one infinite field of consciousness at play. The One has sent out parts of Itself to separately experience for a time — that’s us. Everything in the universe is made out of The One’s consciousness. And therefore each part itself is conscious, living The One’s experience through that part’s senses — so looking out our eyes is not who we thought was “me” but actually “ME”.

We sense our experience as being separate because there is a memory plug. It is temporary. When the expeditionary self is fit to be taken back into the Selfhood of The One, that part is re-identified by The One as a personality aspect. There is no longer a memory plug, and in the reabsorption the traveler has a sudden flashback to before he/she was the person he/she knows. Now he/she sees all the way back to being The One, and everything else that happened along the way before the plug was activated.

The One Self in this way endlessly bootstraps itself into ever higher levels of wisdom and understanding, always becoming more than Itself again and again. The game in itself is so much fun — and the only thing to do under the circumstances — that it needs no rationalization.

If The One had not N-furcated Itself into all of us, all of the Universe, it would have been an eternity of boredom.

If The One had not implanted the temporary memory plugs in Itself when out here on walkabout, the fun would be greatly reduced. The One in any creature role would not make mistakes if it were not for the memory plug. And there would be no drama for the tentacle-self as it could not feel any sort of dramatic feelings, knowing it is invulnerable to any lasting harm. Good thing we all don’t know that, so we can have these huge emotional swings up and down all the time. Let’s face it: we actually enjoy them. Life would be dull without them. But it’s hard to realize this when one’s perspective has shrunken to a dwarfed vision of oneself, due to Acceleritis overcoming our natural abilities to rise above our challenges and face them with nobility and grace. The One who is also looking out our eyes — in fact The One is the only being that is looking out, we are that Being — is here to enjoy all this. We form an assumed separate identity that I call the Robot, and the Robot is in defensive mode not enjoyment mode. The Robot’s defensive mode attracts all kinds of trouble to itself.

A fantastic theory, you will observe. Yes, the most fantastic I’ve ever heard. However, I hypothesize it is what is really happening here.

It is logically deduced from certain experiences I have had, experiences all of us have had, that require more explanation than materialist science (even with the latest God Particle) has offered to date. Despite these ideas having sprung as speculation intensely felt to be truth, there is now also scientific validation for the key idea. The most seminal leader of the new physics, John Wheeler, postulates that consciousness and information are the fundamental stuff out of which the universe is made. This substantially validates the core of my theory, and with the further extrapolations that I’ve shown in the Theory of the Conscious Universe (TOTCU)*, everything else in my theory is a logical deduction from Wheeler’s basic statements. For example, I postulate that a conscious being alone in space will create something to occupy His/Her attention and capacity for love. (Capitals seem appropriate for the Only Being in a postulated universe.)

And its predictions work in my life. This has been the strangest part. And the most appreciated.

So, given this is my picture of the universe, what I call the Theory of the Conscious Universe, what does this have to do with the title of this piece, which claims that events make sense on some larger scale. Surely the reader would challenge me to prove that massive suffering is supposed to happen, in Voltaire’s/Candide’s farcical manner.

Alas, The One is the one who receives all that suffering. There is no separate self. There is only The One. You and I think we are separate selves because of the memory plug. To The One these sufferings are drama, because there is no way they can hurt The One except in terms of compassion — ah, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare had Hamlet say of dreams — for each of our lives is as one dream to The One. Our experience offers positive proof that The One can “take it” in terms of our suffering. At the same time, following logical deduction from what is now Wheelerian science, The One has two reasons to want to reduce suffering:

  1. It is not fun for those of us down here, and He/She is the one having these sufferings in a dream — so therefore it is not fun for The One in that dream.
  2. The One is compassionate. Even if someone else were suffering, The One would want to help that being — if there were any other beings — which there are not. The prime realization of intuition is ultimately that there is only One of us. But even if there were a true Outsider — as in the Zoroastrian/Manichean belief — The One would not want that being to suffer either. Why do we say this? Through our own experience of direct intuition of The One. The Flow State makes this direct intuition not only possible but probable.

