CHAPTER ONE: CONSCIOUSNESS, ENERGY AND THE VOID -

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CHAPTER ONE: CONSCIOUSNESS, ENERGY AND THE VOID

“Our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas.

Our world is in crisis because of the absence of Consciousness.

And so to whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture

And contribute to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the

Redemption of the human spirit.

And that, after all, is what it’s really all about.”

(Terence McKenna)

What is Consciousness?

Words are inadequate at the best of times to describe the vast ordinariness of everyday thoughts and feelings. They are even more so when it comes to concepts like consciousness. Generally, the word consciousness is used to designate a whole array of psychic (mind) functions: thoughts, emotions, memories. Back in the late 19^th Century, Professor William James defined thought as “a moment of consciousness.” The word consciousness has since come to mean very much more than the psychic functions. In many circles it has almost become code for ‘God’. The ineffable, indefinable Absolute (which we will be talking more about), we are told, is none other than ‘consciousness itself.’

For my purposes here, I want to be clear on the definition of consciousness. I would like to make the distinction between consciousness and the commonly understood functions of thought, feeling and sensation. In truth these functions arise out of consciousness. They can create different states of consciousness. But they are not consciousness itself; they are separate psychic functions. Consciousness in its true meaning is a background to everything else. We humans have a particular form of consciousness, but the true nature of consciousness itself hints at being way beyond anything we can conceive. The nearest we may come is to imagine it as a field of intelligence that life uses to mould itself into what we know as the objective and the subjective worlds. We share in this field of consciousness and so we ‘have’ consciousness and out of our consciousness comes the mind functions, the world of the psyche.

So what is this background to everything, this consciousness?

One Face of the Life Force…

The ancient wisdom teachings tell us this cosmos is arranged as an intelligently organized system and everything within it is alive. Consciousness precedes everything in the objective world of matter and the world we see is only a partial ‘projection’ of an overarching field of consciousness. Mind, or psyche, is our means of accessing this consciousness. We necessarily have to divide and discern the world somehow and so our mind creates a construct called time and space. It has been said, space and time are instruments of the mind. The conscious field of the Kosmic Mind is beyond time and space. A universal order generated by the incomprehensible Kosmic Mind was understood by the ancient Egyptians and known to them by the metaphorical goddess Ma’at. The ancient wisdom teachings tell us that all the religions of antiquity understood this principle: the universe we see is but one face of a life force or spirit that pervades the entire cosmos. Conscious intelligent awareness lies behind every form in nature and there is order from the macro to the microcosmic level. Consciousness is not, as believed by modern scientists, a product of biological evolution – on the contrary, consciousness was here first!

And consciousness itself is evolving. It is a process that occurs in cycles and has done for millions of years. Cycles rise and fall, they come and go. The ancients knew of the ‘Zodiacal ages’ which correspond with a 25,920 year celestial cycle known to us as the ‘precession of the equinoxes’. They referred to this celestial cycle as the ‘Great Year of the Pleiades.” The zodiacal ages correspond to and parallel the cycles of human civilization and culture – and the evolution and decline, or degeneration, of consciousness. Let us understand this from the outset. It is perhaps counter-intuitive, but this much we know: the evolution of consciousness does not always proceed in an upward (or forward) trajectory. The truth is, this planet is far older than the history books tell us. Archaeologists are continually pushing dates back further and further as new discoveries come to light. Civilizations have come and gone from the Earth, rising and falling for aeons in fact, before Palaeolithic man. Primitive cultures all around the planet have hints in their mythology of a Golden Age – a time in which their distant ancestors were far more advanced than themselves. The cosmic cycles of the zodiacal ages can be seen as massive consciousness-carrying waves of the vast Kosmic mind. Everything that takes place in the macrocosm (the cosmos) is reflected in the microcosm (man). This was expressed in the aphorism, from a fundamental teaching of the perennial philosophy: “As above, so below.” Our twelve month Earth year, for example, with its seasons and equinoxes is a microcosm of a far more immense celestial cycle. The atoms within our bodies and the cells they form have their own polarities and magnetism and radiation – just like the planets of our solar system. As above, so below.

