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Consciousness simply is. Each person is aware of being aware. In that regard, Hamlet asked the wrong question. It’s not “To be or not to be?” but “To be conscious or not to be conscious?” As hard as it is to imagine death, it’s infinitely harder to imagine having no mind.
there are nervous systems to match. But this book goes much further than a description of mental processing. It argues that we don’t see because we have eyes or hear because we have ears. The reverse is true. The mind created sense organs to explore the universe. As someone neatly put it, we aren’t a machine that learned to think; we are thoughts that learned to create a machine. This total reversal feels so strange at first that it can lead to queasiness.
Instead, the way we should live is according to our highest potential. What this book holds out is a conscious universe where human potential is infinite, because the evolution of mind never stops, and our true nature is mind itself. To be frank, the human potential movement, which has existed for many years, rests on a mushy foundation. In a scientific age, no amalgam of scripture, gurus, saints, and enlightened souls will ever be adequate to transform people’s lives, not on a mass scale. Schäfer’s scientific approach has a far better chance, because his voice is the voice of consciousness itself. He provokes self-awareness in the reader by unfolding his own self-awareness, examining it from its very roots, celebrating where it might lead him. Many books offer themselves as invitations to a journey. This one is rare, because its invitation comes from the heart of creation, where consciousness has no audience except itself, and the end of the journey is to comprehend eternity.
When you hear, for example, that the quantum phenomena tell us that all things and people are interconnected in a holistic background of the universe, whose nature is mindlike, your first reaction might well be “That doesn’t make sense to me!” Why doesn’t it make sense? Because when you take a look at the world, you see isolated material things—lumps of matter—but nothing mindlike and interconnected. So your judgment is simple: “The quantum view of the world doesn’t make sense!”
Teachers don’t like to talk about things they don’t really understand, so the science that is being taught in our high schools is still mainly Newton’s physics of materialism and Darwin’s biology of selfishness and aggression.
“A new scientific truth,” he wrote, “does normally not prevail in the way that its opponents become convinced and declare that they have learned something, but rather because its opponents eventually die out, and the following generation is familiar with the truth from the outset.”
Making a new beginning means digging deep down into your mind to get everything out that is in there—your wishes, your convictions, your views of the world, your motivations, your principles, your logic, your habits, your love and needs, everything—and ask yourself: Why is all this stuff in my mind, and why do I want it to be there? Did I put it there, or has someone turned me into a puppet?
There are many big questions to be curious about, and one of the most fascinating is this: What makes us human? I would say that everyone’s life—yours and mine, Leonardo da Vinci’s and Albert Einstein’s, a first-time mother and her newborn baby’s—is guided by an inner potential, and our supreme good lies in actualizing our potential. More than love and intelligence, or consciousness and joy of life, this potential and our deep need to actualize it are what makes us human.
What exactly do I mean by the states of what is possible in the world? We have to dig in deeper to get a clearer understanding, but it is worth it: Getting a grasp of potentiality is one of the most important things you can do for yourself in this life.
It seems that the interplay between actuality and potentiality in physical reality is quite general: The visible world is an actualization—an emanation—out of a realm of transempirical and transmaterial potentiality. We don’t know with certainty the nature of the forms in the realm of potentiality—after all, they are invisible—but physics posits that they are waves. It might be more precise to say that the forms of the realm of potentiality interact with the world as though they were waves. There are indications that the waves in the realm of potentiality are hanging together, like the water waves in an ocean, so that reality is an indivisible wholeness—the One—in which all things are interconnected.
AI Summary
Infinite Potential by Lothar Schafer presents key insights from the Taoism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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