Come gather ’round people, wherever you roam,
And admit that the waters around you have grown,
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone,
If your time to you is worth savin’.
And you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone,
For the times they are a-changin.’
– Bob Dylan, from “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964)
It is an extraordinary fact that even though we are already twenty-one percent of the way through the twenty-first century, the mainstream scientific community remains convinced that consciousness is produced by our brains. There is no scientific evidence that this even might be true beyond the fact that parts of the brain can be stimulated by conscious processes! And there is a lot of evidence that it isn’t true.
The fact that consciousness is the base of reality isn’t even a new idea. I have just interviewed Leonard Perlmutter for Seek Reality. He’s an expert on Eastern spiritual teachings, and he shared with us the amazing fact that those who invented the practice of yoga knew five thousand years ago that consciousness is primary and it pre-exists matter. It’s not an especially radical idea, either. Some of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century knew or suspected the primary role of consciousness, in part because this conclusion logically flows from some of the oddities of quantum mechanics.
It has been easy for afterlife researchers to come to appreciate the primacy of consciousness. We who spend a lot of our time in non-material pursuits are used to reasoning outward from the afterlife realities, which clearly are based in consciousness. But mainstream scientists are enmired in studying matter, so understandably their logical model is based in matter. But surely by now they must be getting a clue? I have of late been watching for developments in the field of consciousness research, and this week I attended an online IONS presentation with considerable interest.
If you don’t yet know IONS, you should. The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973, after he had a spiritual experience while he was returning from the moon. IONS has always been a serious science-based investigator of what used to be seen as woo-woo ideas, and the very word “noetic” refers to the human intellect. So last week with a lot of hope I attended an online IONS presentation by Joachim Kepler, Ph.D., who is a research director at the Department of Consciousness Research (DIWISS) in Roth, Germany. Both IONS and DIWISS are at the leading edge of consciousness studies, and Dr. Kepler’s talk was called Linking Consciousness to the Foundations of Physics: Toward a Self-Consistent Theory of Consciousness. Linking consciousness to the foundations of physics? Toward a self–consistent theory of consciousness? To someone who has for decades been waiting for mainstream science to catch up with reality, that title sounded like music! But what Dr. Kepler said turned out to be another painful reminder of just how completely lost mainstream science is as a belief-system. I have watched his presentation three times now, trying to find some way that my first reactions were wrong.
Sadly, Dr. Kepler’s ideas amount to a thoughtful rearrangement of the deck chairs on the scientific ship to nowhere. And he ignores the implications of an enormous body of evidence that helps us to understand consciousness, including telepathy, remote viewing, near-death experiences, and two hundreds of years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. All his work amounts to just an attempt to explain how human beings are aware and able to think. And he still is reasoning outward from matter, and not from consciousness itself! How can anyone hope to understand anything if he isn’t trying to get inside whatever he is studying? Dr. Kepler’s presentation still requires matter for the creation of consciousness. He makes the zero-point field the place where consciousness is generated; which isn’t necessary, but as an idea it isn’t flat-out awful. However, he then includes the human brain as a kind of organizer of whatever is given off by the zero-point field. He still requires the brain for the creation of consciousness! And he refers to panpsychism, which is a Medieval idea that posits that all matter is by its nature somewhat conscious. He refines it into cosmopsychism, in which matter by its nature is potentially conscious, but not everything material is conscious. And thus this poor scientist who is trying to be relevant while he keeps his materialist bona fides clings firmly to matter, and he shies away from any thought that consciousness is primary and pre-existing.
But scientists are becoming more desperate now. As recently as a decade ago you could read smug articles in popular science magazines about how we would at any moment be celebrating the discovery of the source of consciousness inside the human brain. But that optimism has largely petered out. You still see cautiously hopeful articles which offer some trivial nothing of an idea that you know is going to lead nowhere; and you see more and more fatalistic thoughts by dead-ended materialist scientists. Here is a response by an “intelligent design” scholar to one such jaded materialist scientist’s article about the impending death of humankind. And his response was published just this month! When you know that the scientist being slapped down is considered by his fellows to be an important thought-leader, you realize that materialist science has arrived at the point of being entirely broken.
The fundamental fact of human existence can be stated in one sentence. What you and I experience in a dim way as human consciousness is the only thing that exists! Everything else that we think is real is created by consciousness, composed of consciousness, and set in place by consciousness. There is nothing else. And our minds are all part of that same consciousness energy, which is one of several important proofs that our minds are eternal. By definition.
The problem with the failed scientific dogma of materialism is that, no matter what we believe, we cannot change reality. Materialism as a strain of rational thought goes back at least three thousand years, and for a while grounding scientific inquiry in “solid” matter made sense. We have talked here at length about the fact that all religions are human-made, and against that backdrop the notion of studying anything non-material probably seemed for a long time to be veering dangerously close to superstition. Mainstream science and mainstream religions have been a pair of worthy adversaries! If there is anything nuttier than designing your system of inquiry around your need for everything to be material, then that nuttier worldview has to be designing all your beliefs around a god that you have thought up yourself and then imbued with superhuman powers.
It is time now for humankind to shun all beliefs and at last try to figure out what actually is going on. What scientists believe has no more value to us than does whatever the Pope believes! And when we investigate all of reality with a truly open mind, we cannot escape the conclusion that a base non-material energy must underlie everything. There have been some wonderful working scientists who have open-mindedly sought the truth and arrived at a similar conclusion, among them Thomas Campbell, Evan Harris Walker, Dean Radin, and now Bernardo Kastrup. And of course, it was the immortal Max Planck who came right out and said ninety years ago that consciousness is primary. So this is a theory backed by illustrious scientific minds who have persisted, even despite the fact that they were defying all the matter-based rules of the scientific playground.
And once you are used to the primacy of consciousness, you find that it explains so many things that otherwise NEVER will be explained! Let’s list here just a few of the basic questions that materialist scientists will never be able to answer. Not in a thousand years:
- How did the universe begin? No matter how far back you go, you always can ask, “so what came before that?” And no theory ever advanced has been adequate, including the much-vaunted Big Bang.
- How did life begin? The notion that lightning struck a primordial soup of just the right combination of molecules has been considerably refined, but the fact remains that every such theory has been demonstrated to be wrong. We frankly still have no idea how life began.
- How and why did life evolve? Once you’ve got some form of life, you’ve still got to figure out how it turned into an elephant and whatever that elephant had for lunch!
- What are our minds, and how are they created? For scientists to be searching for a source of consciousness inside the human brain is like taking apart an old transistor radio to try to find the source of Elvis Presley’s voice. Eventually some materialist scientist will win a Nobel Prize for having found a way to convincingly demonstrate the illusion that at last we may have figured it out.
- What is making that funny sound from the middle of the galaxy? Because matter is seen as both finite and always obedient to human-deciphered laws, whenever something happens that is outside the box of scientific thinking, it confounds everyone.
All of this is going to end, just as deluded thinking always ends. We used to suspect that scientists were going to get a clue only when communication with the not-really-dead had progressed to the place where we were chatting through the veil with a cellphone app. But now I think it will be sooner than that. As Max Planck is reported to have said, science advances by deaths. And right now, in some fourth-grade science class there is a courageous little girl who soon will risk her career to develop a viable consciousness-based theory of everything. The timing will at last be right, and her work will hit this despairing world like a thunderclap of liberation. And then, gloriously, everything really will change!
Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen,
And keep your eyes wide open. The chance won’t come again.
And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin.
there’s no tellin’ who that it’s naming’.
For the loser now will be later to win!
For the times they are a-changin’.
– Bob Dylan, from “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964)