(Materialism as the unexamined foundation of modern science)
Remind yourself that while humanity has come a long way, there is still a lot that we do not know. For example, ~96 percent of the universe is mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy,” about which we know very little.
“materialism”—the notion that physical material, known as “matter,” is fundamental in the universe. In other words, matter is the basis of all reality. Everything is comprised of matter, and everything can be reduced to matter.
The basic thinking is as follows: There was a “Big Bang” 13.8 billion years ago that started the universe. Units of matter—atoms—interacted throughout the universe. The interactions of matter are commonly called “chemistry.” After countless, random chemical reactions, self-replicating molecules known as DNA eventually formed on Earth. DNA molecules served as the building blocks for the evolution of life. Human beings and other organisms evolved and developed brains. The brain enabled humans to have minds and awareness: an “inner experience” sometimes called “consciousness.”
Because materialism assumes that the brain produces consciousness, when your brain dies, your consciousness dies.
However, simple introspection revealed that materialism is a superstitious belief system that cannot be proven.
Technically, no, we cannot prove it. If there were no conscious observers, there would be no living beings to confirm that anything existed.
The materialist point of view asserts the reality of that which is never experienced—matter [outside consciousness]—and denies that which alone is always experienced—consciousness itself.
Materialism’s logic is twisted when you break it down. You might need to read this slowly. ❍ Matter’s existence before consciousness, as described above, cannot be known for sure. We just showed that. Therefore, matter’s existence before consciousness is “unknown.” In other words, it is an abstraction. ❍ Conversely, we know that we have conscious experience—you are conscious as you read these words. So, consciousness is unquestionably “known.” In other words, it is concrete.
There is no controlled, double-blind study that science can conduct to conclusively prove that matter preexisted consciousness.
cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.”8 That’s right, folks, Einstein said it: The foundation of modern science—ironically—is a form of religion.
(The hard problem: why matter cannot account for consciousness)
As physicist Peter Russell puts it: “How can something as immaterial as consciousness ever arise from something as unconscious as matter?”9
The responses we get from science are often similar to neuroscientist Sam Harris’s statement: “There is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness”
No one would dispute that the brain is related to consciousness. However, we have no evidence that the brain produces consciousness.
Figure C. An alternative perspective suggesting consciousness is fundamental and everything else (e.g., physical matter and the universe…and even brains) comes from, and is experienced within, consciousness
Matter is not that which produces consciousness, but that which limits it and confines its intensity within certain limits”17 [emphasis in original].
But if consciousness is the foundation of reality, then it would be easy to imagine, for instance, that consciousness could flow from one person to another (telepathically). And since the body is just a product of consciousness, the body’s death would not imply that its consciousness also dies.
Dr. Kastrup provides a metaphor to explain how the theory works. Imagine that all of reality is a stream of water, where water represents consciousness. Now imagine that within the stream, whirlpools form. Those whirlpools are self-localizations of water. While they may look different from other parts of the stream, the whirlpools are made of nothing more than water.
The answer to Science magazine’s question is: There is no biological basis of consciousness in the first place.
“What is the universe made of?”19 The answer, according to the described framework: “Consciousness.”
In other words, our brain picks up consciousness from “the cloud.” These ideas fly in the face of mainstream scientific thought, which typically regards consciousness as a by-product of brain activity.
(Psychic phenomena and the scientific evidence for nonlocal consciousness)
Some of the individuals nonchalantly spoke of their “psychic abilities” and “extrasensory perception (ESP) abilities.” They claimed people had the ability to send their minds to distant locations in the past, present, or future and accurately describe what is, was, or will be there (“remote viewing”—also known as clairvoyance); they had an ability to communicate with other people by using their minds alone (“telepathy”); they had an ability to know the future before it happened (“precognition”); and they had an ability to affect physical objects using their minds alone, without making physical contact (“psychokinesis”).