The problem that causes all suffering is that Acceleritis™ blocks Flow State. This is what makes it probable that we will not have functional intuition, one of Jung’s four behaviors/functions of consciousness (the others being perception, cognition, and feelings; he saw memory as being a subset of each). This is a temporary pandemic aberration due to the slowness of functional integration of the new brain in relation to its physical evolution. The prefrontal cortex and cortex are fully formed but only slowly making ground in not being dominated by the older parts of the brain where feelings, perceptions, memories, and instincts (hereditary intuitions, intuitions that made it onto the genes) are mediated.

As Shakespeare and Milton knew hundreds of years ago, free will is what explains suffering. You cannot have free will without mistakes, and suffering comes along with mistakes.

The One can either play with dumb dolls from the outside, or can have this universe, where S/He plays the dolls from the inside and really believes s/he is the doll during the playtime. You and I are among the many dolls. The One has avatars in so many forms that the word “doll” is inappropriate.

What more fun could you have as The One?

It’s lonely and boring out there as a dimensionless sentient point source.

You can, sure, use up a few quintillion years just thinking, but after that you want to do something! You want some company. You have superpowered imagination and so you know you could have feelings — but this would require you to have goals that can be helped and thwarted (see earlier post that establishes there are no feelings without motivations).

You decide it would be great to have feelings! But that would mean you actually have to want something, which means you cannot be allowed to remember who you are or you would never want anything.

So humor me for a moment — if this is the universe as it really is, of which  each of us is a rather important part in the cosmic sense — this means there is an unseen and important audience watching our life like a movie —from the “inside” as well as from the “outside”.

Everything that happens, in order to be important to The One, must have deeper meanings, revelations that our explorer-pod of Self needs in order to evolve back toward union with the original Self.

All it takes is a stolen few moments in time and imagination to find reasons why something that is happening today, had to happen. Imagination allows us to see that there could be a worse future if this bad event did not happen now, that a much worse event could happen in the future, which might be prevented now that we have this case to teach us.

As an experiment, we propose that you test this in your own life. Look at the events you wish had not happened that occurred — recently or long ago. Without committing to believing anything, allow yourself to imagine an explanation based on this lens of preventing a worse harm in the future. See if there is any applicability and what action decisions you might make to arm you for recurrence of similar challenges.

If you begin to look at the happenings moment to moment in your own life through this lens, you will in all likelihood have a similar experience — things will make more sense, and you can find solutions faster. You see the problem from the cosmic point of view. You understand better what is happening. You see what has to be done and as you do it, things go well.

After this happens again and again you will start to entertain the possibility that these theories explain what’s actually happening in and around Us.

My best to all,

Bill

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

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Read my latest post.

Make the Best Use of your Fine Brain

2 Replies

Originally posted October 20, 2011

Even Bill Gates could not afford to buy this supercomputer. That is, if we could make one. The more science discovers what our brain can do, the more respect one has to have for the “random forces” that supposedly “collided” to make this brain.

On the other hand, those forces might not have been random, and may have been far smarter even than this fine brain you and I have.

As the ancient texts of India, all religions and esoteric schools, Jung and many others have postulated, we all appear to be connected somehow. Perhaps where we are all connected is the sum of everything, itself a brain made out of energy, manifesting to our senses as a three-dimensional material universe. But perhaps if our senses were cleansed of cultural conditioning, they might be as remarkable as our brain is, in the more complete universe they might then show us.

Although our cultural perceptual filters keep us from noticing, our fine brain gives us foreknowledge of certain events. Recently replicated experiments have shown that samples of college students, and occasionally other/broader population samples, can guess what the next image on a screen is going to be, even though that image is randomly generated. In other words, nobody can know in advance what that next image is going to be, not even the computer which is selecting the image, were that computer self-aware, even it wouldn’t be able to know which image is going to pop up next.