Evolution…..and Involution…

We sit at the brink of the Aquarian Age, a time in which an evolutionary shift is destined to occur within our collective consciousness. We are in a time of transition, which is probably the reason life is so chaotic. Just like in the birthing process, the moment of the transition is the most fraught. Our civilisation may disappear. It may not, who knows. We have another hundred years plus before we are officially in the new age. The ancient wisdom teachings tell us that a new Golden Age will come, a time in which humankind will once again flourish. But what we have to go through between now and then – we do not know. One day, we will no longer see the Divine as distant and uninvolved, inconceivably unreachable – but rather humanity will realize that we are Gods in the making ourselves. According to the hidden teachings life is a process of involution and evolution. Involution was the descent into matter as Spirit emanated a portion of itself downwards into denser and denser forms. Evolution is the gradual ascent, by the ‘Divine Spark’ (or monad) to rise up through these dense forms – through a process of transmutation. Eventually, vibrating once more in conscious harmony with the Absolute. It seems clear however, that this ascent of evolution is not a steady one. It is more a spiralling one, with periodic falls or downward slopes along the way.

The age of Materialism…

As a collective we have become so enamoured and convinced that the world we experience through our senses, the objective world, is the real world. We have become so enmeshed in materialism that we have lost our connection with the divine spark that is within us. This dive into density really went into overdrive in the seventeenth Century with the age of technological invention. The industrial revolution catalysed the rapid rise of economic materialism and the beginnings of modern scientific research. This knowledge has and will, take us far. But our blind spot (rather larger than a spot in many instances) has been the relegation of anything that cannot be ‘scientifically proven’ to the shadows. Science is limited by its own instruments of observation. Back in antiquity it was held that esotericism consisted of four ways: religion, philosophy, science and art. They were each different but interrelated ‘ways to the truth’ – which lay, as truth does, at the centre. Then the four ways diverged and with their separation we were led further and further away from the truth. We are seeing now the emergence of wary re-connection between science and religion, as the discoveries of quantum physics are opening our awareness and understanding to the truth that there is a hidden unity behind form.

The occult made a sudden re-emergence in the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth Centuries, a time where magic and spiritualism became fashionable. But for the most part, the hidden world of esotericism has been lost to us. Scientists study the cosmos, but not the kosmos. One of the reasons is esoteric knowledge has long been protected. The non-initiated were not trusted with this knowledge. It was understood such knowledge could be distorted or misused and so it was only handed from teacher to pupil within the mystery schools of the ancient world and the pupil was one who had undergone a long and difficult preparation and initiation before admittance to the inner circle. Esotericism was the inner circle, and only a very privileged few were admitted to this circle. The outer circle was exoteric; it comprised the vast majority, the masses, and it only hinted at the mysteries of the inner circle (the truth) in the form of myths, allegories and symbols which in many cases were claimed to be ‘actual historical accounts’. You can still see today in some of the temples of ancient Egypt, an outer, public space and beyond it, an inner sanctum. The inner temple was for the initiates of the mystery teachings. The great pyramid was constructed, according to the hidden teachings, for the purposes of these initiation rituals. The initiate underwent a ‘death’ process, in which the truth of the immortality of his or her soul was revealed through the actual experience of consciousness leaving the body. It was a tomb, of sorts, but not in the common usage of the word.

We live in an age where science, the laws of logic and rationalism prevail. Esoteric knowledge, so long concealed from us, holds no place in our general understanding of life and our universe. This is to our detriment and it is the reason behind this book. In our attempt to understand consciousness, we inevitably enter the realms of the mysterious – the esoteric world, a world only the high priests and keepers of the hidden teachings in the past were privileged to enter. To go forward, like the spiral-like journey of our consciousness, we must come back around to the past.

The Subject Creates the Object…

Scientists will eventually be compelled, if they are not already, to realize that objective knowledge depends upon the properties of the psyche. There is nothing science has told us in the past, is telling us now, or will tell us in the future from its observations and tests for something ‘being true’ that is or will be the last word, true and correct forever. Facts themselves rely on the senses and we can quite easily demonstrate how unreliable our senses are! Our senses form our subjective world and there is nothing factual about our subjective world. Thus we will only ever get fragments of views of the world, bits and pieces, from our science. New discoveries build on the old paradigms and before long they themselves are transcended by newer ones. The full picture may eventually be revealed to us, but as we may surmise from a cursory glance at the cosmic cycles of astrology, the evolutionary journey of our consciousness has a very long way to go.