The collective data suggested that consciousness is not localized to, or dependent upon, the brain. And further, it suggested that consciousness is primary in the universe—it is more fundamental than physical matter and exists beyond space and time. Along these lines, there was discussion that at the deepest level of reality, there is only one consciousness, and each of our individual minds is a part of it. This idea would explain why we experience the same physical world—not because the physical world exists independently of consciousness, but because we are all part of the same consciousness. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger even explicitly stated: “Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind.”
was stunned, skeptical, and confused. None of these ideas conformed to what I was taught. Is mind-reading possible? Can we know the future? Can the mind alone interact with physical matter? Can we communicate with deceased loved ones? Are past lives real? Is consciousness fundamental in the universe and not a by-product of the brain? Are we all part of the same consciousness?
I learned, for example, that the statistical support of these phenomena is stronger than the evidence showing that aspirin prevents heart attacks.
Dr. Radin describes studies in the following areas that have achieved six-sigma results: ❍ Remote viewing16 ❍ Telepathy17 ❍ Precognition18 ❍ Psychokinesis19
Others maintain that there is no evidence. The table on the next page illustrates the divided dynamic that we see in science.
Instead, we have individual theories, such as quantum mechanics and general relativity, which work in specific cases but are incompatible when applied together. So, basically, we have no idea how the universe works.
Instead of humbly reminding ourselves how little we know, there is a tendency to think we know it all.
Could the anomalies of nonlocal consciousness: psychic abilities, ESP, near-death experiences, etc., be the “clouds” of today’s science—that is, “clouds” that we’d prefer to sweep under the rug because they don’t align with our theories, but which could ultimately lead to a new understanding of human capabilities? Are we just like the scientists at the turn of the 20th century who thought they knew it all? Are we quick to dismiss phenomena just because they seem too unbelievable to be true?
We will examine cases in which reduced brain functioning is related to heightened conscious experience. This relationship might make sense if we regard the brain as a filter—rather than a producer—of consciousness.
To summarize, if consciousness is fundamental, the key implications are: ❍ Materialism—the foundational assumption of modern science and much of modern thought—is wrong. ❍ Consciousness is not produced by the brain; rather, consciousness is “nonlocal” to the brain/body system. ❍ We all have latent psychic abilities. ❍ When our body dies, our consciousness does not die. ❍ Consciousness exists beyond space and time. ❍ We are all fundamentally interconnected as part of the same underlying consciousness.
The most undeniable and obvious part of our existence is that we have the subjective, inner experience of feeling alive, and we still can’t explain it.
(The brain as filter: evidence from savants, psychedelics, and near-death experiences)
Our primary senses, our eyes and ears, happen to be situated on the head. Thus the central point of our perception, the point from which we seem to be experiencing the world, is somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears—somewhere, that is, in the middle of the head. The fact that our brains are also in our heads is just a coincidence, as the following thought experiment bears out. Imagine that your eyes and ears were transplanted to your knees, so that you now observe the world from this new vantage point. Where would you now experience your self to be—in your head or down by your knees? Your brain may still be in your head, but your head is no longer the central point of your perception. You would now be looking out onto the world from a different point, and you might well imagine your consciousness to be in your knees.
other words, the psychedelic experiences tended to be more intense when brain activity was more greatly reduced.
Psychologist Dr. Imants Barušs and cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Julia Mossbridge make a similar point: “In neuroscience, we generally assume that mental clarity requires a functioning brain. Thus, the reason that mental clarity is unexpected in some of these [terminal lucidity] cases is the presence of obvious functional or structural brain pathology…that seems sufficient to prohibit mental clarity”26 [emphasis added].
In his 2010 book Islands of Genius, Dr. Treffert reports that “by age 18 months [Peek] was able to memorize all the books read to him with just a single reading.…By age six [Peek] was reciting whole paragraphs verbatim from a book with the mere mention of its page number. By that time he had memorized the entire index of a set of encyclopedias.”
Savants pose perplexing questions for anyone studying the connection between the brain and consciousness. It is not understood how individuals with such brain impairment can simultaneously possess such remarkable mental abilities.
The definition of consciousness depends on who you ask. For the purposes of this book, consciousness refers to the mind, one’s sense of awareness, and inner experience; it is the sense of experiencing life.