Typically a choice of perhaps five classes of images is offered, and the subject has the task of guessing which of the five categories the image is going to be in. If the guesses were entirely random, studies like this would show that the average subject is right 20% of the time, in the six-figure sample sizes now cumulated for this kind of research. Instead of 20% right guesses the average is 21-22% in the typical study, and with certain population segments such as meditators and monks the levels go higher.

Read Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe (yes he came up with the same phrase as I use in The Theory of The Conscious Universe) for science’s current tallies of sample sizes, numbers of studies, and exact odds against the results being a result of chance, for the main classes of ESP — telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and telekinesis. In short, the evidence is in and the odds of these phenomena being explainable by chance is in the millions to one and sometimes higher. Major universities are involved in this research, as well as the military.

You too have these powers. But you probably ignore them all too often, goofing when you knew an instant ahead not to do a certain thing but ignored the hunch, and thus goofed.

Meditation, contemplation, and any other form of focusing the mind appear to be associated with success rates across the studies higher than the 21-22% average.

Some of the techniques in my book are gamelike. For example, here are some ways to enjoyably get the highest performance out of your fine brain, not only in terms of getting a lot more out of your intuition as we have just been discussing, but in every area of your functioning — intuition, intellect, feeling and perception (Jung).

It’s Always a Good Time for a Mind Cleanse

When you have nothing else to do, enjoy an interesting mind cleanse.

Give your self a report (I know “yourself” is one word, but you look at it differently when it’s two words.) How are you feeling? Everything great? Any complaints? Good. The fun is in the complaints. That’s where it’s interesting, and we can use the fine brain for its supreme problem-solving prowess.

Start to enjoy the way you no longer waste time on your supercomputer. You appreciate the great feats of which it’s capable therefore you wouldn’t think to burn minutes of its time in simple whining, playing old tapes, running on unconscious autopilot rather than the conscious Flow state kind, or whatever else diminishes the functioning of your fine brain.

It aids the focus to have paper and pen/cil, feeling free to draw or write whatever one feels like without having to make it neat or to conform to any rules whatsoever.

Sometimes you see your self drawing schematic diagrams with arrows and circles to depict some phenomenon that you would rather not have in your life. Let your self go, knock your self out — you will definitely learn something practical out of contemplating whatever is going down on paper or just flowing through your head. Pay close attention as if you were a detective studying someone else, not your self, someone you had never seen before — look with new eyes, willing to strip away all the old rhetoric about your self and opening your mind to reconsider everything — no buttons locked down on the keyboard.

Another thing that will happen is that you will start making a list. This is when there are so many things going round and round in your head they just are dying to leap through the ink onto the paper, so you let them. You may see a mix of relationship challenges and shopping lists. That’s okay, all of them have some level of importance in cleansing your mind. Just when they stop flowing freely for a minute, put priority numbers next to them and eventually you will have it as a list in your computer that will be in priority order, and probably in categories to keep the shopping lists out of the life changing hypotheses.

Go into it with the conviction that there are always solutions — even if you are acting to some degree, do it experimentally to see what the true results are in your case. Your fine brain got you into this, it can get you out of it.

On the other hand, also leave open the possibility that this thing you are trying to get to stop happening in your life, make believe for a few minutes that you could get to like it if you looked at it differently and performed differently when it is happening, and that it might be happening for a good reason — perhaps you even caused it by something that you wanted.

Look at the situation from as many points of view as possible, keeping an open mind.

Recognize your own powers without exaggerating them. How can you use whatever control you do have over the situation to gently nudge it a step at a time into the comfortable sustainable zone?

You don’t have to solve every challenge in one sitting. Just keep creatively attacking your list with strong intention and solution orientation every day — glance at yesterday’s list and then put it out of your mind. Go do something else until you feel a flow of ideas and then if possible get writing implements and seal your self off from any possible interruption to the extent that you can do so even for a very short time — take a biobreak if necessary to escape from the world for a few minutes.

