Are you conscious?
By: Peter Monegal
Tags: Mindfulness, Consciousness, Philosophy, Science, Awareness

11:11 The expansion of consciousness

That was the question posed to the audience by psychologist Susan Blackmore at a talk I went some years back at the Edinburgh Science Festival. For me it was a starting gun for the exploration of the scientific and what I will call the spiritual evolution of consciousness and how they can be reconciled.

Because the question turned out for me to be all about how our beliefs are determined by our perceptions, prompted by a well known video clip about perception called ‘Gorillas in our midst’ which Susan showed during the talk. The clip shows people moving around in front of a camera and the point of it is that when they are watching it most viewers do not notice that just for an instant a gorilla moves across the background. But when Susan told the audience there had been a gorilla there, most of the audience refused to believe it because they relied on their perception and didn´t buy into her version of what had appeared on the screen.

Two things resulted from this experience of rejecting another’s experience. One, that, as I sat observing all these people around me falling for this mind control being perpetrated on them (as I perceived it) I was aware of peoples’ ideas, perceptions, consciousness — whatever you want to call it — being transmitted around the lecture room. For instance, when one man in the audience eventually raised his hand and told Susan that he had seen the gorilla in the film, she poured pretence scorn on this but soon more hands went up around the room in support of the gorilla man and then it became the “accepted wisdom” — it became reality as more and more people believed it. So how did this wave of realisation travel through the hall?

My first realisation was what the phrase “accepted wisdom” implies. It implies that we, as individuals, are willing –even anxious- to stop working something out for ourselves and accept the knowledge or experience of other members of our species. We are willing to learn from others what we are unable to learn for ourselves, for the simple reason that none of us can find the time or the resources to understand by personally investigating everything that is going on in the universe to its eventual root. So we rely on others to transmit that knowledge to us, as we have from birth by learning from our immediate family environment and then expanding outwards in ever increasing circles of experience, social relationships, geographical space, factual knowledge, etc. ad infinitum. And as we become aware of what other people believe, we form part of a collective consciousness.

But here is where we need to put up some protection. Can we really always accept at face value what people tell us? Well, obviously not and we do know that from our own experience.

Our childhoods have been a whole series of disappointments as we have learned that, as our individuality begins to assert itself, it clashes with those of others and from being loving, nurturing, cooperators in our progress towards understanding the world about us (and at that stage it is only a small world and maybe remains that way for the rest of our lives) those others start creating rigidity in the links we have with them and becoming rivals. This process begins with siblings, or our peers at nursery school, who, unlike doting parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts etc., put their own selfish interests before yours. Almost everyone wants to lend a hand with the most vulnerable (i.e. babies) to equip them with the skills to deal with life, but as those skills become more developed, those same initial cooperators (parents and family members to start with) become less tolerant and less giving of their time and attention because, in devoting themselves altruistically to equipping others, on the face of it they are sacrificing, at least in part, their self-interest in continuing to develop understanding or skills for their own benefit — and/or for the “greater good”, as I shall try to describe in a future post.

Now before I go any further, we all know that lots of people have come up with lots of answers to lots of questions and it’s important to realise that these answers are in each case, an answer, not the answer. If language is meant to represent absolute truth, the definite article should not exist because it shuts out relativity. Universal consciousness holds a definite to be as impossible as an impossibility. Even scientific “facts” are subject to revision where there are alternative realities and unlimited dimensions beyond our 3D minds. Absolutism is as limiting as both affirmation and denial (Yes, there’s a God, No there isn’t, Islam is the true religion, No it isn’t, My country’s the best, No mine is, etc. etc.). Many of these answers are contradictory because concepts are porous and mere perceptions from a tiny individual or collective perspective within the infinite expanse of consciousness. Which means that the expansion of individual or collective consciousness is a continuing and infinite process of working out questions and answers, stimuli and responses, and those answers generating more questions which lead to more answers and so on. It means being conscious of infinite reality.

Here below are just a few relationships I have thought of and jotted down. When you start thinking about them consciously, you may find that just one pair of words can set your mind thinking endless thoughts or a stream of consciousness. Think about the relationships, the degree of trust, interdependency and cooperation within each and how these may vary with changes in either time, physical environment, different social and cultural or religious environments and how they also vary within one small local community, and within wider communities, going out onto a global scale.

Mother/child

Pope/Catholic

Imam/Muslim

Politician/citizen

Monarch/subject

Husband/wife

Teacher/pupil

Author/reader

I have set these out according to certain prejudices about who might be the dominant influence (the first of the pair) and who the influenced, but in fact you can just as well turn them around and see how the same relationship functions in reverse, how each in a pair is interdependent — and not just within the pairing but with other individuals, pairings and groups, for example, how the role of mother, or questions like contraception and abortion, are perceived by a Pope or an Imam and to what extent a Catholic or a Muslim accepts that perception, etc. etc. And what about if you think about them in the plural instead of the singular, about the general instead of the particular?

It so happened that the evening after Susan’s talk, there was a TV programme about ‘magic’ (in its most general sense), paganism, religion, ritual, the alternative explanations to science, and then later I started to read a book called “Soul Retrieval” by psychologist Sandra Ingemann about shamanism and how it acts in a similar way to psychotherapy.

We often say that something is ‘doing our head in’. Well that’s consciousness folks — an increasing awareness of the limitless perceptions there are to everything. It’s about “realising”. We can either internalise it and try to find all the answers within our own minds or we can capture them from outside sources and, in either case, we need to work out and constantly revise our perception, of how much we can trust these existing perceptions and concepts.

Consciousness is responding to a cosmic reverberation of information, an evolutionary process of learning to build on both our cumulative genetic and acquired knowledge/database driven by our own individual as well as species-wide genetic code to evolve. And it is an awareness that our solipsistic individual or collective perspective is no more than an interface with infinite consciousness.

But if we accept this we have a problem: science gives us no proof that consciousness is shared among all the elements in the cosmos — it just intuits from quantum theory— but it appears in the most ancient cosmologies that acknowledge spirit even in what we consider inanimate objects — rocks, trees, water, etc. Science is indeed beginning to provide some very fundamental answers and can contemplate infinity. But acceptance of the concept of infinity as the reality we experience, our inter-relationship with an infinite cosmos is only accessible through the interface of consciousness.

Whether it matters if things are explained to us by science or by an expansion of consciousness that goes beyond science and “fact” (be it through magic, the unexplained, the spiritual or paranormal, the non-rational, a cosmic order channelled from chaos) is what I want to explore next — whether my consciousness, my ability to add to my database of understanding — was better served by a scientific lecture or by a TV programme on magic and paganism, or by a book on shamanism I can’t say. But they all led to that buzz, that consciousness, that processing of limitless alternatives and insights which had been (re-)awoken in me by the simple question “Are you conscious?”.