A foundational question explored in this book is: “Does the brain produce the consciousness?” Mainstream materialist science assumes that the brain produces consciousness, but doesn’t know how this occurs. ❍ However, some scientists view the brain not as the producer of consciousness but more like an antenna or a filter of consciousness. In other words, consciousness exists independently of the body.
❍ If the brain produces consciousness, we might expect heightened conscious experience to correlate with increased brain activity. However, that is not what we find: — A 2012 study suggests that psychedelic mushrooms reduced brain activity, even though the experiences are enriched and hyper-real. Similarly, people report having lucid, hyper-real experiences with little or no brain function (near-death experiences).
In cases of terminal lucidity, patients with brain disorders exhibit sudden and unexplained clarity near the time of death. — Savants who are disabled in some ways have superhuman memories and abilities in math, music, and other areas. Some savants might even be highly telepathic. — Systematically destroying and replacing elementary animal brains does not seem to eliminate memory and certain behaviors. — Organ-transplant patients sometimes take on the memories and personalities of their donors, and in these cases the organ they’ve received is not the brain.
Collectively, the evidence suggests that we may need to rethink the materialist claim that the brain produces consciousness.
If there is anything to take away from this chapter, it is that our perceptions can lead us astray because we live in a reality far more mysterious than our everyday senses show us.
(What quantum mechanics and evolution reveal about the nature of perception and reality)
Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, shares his findings of evolutionary game theory: If you have an organism that sees reality as it is and is competing with an organism that sees none of reality but is only tuned to the fitness consequences in its environment… then the organism that sees reality as it is can never win.… Evolution does not shape perceptual systems to see reality as it is. It shapes our perceptual systems simply to keep us alive long enough to have kids… . So that means that I can’t trust that my perceptions of space and time and physical objects are an insight into the nature of reality as it is. Rather, what evolution is telling us…is that our perceptual systems are a species-specific adaptation not designed to show us reality as it is, but in fact shaped to hide reality, because we don’t need to know reality; it’s unnecessary11 [emphasis added].
Physicist Brian Greene sums it up well: “Common experience—mundane, ordinary, day-to-day activities” are “part of a classical charade, hiding the true nature of our quantum world.” Our everyday world is “nothing but an inverted magic act, lulling its audience into believing in the usual, familiar conceptions of space and time, while the astonishing truth of quantum reality lay carefully guarded by nature’s sleights of hand.”14
Entanglement—“spooky action at a distance” One of the primary tenets of quantum mechanics is known as “entanglement”: the finding that the states of two distant particles mirror each other instantaneously. So entangled particles are in some way connected, even if they are physically separated—no matter how far apart they are in space and time.
The findings suggest there is a hidden, fundamental interconnectedness—or “nonlocality”—in the universe that our eyes don’t see. Put another way by physicists Rosenblum and Kuttner: “That our actual world does not have separability is now generally accepted, though admitted to be a mystery. In principle, any objects that have ever interacted are forever entangled, and therefore what happens to one influences the other. Experiments have now demonstrated such influences extending over more than one hundred kilometers. Quantum theory has this connectedness extending over the entire universe.”23
The first strange finding is that particles (i.e., “compact lumps”28—pieces of matter that have a finite location) can act like waves of probability (i.e., they have a distributed, uncertain location; maybe here, maybe there).
This is known as “the collapse of the wave function”—when an observer “looks,” the wave “collapses,” and the observer sees a particle.
The mere act of observing changes the behavior of physical matter. Particles behave like particles when they are observed and like waves when they are not observed. As Physicist John Wheeler summarized it: “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”31 Put another way by Wheeler: “Nothing…exists until it is observed.”
An inference one might make from these findings is that consciousness is somehow creating particles of matter from waves of probability. That idea would fit with the framework discussed in the preface: Matter is a product of (and influenced by) consciousness. Further experimentation is needed to shed light on this theory.
Quantum physics makes us question even that basic assumption. Is it true that time only moves from past to present to future? Maybe not.
They suggest that the relationship between past, present, and future is less clear than our ordinary experience teaches us. And as we will discover later in this book, consciousness sometimes displays similar oddities with regard to time.
If we followed our everyday perceptions, we would think the world is linear, Newtonian, and fixed.