Today’s flow of ideas might or might not have anything to do with yesterday’s list. If you find your self impatient for instant dramatic solutions, add that subject to the list. The highest part of you knows intuitively that dramatic sudden improvements are rare, and that some lower part of you is being childish. The goal is to move your center to the highest part of you at all times.

Let’s take the happy assumption that you, my special friends to whom I send this weekly missive, already know all this and therefore you don’t have anything to complain about. These same mind techniques apply to you too, because you have a purpose in life, currently expressed as a job (or sideline), in which these techniques of focusing make you more effective and give you more pleasure while you creatively make a success out of your business/profession, volunteer work, parenting, lovegiving, caregiving work, or other life activity.

In that sphere, the same sense of solution orientation applies just as strongly. Most companies and the people in them, and most other teams as well, spend too much time in problem definition, which is not as much fun as shifting more time to solving the problems (which is of course also more productive). Solving problems is fun. When they are not your own problems it is even more fun.

I was a consultant for many years. It was tremendously enjoyable. Always being creative about someone else’s problems — and even getting paid for it! However you do it, solving problems is fun. Because of Acceleritis™, we often have to remember to enjoy it. We get sucked into “our problems” like a horror movie, as if morbidly fascinated, and then hypnotized into taking it all too seriously, getting too attached to certain outcomes, generating that unhealthy and torturous thing called negative emotions.

As a consultant and in whatever position you’re in professionally, your fine brain yields the best results if you “think about the client’s whole business, not just the one department he/she wants your help on.” Broaden your perspective as much as possible while focusing all of your attention on it. As you get better at this, singlepointedness comes easily and naturally to you, words in the mind come infrequently and this speeds up the flow of ideas as you see in your mind’s eye fleeting images that race by and change much faster than you could explain the logic to your self by use of words in the mind.

It’s in this wordless observer state that you’re likely to experiences periods of Flow state. In these higher states that Accelertitis suppresses, hunches are far easier to pay attention to, because the Acceleritis-driven words in the mind no longer distract attention from the subtle and often fleeting appearance of a hunch in the mind. I use the word “fleeting” repeatedly here because it is a genuine characteristic of the phenomenon. Hunches and Flow state ideas both come at speeds that in any other state you would have an impossible time keeping up with. This suggests they are probably always there — even in EOP — except they are drowned out from attention by being too subtle for the grosser state you are in when in EOP.

Another key point of these techniques is prioritization, mentioned briefly above and deserving of more emphasis. You cannot be singlepointed if you are distracted knowing you might not be working your fine brain on the optimal thing at the moment. So always know the optimal sequence based on how much of a positive difference you can make in the world at any given point in time. You might be seen as a person who takes a lot of bio breaks, but there are worse things. 🙂

Best to all,

Bill

What is Consciousness made out of?

1 Reply

Originally posted August 4, 2011

This may seem like an academic question yet it leads directly to the meaning of life. Who among us has not pondered the meaning of life at one time or another?

We know consciousness is real, we know it exists. As René Descartes said, “Je pense, donc je suis” — I think, therefore I exist — meaning that you dear reader know something exists because you are experiencing something right now. Rene might have said “something is being experienced, that is what can be stated with certainty”.

In fact nothing can actually be stated with such great certainty except that consciousness — that which experiences — exists.

So what is this stuff that exists? You and I both experience It.

It is the weirdest stuff around. Everything else is easier for our minds (consciousness itself) to grasp. That too is weird — consciousness finds itself weirder than everything else that it experiences, at least among the scientists who have dodged this question while ironically basing everything else in their cosmology upon the observer — which is the same “Self”/”Consciousness” that science has avoided investigating more deeply.

Matter, energy, time and space seem perfectly normal and reasonable to us. Those are names that we put on aspects of what we experience. Names seem normal and reasonable too. Just not consciousness — it is so ineffable, so hard to grasp, to even think about.