The esoteric knowledge tells us that all fields of consciousness are essentially transitory. We are all observers and participants in a constantly changing existence. This existence, as mentioned above, is organized and limited by way of a sequence of concentric fields that arise as the macrocosm projects part of itself down into lower fields of existence – the human, animal and plant kingdoms. Everything is a smaller, more limited version of a higher emanation. This idea that we are observers of a constantly changing existence has relevance to the purposes of this quest we are on. Essentially, in not grasping this fact we cannot help but personalize our experience. This personalization of experience is one of the reasons for our suffering. If we can understand, even by small increments, that to depersonalize our lives is to approach the truth of the philosophy that life is ‘a passing parade.’ Such a philosophy is in perfect alignment with the ancient wisdom teachings. Self-observation is a key requisite in this quest and we cannot observe ourselves unless we are able to find some measure of detachment, or depersonalization from our experience of life.

I have known good and evil,

Sin and virtue, right and wrong;

I have judged and been judged;

I have passed through birth and death,

Joy and sorrow, heaven and hell;

And in the end I realized

That I am in everything

And everything is in me.

(Hazrat Inayat Khan)

Fields of Consciousness…

We share the consciousness of the Kosmic Mind, the larger consciousness system, with all sentient beings and the teachings tell us, non-sentient ones as well. Even the plant kingdom has a rudimentary consciousness. Experiments have shown that plants have memory, for instance, and that they experience primitive emotions like fear. The wisdom teachings have much to say about the consciousness of the animal and plant kingdoms. You may have heard the term ‘nature spirits’. These so called nature spirits belong to the diva or angelic kingdom. The consciousness of the ‘beings’ at this particular plane of existence is highly intelligent but completely instinctual. They do not possess imagination. Their role is to repeat patterns in nature, to make a ‘perfect reproduction of the divine plan.’ There are various levels of existence and consciousness within a kosmos that is teeming with entities. Some we see, most we do not.

Human consciousness. What can we say of it? The wisdom teachings tell us that human consciousness is simply one form of consciousness. They say there is a much higher consciousness and this higher consciousness is like a ‘field of being’ within which we exist. We humans have the faculty of mind and we can see the mind as a psycho-spiritual fluidic medium that is capable of moving between various fields of consciousness. Consciousness is a property of the Divine spirit – it is an aspect of the life force itself and our consciousness is our particular field of being given to us by the Absolute. Our minds use consciousness to create our inner and outer world realities. I was surprised, and you may be also, to learn that the outer world we experience as the phenomenal world, the world of matter is not composed of any substance – but rather it is a condition. Matter is a condition of our existence in this third dimension we call reality. It is a condition of existence in space and time.

The Three States of Human Consciousness…

We know that consciousness is not dependent on wakefulness, nor on the body for that matter. When we fall asleep and dream, the mind continues to function quite happily. Dreams are a series of feelings, thoughts and images that pass through consciousness. Deep, dreamless sleep is different. Here consciousness and its agent the mind have departed to realms of which we know not. The very fact we wake up in the morning and return to the body, having been consciously absent for some considerable time, tells us quite clearly that consciousness is independent of the body. When we wake up, the sense of self returns. Here is the origin of our misguided belief that the body and the self, or the ego, are one and the same. We think the body-mind is who we are, that it IS our self, when in truth we are so much more.

So it appears, on examination, that there is a mind consciousness and a body consciousness. And it seems they are two different things. We lose body consciousness in sleep but obviously, continue to exist. If we dream, the mind is functioning within itself. However, when the mind withdraws as it does in deep sleep, or is driven out of the body by way of anaesthetic, coma or deep trance, consciousness too, is withdrawn, or somehow projected elsewhere. We have all heard stories of people who, under the influence of anaesthetic, when they were supposedly ‘out to it’, were able to report back on events that occurred while they were out, once they had returned to waking consciousness. In such cases mind consciousness has been projected out of the body.

We know that without the mind we could not see, or hear, feel or speak. All of our senses need the mind to perceive and interpret (or decode) the vibratory information they transmit from the world around us to our brains. It is the mind that creates distinction for us. It is the mind that selects and selection is a visible sign of materiality. Selection, or distinction creates the edges around ‘things’ in the world. Without these distinctions, everything would be a blur. So then, it is the mind that creates the world of separateness. The mind, as we know from experience, sends us a constant stream of thoughts: thoughts about the external universe and thoughts about our inner universe – our feelings and emotions. Without the mind consciousness, there could be no thoughts and no recognition of the outside world. We are limited by words when it comes to the mind. Words define. And this subject is not easily definable. Mind, it turns out, is a very difficult word. In the esoteric literature, we learn there are two minds, the higher mind and the lower, ordinary, or egoic mind. More of that later.