But real, proven science instead suggests that our reality is nonlinear, quantum, and relativistic.
(Remote viewing, telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis: the research record)
Remote viewing (sometimes called “remote perception”) refers to the ability to perceive something—with one’s mind—from a distance.
Yes, that’s right—remote viewing is the act of seeing or sensing something without physically being there to experience it. And what’s more astonishing is that it can be done independent of time. Remote viewers are able to perceive at a distance and in the present, past, and future.
Researchers often report that remote viewers go into a meditative trance while remote viewing. Taken in the context of chapter 2, this might make sense: If, in the trance, they are reducing brain activity through a calming of the mind, perhaps they are eliminating noise that ordinarily prevents access to the broader stream.
Furthermore, Dr. Utts has shown that the statistical evidence for psychic phenomena is “much stronger” than the evidence that aspirin prevents heart attacks31 [emphasis in original].
Telepathy refers to mind-to-mind communication. That means communicating without spoken or written words. It means communicating with the mind alone.
Dr. Larry Dossey reports another example: “In one case, George, an autistic savant who could not write his name or a sentence, would know when his parents unexpectedly decided to pick him up at school (he usually rode the bus). He would tell his teacher his parents were coming, and he would be at the door when they arrived.”41
She continues: “If you have a model that thinks that memory has to do with the number and complexity of synaptic connections [in the brain] and you’re…looking at a brain that has fewer of those…and they’ve got the most phenomenal memory of all, then you have to really question the paradigm”42 [emphasis added]. Note the similarity between Dr. Powell’s statement and the examples discussed in chapter 2, where we saw a relationship between reduced brain activity and heightened experience.
But remember what quantum physics teaches us: Time works in mysterious ways. If consciousness is indeed fundamental, perhaps it exists beyond space and time. That would allow for precognition.
Your physiology jumps when you see [an erotic picture] after watching a series of landscapes or neutral pictures… . But the remarkable finding is that your physiology jumps before the provocative picture actually appears on the screen—even before the computer decides which picture to show you. What it shows is that your physiology can anticipate an upcoming event even though your conscious self might not.”19
Dr. Jahn and Dunne also noticed a performance-related pattern in these studies. When participants relax, they do best. When they are “trying hard,” they do less well. Dunne states: “It seems that the less you try to connect with the [RNG] machines, the more successful you are… . At first, most people get the effect, however small. Then it almost always reduces significantly. If they try harder and harder, they become frustrated and the effect remains elusive. If they just let it happen, relax, have fun, and gently encourage and tease the machine into cooperating, the effect returns and is often more pronounced.”
Targ became convinced that it’s real after attending “spoon-bending parties,” during which ordinary people use meditation techniques to bend spoons.
He gave up the department chair at Stanford, his government and professional committees—all so he would have time to explore this topic. Stanford was not happy with his choice, but Dr. Tiller was a tenured professor and was able to maintain his normal duties while pursuing nonmainstream topics on the side.
In other words, people meditate into an electrical device, and that electrical device can then change the pH of water. If this is real, think about what that implies about how powerful our minds are.
Dr. Tiller used a similar method to “condition” a physical space with mentally imprinted devices. Using this method, he was able to increase the chemical activity of a liver enzyme by 25 to 30 percent with a 30-minute exposure to the conditioned space.
So, if this is real, one’s mind can alter the development of a living organism.
Dr. Swanson summarizes the results: “These experiments show that a Qigong Master can focus his energy very precisely in a small volume, only a few centimeters wide, over great distances of thousands of miles. The energy is capable of killing cancer cells in the targeted region, while sparing those only inches away.”
Some people are more naturally skilled than others. In his 2006 book, Entangled Minds, Dr. Dean Radin likens psychic abilities to high-jumping. People have different abilities, and the most talented high jumpers can jump really, really high. But they’re all jumping, even if they aren’t very good at it.
Dr. Radin examined the topic of meditation and psychic abilities in his 2013 book, Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities. He summarizes his analysis of the available scientific literature: “We’ve seen evidence suggesting that advanced meditation may be associated with improved [psychic] performance.”