Scientists either avoid the subject entirely or else try to reduce consciousness to events in the brain. The late great physicist Evan Harris Walker in his book The Physics of Consciousness brilliantly posited that consciousness emerges from quantum effects at the synapses of the brain. This however has nothing to do with the experience of consciousness. It is the experience itself that we are interested in, not in how we might explain away these experiences by relating them to physical events. The latter explanations beg the question of which came first — i.e. consciousness could have created the brain rather than vice versa — and although we are culturally biased to consider that sequence absurd, there is no scientific evidence either way. It would be the definition of unscientific to take any position under those circumstances.

Those locked into cultural first assumptions are by definition unable to see past those assumptions or to even see that those assumptions exist.

Try this if you will: focus your mind on the experience of consciousness for a moment. What is it?

To ask what consciousness is made of is itself evidence of our predisposition to assume that substance — matter or energy — is the substrate of the universe, so that everything in the universe must be made out of either matter or energy. This is just a bias.

But let’s play along with that bias for awhile. Is consciousness an energy? Okay, if so, then what is energy? Simply saying that energy is a force or a force field is just replacing one name with another — it does not tell us anything, it adds no new information — we are just playing with words.

Today scientists relate to energy in terms of waves radiating from a source. That itself is an ancient metaphor to waves on the ocean. Scientists assumed for a long time (some still do today) that waves must be waves in something. In Newton’s time the term aether (“ether”) was the stuff the waves were waving. By Einstein’s time and our own the concept of an aether has become passé. Today we are more comfortable thinking that things reduce ultimately to wavicles — things that have both a wave and a particle aspect depending on the choice of instruments and experimental conditions the observer chooses to set up.

Do you begin to see The Great Circular Argument going on here? Really the modeling of “what is” falls back on the way we as humans perceive the world and the ultimate categories we place as contexts around everything else — the way we perceive time and space — the apparent hardness of matter — which we now know is actually the mutual repulsion going on in electromagnetic and nuclear energies at subatomic levels. There is no hardness, it is a subjective readout our brains feed to our consciousness. We are trapped in Plato’s cave, making up possible stories about what is really out there. But what is in here?

The Theory of the Conscious Universe* postulates that everything in the universe reduces to neither matter nor energy, but to INFORMATION. But then what is information?

The clue comes from deconstructing the word into its parts: IN…FORMATION — information is a pattern — a formation. Any pattern is information — even randomness. Since information exists in the form rather than requiring a substance — form and substance being an ancient division of aspects of things going back at least as far as the Vedas — information can exist even in something that is substance-less.

In fact we see this every day in our computers — which contain and send and receive and process information — but that information does not have a concrete substance — it exists when stored as energy/nothingness, as both charge and non-charge, representing zeroes and ones. The nothingness (the zeroes) are as much information as the 1’s (electric charges).

What then is consciousness? It is the Self — the capacity to experience — that which experiences — and the experiences are information received by the consciousness or Self. The information appears to us to be coming from something that has independent existence outside the Self. It appears that hard and/or wet and/or gaseous objects out there are encoded as electromagnetic signals that strike our visual sense organs which then encode them as electrical pulses in our brain — or that strike our apparent body where they are converted to electrical pulses we call touch — or as compactions and expansions of air that cause pressure against our auditory sense organs where again they are converted to electrical pulses in our brain — or as interactions with our taste and smell organs, also winding up as electrical pulses in our brain.

But all of this could actually be taking place in our Self. There might be nothing out there because there might not be an “out there”. Our experience would be the same.

One way or the other, we can definitively state now two things: the Self exists — the Experiencer — and information exists, for this is what gives variation to what we experience. Both the Self and information exist in consciousness — this much can be stated as fact. The rest is supposition.

But why am I capitalizing Self? The answer in our next posting — our response to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”

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

All the best,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Read my latest post.

Maximizing the Emotional Fullness of Life

Leave a reply

Originally posted July 28, 2011

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

Why I am writing about this subject — The Theory of The Conscious Universe?

