Matters of the Mind, with Dawson Church
By: Michael Woronko
Tags: Lifestyle, Consciousness, Life, Science, Philosophy

Intersections and Roundabouts

Our understanding of the relationship between mind and matter has cascaded through history with such a dramatic thirst for answers that it has caused our effort to bifurcate into countless veins of study. Fragmenting our hopes of a cohesively unified and comprehensive perspective that, in all truth, would have likely been impossible to achieve in the first place.

Our journey towards these understandings has taken us all over the proverbial map, navigating our perspective through valleys of religion and mountain tops of scientific postulation. Through tangled forests of psychology, oceans of biological evolution, and arid deserts of secular spirituality.

Every field has cultivated its respective assertions and, where certain overlaps exist— largely on the fringes of each field of study — scoffs can be heard from the nuclei’s at the center. For instance, physics may hold firm in a physicalist interpretation of reality, whereas some layers of quantum physics support more idealistic notions of how consciousness (say, through the observer effect) is seen to have a significant impact on material reality.

These overlapping fringes, however, are usually and historically the volatile edges of study that prove just as creative as they do self-destructive. They are, by their very nature, sources of new ideas, mold-breaking and innovative, largely nonsensical but experimental enough that, from the pressure of scrutiny and criticism, diamonds can sometimes be generated.

And no more fringe-filled and overlapping areas exist than those which relate to consciousness. Whether intersecting with physics, astronomy, divinity, neurochemistry, evolution, or even (of late) technology, consciousness proves itself as dynamic and versatile a field of study as anything else.

On its own, consciousness doesn’t take us very far (in terms of palpability). But as soon as we begin infusing the study of consciousness with other streams of knowledge, we can see some remarkable revelations come to light. Maybe not so much in the fluffier applications of self-improvement (say, the laws of attraction or the powers of visualization) but in the more tangible fields of interest. Anywhere from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or Jung’s work on the subconscious to the more modern work being done with artificial intelligence and augmented biotechnologies like Neuralink.

We may never come to know how the mind truly interacts with matter but we seem to have a cornucopia of possibilities at our disposal. While we understand certain premises, we may not necessarily buy into the various conclusions that follow them (i.e. a collective or universal consciousness). And while we know that there is undoubtedly some truth to the idea that we can, to one degree or another, materialize the kind of reality we seek to exist in, we stop short of praising the powers of our consciousness which seem to get us there — every time.

Everyone is privy to their own flavor of combinations when it comes to understanding consciousness, whether that entails a combination of biological understanding or one of a more spiritual context. Moreover, the idea that the mind can influence our reality in such a dramatic way isn’t exactly digestible for those who have accepted the more ‘verifiable’ and tactile means of navigating life (physics or mathematics, for instance). But, for countless others, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

And, for Dawson Church, author of numerous works which seek to highlight this apparent potential of our mind, it’s the only thing that he’s focused on elucidating through the devotion of his own life — to exemplifying this seemingly undecipherable relationship between mind and matter by working in his own unique overlapping edge of study.