As Dr. Diane Powell states: “Evidence does support the idea that the pineal gland plays a role in creating states of consciousness that are conducive to receiving psychic information.”6 Additional research is needed to better understand the role of the pineal gland.
Can I use psychic abilities to make money? Some people claim they have. For example,
(Consciousness as primary: implications, mystic convergence, and causality)
The crux of Dr. Currivan’s premise—and supported by wide-ranging evidence across many fields of research and all scales of existence—is that “everything that manifests in the physical world emerges from deeper and ordered levels of nonphysical and in-formed reality.”23 This perspective regards the universe as existing and evolving as a unified entity—a reality fundamentally made of consciousness, in the form of digitized information. And moreover, that its appearance is simply a holographic projection of its holographic boundary. Dr. Currivan further provides a novel perspective on the “incompatible” quantum and relativity theories—viewing them not as antagonistic, but as complementary expressions of information manifesting as the energy-matter and space-time of our interconnected, holographic reality.
Two-thirds of them described their experience on the substance as one of their top five most meaningful life experiences.
Consciousness studies combined with fields such as epigenetics suggest that doctors shouldn’t limit their focus to physical causes and treatments of illness. They should also incorporate nonphysical, mental aspects. This suggestion would mark a radical shift in Western medicine.
As a materialist, I thought comforting theories of existence had to be wrong. I viewed them as rationalizations. To me they were nothing more than methods of hiding from the inevitability of death. However, in hindsight, I realize I was making a logical error. I was reasoning that because a theory of existence was comforting, it also had to be false.
Likewise, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander states: “Consciousness is not only very real—it’s actually more real than the rest of physical existence, and most likely the basis of it all”44 [emphasis in original].
And physicist Norman Friedman sums it up: “According to my view of quantum theory, matter does not produce consciousness. It is the other way around. Consciousness produces material events. This is done by ‘choosing’ from a latent field of probable events.”49
Figure A Materialism (consciousness comes from matter) Figure B An alternative perspective
The panpsychist view asks, “What if consciousness is an inherent property of matter”? In other words, every unit of matter, even a tiny particle, has some amount of consciousness. A system’s level of consciousness will vary depending on the way in which its matter is configured. This perspective is a veiled form of materialism, however. It asserts that matter has consciousness. So panpsychism starts with matter and says consciousness comes from it. By contrast, I am putting forth a framework that makes consciousness the basis of reality. Matter is an experience within consciousness.
From the perspective of materialism, each of us is a body that has a consciousness. However, the evidence presented in this book suggests to me that this thinking is upside down. Instead, it seems more likely that we are a consciousness first and foremost that is having the experience of a physical world through a body.
So the notion that “consciousness is primary” is not at all new. It may sound new to some of us in 2018 because of the materialist bias in contemporary academia. But it is not new. Just to give a flavor of the types of beliefs held by mystics across cultures for ages, consider this quotation from mystic and nonscientist Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: “Consciousness itself is the source of everything.”57 That sounds a lot like what science is now pointing to.
Let’s assume that consciousness is, in fact, the source of everything. Then where does consciousness come from? This is a natural question, but it is perhaps misguided. It is predicated on the common-sense belief of the limited human mind that something must cause something else. As we’ve learned, our ordinary experience can lead us astray when trying to understand reality beyond approximation.
Let’s take a simple example. I hit a tennis ball with a tennis racket, and the ball goes over the net. From a local, narrow perspective of watching the tennis racket hitting the ball, it seems like it was the racket that caused the ball to go over the net. But let’s look at a level deeper. Where did both the tennis racket and ball come from? We can trace the chain of events and find that the number of things that needed to happen in order for the racket to hit the ball is astronomical: The Bang 13.8 billion years ago, leading ultimately to the evolution of life on Earth billions of years later; the evolution of humanity to get to the point where humans could manufacture tennis rackets and tennis balls; I needed to be born in order to hold the racket that hit the tennis ball, and I was only born because of all of my many ancestors; and the list could go on and on. The point is that there are countless factors needed for me to be in the exact position in which the racket and ball come together. So at the deepest level, the racket itself didn’t cause the ball to go over the net. Both the racket and ball are products and parts of the universe (consciousness). They are emergences of the universe itself.