To explain let me go back a few thousand years to the earliest philosophers — folks like Thales and Epictetus, Socrates and the many other earliest thinkers at the dawn of written language.

Philosophy itself means the love of knowing. “Knowing” itself was one of the first subjects of philosophy — philosophers asked “what is knowing?” and “how is it possible that knowing can exist?” This sub-field of philosophy is called epistemology, as you may know.

Significantly, the root of the word “knowing” is “to see” — you may recall that in an earlier post I pointed out that being primates whose dominant sense is sight, we humans put seeing on a higher pedestal than our other four physical senses.

To me the two most important words that explain why philosophy exists are “wonder” and “awe”. These primal feelings/intuitions are the driver of philosophy, and it was philosophy that gave rise to art and culture, science and technology, morality and religion. First we had those feelings, then intuitions arose to guide us in the right direction to realize unspoken questions and to figure out the best ways of trying to seek answers. Without those feelings where would we be today? Perhaps still in trees.

Growing up I was unwittingly recapitulating the race’s ontogeny — feeling those feelings and being led through the same kinds of intuitions the early philosophers had, even before I could read such works and discover that others had been there long before me.

Freud called these feelings “the oceanic experience” (highly recommended reading: Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents). He postulated that religion came from this sense of something larger than ourselves. Remarkably, there may be nothing larger than our Self, if The Theory of The Conscious Universe is the right explanation of the meaning of life. Our Self may be the only thing that actually exists, and the cause of everything that we experience. In fact this idea is the core of The Theory of The Conscious Universe: all that exists is a single Consciousness, capable of “entertaining” Itself by making virtual copies of Itself, each of which shares the experience of being a self, and may be denied full or partial memory of who it really is. The Original Observer sees through the eyes (or other sensory equipment) of the virtual copies and the copies may or may not be(come) aware of the looker above who is also seeing out their eyes.

So back to my reason for these writings, despite the fact that the daily interests of my dear readers may be focused totally elsewhere. The reason is this: The Theory of The Conscious Universe bears the promise of an ability to restore the magic of life, without the need to take things on faith, engage in superstition, or follow rituals which to some may not feel natural. If it is true that Consciousness is the supreme nature of the Universe, and that each of us is a reflection and a particularization of the Absolute Consciousness in a sacred game making each of us a unique and important experiment in a celestial and divine process, and that this in no way steps away from the scientific method and the disciplines of scientific thinking — then how much emotional fullness might be restored into everyone’s daily lives by recognizing this heritage?

Who among us has not had the experience of lying on your back in the grass looking up at the stars and suddenly feeling elevated, understanding deep down the importance and the excitement of the journey we are all on, and the hugeness of it all and our inextricable connection to it all? But after childhood, how much of this living large feeling makes it into our daily lives? Are we not ground down into pettiness? Do we not still yearn to feel the greatness of our existence each second of every day?

Even before proving that The Theory of The Conscious Universe is true, simply the fact that it could be true is enough to place all religion into a new light, as scientific possibility. In fact it would be unscientific to rule out the core truth of all religion, without having disproven it.

The unity and integrity of having all things inside oneself integrated into a wholeness of purpose, a meaningfulness, makes life emotionally full. In a highly rational culture such as ours has been since the Golden Age of Greece, we subconsciously are unable to get in touch with the greatest feelings we can have, unless we can square those feelings with the rational strictures in our minds. The Theory of The Conscious Universe can do that, without appeal to faith, because it is a scientific explanation for “what is”, which lines up with what we know from Quantum Mechanics (QM) and Relativity, and can explain why it is that time and space exist in our subjective experience and yet are not really there according to these cutting edge sciences.

That’s why I share The Theory of The Conscious Universe. It has restored the magic of life to me, and I wish to share that magical feeling with as many people as possible. Especially you people who have touched my life and to whom I am grateful for what you have taught and given me.

All the best,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Read my latest post.