Mental states and feeling states are constantly changing. We have thousands of thoughts every day. We also have innumerable feelings and emotions; one moment we are happy and content, the next, a random thought pulls us into a darker place. We are rarely without the unending chatter of the inner monkey mind. Yet throughout all of this movement and energy, the comings and goings of mind and emotion, there is one constant. It is there, behind the activity of our thoughts. It is there when consciousness is projected in out of body states, it is there in the dream world. It is even there when the mind is not – when we are in the deepest sleep; it is what brings us back when we wake up. If we consider this, we must realize that there is a separate self which is apart from the mind. Perhaps we believe the mind consists of thoughts. But if we stop thinking for a moment (usually this is the best we can manage, a moment), we know we still have a mind, we are still conscious. Neither have disappeared. In fact we are more conscious than ever. So there is something in us which is not thought, it is behind thought. A part of us, somewhere deep within, knows of these changing states and simply watches them. Through all the years we have lived, as we passed through childhood and into adulthood, as our appearance altered with time, as our lives took different twists and turns, chapters ended, new ones unfolded, something within us remained constant. There is a knower that is beyond the busy-ness of our thoughts. It registers the changes, yet remains unchanged.

The Hazy World of Solid Matter…

Here is a thought: It is said that the unconscious mind accounts for up to 95 per cent of the sensory data we are immersed in. Which means most of the information in the world around us, in the form of vibratory energy, is not even registered by our conscious mind. It is reacting and responding to a mere five percent of what is ‘out there’, whilst the unconscious mind is absorbing the rest. Once upon a time it was believed the world of matter and the world of mind, or energy, were separate things. In 1687 Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and with it established mathematics as the foundation stone of the universe. Classical physics was born and right up until Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity from the 1900s it described the world around us adequately – particularly when it came to the movement of large objects by energetic forces. But as all things evolve, so did classical physics. In the early part of the 20^th Century, it dawned that Newton’s laws did not seem to work so well on the subatomic level. It was the beginning of a new physics – Quantum physics – as it was realized the world of the atom held many mysteries and so new ways of understanding and explaining them had to be found.

Quantum means ‘a discrete quantity of electromagnetic energy’. Max Planck published his theory that energy packets, called ‘quanta’, with their strange ability to exist as probability rather than actual objective things, was the ‘reality’ behind the seemingly solid world. We had discovered (or, more accurately, rediscovered) the power of electromagnetic energy and the truth that the world of matter is not solid. Rather it is a moving sea of energy, or light. It was at this time that scientists at the forefront of research claimed ‘all matter is ultimately the condensation of radiant energy’ – that is, of Light. The oldest teachings in the world, from esoteric religions of all traditions, tell us that God, the Sun and Light are synonymous. It is interesting to realize that scientists still don’t know what energy actually is. They say it is the source of everything in the universe – but what is it??

Energy never sleeps…

We now know that energy cannot be destroyed, it is merely converted to other forms. We see this happening in everyday life, as all that belongs to the world of form, all things material change and deteriorate over time. Entropy, the progression of complex systems to move towards a state of chaos, (or the second law of thermodynamics) – is a fundamental law in this third dimensional world. Energy is continually changing the form of material objects. Nothing is static. Pioneering researchers in the fields of science and spiritually believe consciousness is present throughout the universe, and that it is really a more subtle form of matter. Many are now telling us that our reality isholographic in nature and akin therefore to a giant computer generated ‘reality.’ (More of that in the next chapter).