As stated by Maharaj: “Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause—the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong.”58
Maybe consciousness just is, even if that’s difficult for our human minds to fully grasp. Just because something is difficult to grasp doesn’t make it unreal. For example, the concept of “infinity” is widely accepted. But can we fully grasp what infinity is? No.
This exercise could be done for any experience of anything. Our life is nothing but a set of experiences; therefore, everything in our life can be thought of in this way.
(If you are finding this concept difficult to wrap your head around, you are not alone. It requires an unwinding of a lifetime of conditioning. These exercises take time and practice to truly feel and experience. In fact, Rupert Spira has created a 30-hour meditation set called Transparent Body, Luminous World: The Tantric Yoga of Sensation and Perception, which is designed to allow the body to feel these concepts.)
Dr. Kastrup therefore concludes: “Past and future are myths: stories of the mind.…You cannot escape the present; ever; not even theoretically.”74 Further, he states “that we think of life as a series of substantial happenings hanging from a historical timeline is a fantastic cognitive hallucination.”75
Princeton PEAR lab’s Dr. Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne recognized the inherent issues with space and time through their nearly 30 years of nonlocal consciousness research. They commented that their studies raise the question “of whether space and time are truly intrinsic properties of the physical world, or whether, as many prominent thinkers have maintained, they are subjective coordinates that consciousness imposes in order to organize its experiences”78 [emphasis in original].
And we can see why mystics such as Ramana Maharshi is quoted as saying: “The world one sees does not even exist.”83
(The nature of “I”: time, space, and the witness that cannot be an object)
Who is “I”? Let’s investigate by walking through an exercise inspired by the teachings of Rupert Spira.
This exercise could go on and on. In any instance of “I am ,” we will see that there is a distinction between “I” and whatever the state “” is. Try it—insert anything into “____,” and see if you can find something that is identical to “I.” It can’t be done.
Now we can truly understand why the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi, said: “I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.”
And Spira states: “Each of us is, as such, the same person, apparently diversified and separated through the kaleidoscope of thought and perception.…We are literally each other. Each of us is the outer face, or the objectification, of the only mind there is, eternal, infinite consciousness. We are all mirrors of the same consciousness”90 [emphasis in original].
(Love, beauty, and altruism as intrinsic properties of consciousness)
We would ask, “In what sense did this behavior enable an organism to survive so that it could reproduce?” In many instances, we were able to come up with good reasons. For example, the behavior of lust makes a lot of sense. Sexual reproduction is required for the continued survival of a species, so the desire to have sex is critical and would be selected for, and passed on to, offspring.
But a question that continually came up in my psychology classes was: “What is the evolutionary explanation for love?” It was a mystery.
Similarly, there aren’t strong evolutionary explanations for natural beauty. Why would it be evolutionarily beneficial to find a sunset beautiful? Or a painting? Finding things beautiful wouldn’t confer a selective advantage for survival, would it? Yet the notion of beauty is pervasive in the human experience.
Perhaps there is another explanation that takes evolution out of the equation. What if love and beauty have something to do with our innate quality as consciousness—as “I”—a quality that transcends biology. As Spira puts it: “At the deepest level all minds are connected because they are all precipitated within the same field of infinite consciousness, and the varying degrees of connectedness that we feel with one another or with animals, objects and nature are the degrees to which our minds are transparent to this shared medium. Love is the word we use when we feel this shared medium with other people and animals. The same experience is referred to as beauty in relation to objects”92 [emphasis in original].
And if we are just part of a singular consciousness—the singular, shared medium of existence—perhaps love and beauty are our intrinsic characteristics. So they aren’t products of evolution or biology; they are basic to what we fundamentally are!
With this lens, we can perhaps explain feelings described in mystical experiences such as those induced by psychedelics and NDEs. Experiencers typically describe feelings of unconditional love, and they appreciate beauty in new ways. These experiences occur when the brain has reduced functioning—meaning that the experiencer is more tapped into the broader consciousness and its naturally loving and beautiful state of being. In these experiences, the brain’s filter is partially unlocked.