So it has been clearly established that this apparently physical, three dimensional world is, in a very real sense, illusory – because that which appears solid to us, is in fact nothing more than interference patterns of electromagnetic energy which we are decoding via our sensory apparatus, to ‘create’ a solid reality. At a subatomic level, ‘reality’ is certainly not as it appears to be. As we said above, matter is not a substance, it is a condition. The subatomic particles that make up molecules that make up objects, can be both particles and waves at the same time. Let’s look at that:

The Old Wave or Particle Trick…

Physicist David Bohm came up with the idea of implicate and explicate orders of reality – by way of explaining the ability of subatomic particles to manifest as particles or as ‘blurry clouds of energy that behave as waves.’ The implicate order is a deeper level of reality (implicate means ‘enfolded’) and it is from this deeper level that all objects and appearances in the physical world emerge. Once they have emerged from the implicate they become part of the explicate – or unfolded order. They manifest then as separate entities: particles, bodies, trees. And then, as surely as they appear in the visible world, eventually they must disappear, back into the invisible. The energy, or light that was captured in form is released back into the universe. So there is a kind of swimming in and out of our reality: now you see us, now you don’t. Particles are not destroyed but rather they become enfolded back into the implicate order. Like us, when their time here is done they merge back into the invisible world. Everything in the cosmos, according to Bohm, is made out of the ‘seamless holographic fabric of the implicate order.’ Birth and death, form and formlessness, time and timelessness, separation and enmeshment, the drop and the ocean, the wave and the particle – all exist within a unified field. This is the integral reality. The implicate and the explicate are continually flowing into and out of each other in a type of holographic order, as nature presents us with a ‘great cosmic illusion’ – the illusion of material reality. But what is it that brings the particle, or the thing, out of the deeper level of reality, the implicate, and into the world of form?

At this subquantum level it was discovered, there is non-locality, or a form of instant communication between particles, defying Einstein’s law that nothing can go faster the speed of light. At this microscopic level, atoms and particles behave as if they are connected. There is ‘quantum entanglement’ happening at this level. Photons, or particles of light (the radiant light of earlier language) are apparently the stuff our universe is made of. Experiments have shown, repeatedly, that when a single photon is split into two particles and they are sent off in different directions and forced to ‘choose’ between two different routes, they both make the exact same decision to go one way or the other. In other words, they behave as if they were still one unit, one photon, as if they were still connected. Such is the invisible world. Subatomic particles not only move in and out of the visible world but they remain connected, once they have been connected, forever. They arise from a unified field of consciousness and there they are destined to remain – whether they manifest into particles and ‘appear’ in our world, or continue to flow together in the waveform world. This implicate, unified field, appears to be the birthplace of everything in the visible world. It is the invisible, unmanifest realm from which all that appears to be real in the manifest world comes into being. The Hindu religion calls the implicate Brahman. It is the Tao. It is Spirit. Or, as we have called it here, the Kosmic Mind. The Tibetan Buddhists call it the void – the non-void being the physical world. The wisdom teachings have revealed the Kosmic Mind is void only in one phase of its being – the in-breath, if you like. There is an out-breath phase in which the cosmos, the universe, and all the entities within it are re-manifested and the objective world comes again into being, according to karmic law. The Vedas say the physical world is brought into being through both the ‘veiling’ and ‘projecting’ powers of consciousness. Nature is the handiwork of the Absolute, the Kosmic Mind, when it is projected. Maya, a Sanskrit word, means illusion and magic. The teachings tell us that matter is an illusion of the mind; it is maya. That is, at its essence, matter is pure mind. This concept that mind is behind all matter, is known as mentalism.

“The world is but appearance, a shadow flung out of the timeless.” (Paul Brunton)

Mind Magic…

Consciousness brings the particle out of the invisible into the visible world. Whether it is the conscious intelligence of the elemental kingdom – builder of the natural world, or the conscious intelligence of our minds, we are all creating the objective world. This is the knowledge we have been given by the ancient teachings and it is corroborated today by leading edge scientists – the two grow closer by the day. Even so, we still don’t know what ‘mind’ actually is. Perception is really a cluster of sensations which the mind constructs into the ‘things’ of the visible world. In truth, the object and the sensation are not separate, they are one and the same because they are both produced and moulded in space-time reality by the mind. This is a complicated subject, of which I am touching only the perimeter in our overview of consciousness. Sensations are clusters through which mind creates a unified whole, or a complex from and this gives us a unified picture of whatever it is we are seeing – an object. We have learnt that everything, in this ‘physical’ reality of ours depends on the decoding ability and thus the consciousness of the observer. Consciousness can be a matter of choice – where our attention goes we go. And where our attention goes, so too does the decoding apparatus of our five senses. So goes the mind. Whatever we experience cannot be separated from ourselves: the experiencer. The observer is always coupled with the observed and so there is always a knowing consciousness behind every object we perceive. What we perceive outside of ourselves is transformed in the brain, via the senses, into actual, seemingly real objects in the third dimension, or space-time construct. And it is consciousness that enables the whole process. We know that if we are unconscious to the data swirls around us, as we are when we are immersed in creative work or activity that takes all our attention, or we are asleep, we do not perceive the world around us. The mind in the first instance, has become so focused that our awareness of the objective world temporarily slips away, disappearing into some sort of abstract world.