So perhaps we experience our natural state of love and beauty more when our brain does less.
(Enlightenment and awakening as unlocking the filter of consciousness)
If we view consciousness as being fundamental, then maybe enlightenment and awakening are something more. Maybe they have something to do with aligning with our “true” self; the “I” within us that we have for so long overlooked. Maybe they are additional experiences of “unlocking the filter” so that we experience the broader reality that our brain normally hides from our experience.
Consider the case of Sir David Hawkins MD, PhD, a well-respected psychiatrist who authored Orthomolecular Psychiatry (1973) alongside Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling. During his life, he reached states resembling what many describe as enlightenment. He described those states: “It was necessary to stop the habitual practice of meditating for an hour in the morning and then before dinner because it would intensify the bliss to such an extent that it was not possible to function.”93
He also reported apparent miracles: The miraculous happened, beyond ordinary comprehension. Many chronic maladies from which the body suffered for years had disappeared; eyesight spontaneously normalized, and there was no longer a need for the lifetime bifocals. Occasionally, an exquisitely blissful energy, an Infinite Love, would suddenly begin to radiate from the heart toward the scene of some calamity. Once, while driving on a highway, this exquisite energy began to beam out of the chest. As the car rounded a bend, there was an auto accident; the wheels of the overturned car were still spinning. The energy passed with great intensity into the occupants of the car and then stopped of its own accord. Another time while I was walking on the streets of a strange city, the energy started to flow down the block ahead and arrived at the scene of an incipient gang fight. The combatants fell back and began to laugh, and again, the energy stopped.
Dr. Hawkins found that “people felt an extraordinary peace in the aura”95 of his presence.
He also stated of the experience: “The novelty of sequential experience disappears as do expectation, regret, or the desire to anticipate or control. Existence as Existence is total and complete. All one’s needs are already fulfilled. There is nothing to gain or lose and everything is of equal value. It would be like all movies being equally enjoyable because the pleasure stems from going to the movies, and the movie that is playing is irrelevant.”96
Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan, holistic medicine doctor and Harvard graduate, had a similar spontaneous awakening while in meditation. As she describes it: “One moment, I was sitting peacefully following a guided…meditation. Then the next moment…I experienced myself bursting…Bursting into trillions of pieces of Love and Light. I experienced myself the size of the entire cosmos. No more physical body. No time. No space. The feeling was so intensely blissful, so beautiful, so filled with love…I had no reference point for anything like this in my earthly life. All I knew was that—I was Home. All I knew was that—this is our natural state.”98
Enlightened or awakened states appear to induce immensely pleasurable changes that are associated with a shift in one’s consciousness. Consistent in these experiences is an inward shift, an identification with one’s true self rather than the external world, a focus on the formless but ever-present “I.”
Or as stated by Eckhart Tolle: “Even if you achieve your outer purpose, it will never satisfy you if you haven’t found your inner purpose, which is awakening, being present, being in alignment with life.”
Spira often provides an analogy that is instructive here. Imagine a colorless, self-aware television screen that extends out into infinity. Characters and objects appear as movies on the screen. They are colorings of the screen, but they are made of nothing more than the screen itself. The characters get lost in the story of the movie. All the while, they’ve forgotten they are fundamentally nothing more than the screen itself! Are we, the characters in the movie, forgetting that we are nothing more than the ever-present “I” of the “screen”? The character we are is a collection of thoughts, perceptions, sensations, and feelings; however, as we established, “I” is constant while all forms of experience change within it. The failure to look inward causes us to seek illusory objects in the movie at the expense of ignoring that which perceives: “I.”
Maybe we should heed the Dalai Lama’s advice and focus our attention inward. Modern society doesn’t teach us to do that. We are accustomed to looking externally. We are conditioned to look for the next best thing outside of ourselves.
Altruism—a concept that has for many years troubled evolutionary biologists and psychologists—makes so much sense under this framework. Of course it feels good to help another—by helping another, we are helping our “self ” as part of the same underlying consciousness. In this sense, altruism is the highest form of selfishness.