Einstein said: “the field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” In other words, it is the field of consciousness that determines the life and times of the particle – or the object manifesting in the physical universe. There must then be a higher order of intelligence, the field, which organizes this material world of ours. The esoteric literature tells us this is so. It tells us that everything works ‘from above downward.’ ‘As above, so below’, not the other way around as the prevailing scientific worldview would have us believe: consciousness, they say, arises after matter has prepared the way. This is far from the truth. The wisdom teachings tell us the generator of consciousness itself is ‘thesoul entity.’ We will talk more of the soul later.

Bohm believed not only that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, but that it is present in various degrees of enfoldment and unfoldment in all matter. It is meaningless, he believed, to see the universe as composed of parts. He was not the only one to view reality in this way.

“The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.” (Sir James Jeans, Pioneering Physicist)

My Big Toe…

Thomas Campbell, NASA physicist and creator of the My Big Toe theory (Toe = Theory Of Everything) is a brilliant mind and one of the few scientists (in mathematics and physics, he is ex-NASA) able to embrace an esoteric view at the same time. He is a big thinker, as evidenced by his ‘Theory of Everything.’ Campbell corroborates the wisdom teachings beautifully. He says: Reality is a data stream. Reality, is simply information, or a stream of data, coming at us digitally (in discrete packets) to be decoded by our senses. So, for example, photons, those discrete packets of light, hit our eye and are converted into electrical impulses which travel through the nervous system and stimulate neurons that create for us, the objective world. We call this reality we see, reality. This reality, the material universe is a construct of consciousness. It is the mind via the brain that is interpreting this data stream through the sensory system which converts the sensations of vision, hearing etc into the spatial, time organized world of material reality. Thus, says Campbell: ‘Consciousness is the Fundamental Reality!’ He poses a mind bender to illustrate the point. The brain can be artificially stimulated to the effect of replicating the exact same experiences as reality itself. There is no difference in the two experiences, seeing something ‘for real’ or being in a complete black void, and having the brain stimulated to enable the brain’s owner to see and experience the same thing! What is present in both cases? The observer. Consciousness. The mind is the generator of experience. The background field of consciousness remains the same, and the mind is constructing ‘reality’ the same – whether or not the rest of the body or the actual objective world is involved. We need not be so surprised by this experiment in fact – as this is exactly what occurs when we are dreaming. Our minds are creating a fictitious reality, or we might say a highly subjective one, that feels acutely real and objective to us at the time.

“The conscious act of observation causes the collapsed manifestation of a probability function.

Our physical reality is entangled with our mental, emotional, spiritual reality.

Our outer world and inner worlds are connected.

Everything is energy.” (Thomas Campbell)

We know that if we do not see something, it does not exist in present moment reality for us. If we are lost in the creative process, or deep thought, we enter a trance-like state where we are oblivious to the world around us. But meanwhile the brain selects bits of information to decode from the vast, multitudinous frequency fields of information around us. The unconscious (overconscious might be a better word) is perceiving these endless streams of information, though it is only what we choose to pay attention to that ultimately, becomes real for us because it is then projected into our consciousness field, or our field of awareness, by the mind. Whatever is not projected into consciousness remains in the waveform world. The act of observation is creating the material world through collapsing the probability wave, or in other words, attention pulls the wave-like energy field from a potential down into a particular (particle).

“It is better not to view a particle as a permanent entity, but rather as an instantaneous event. Sometimes these events link together to create the illusion of permanent entities.” (Shrodinger)

The Brain of Memory…

Research has shown that the brain records everything we have ever experienced. We certainly don’t consciously recall everything we have experienced – but somewhere, in the holographic brain, the recordings are stored. The watcher is watching. This means all that our conscious minds omit (through sheer necessity) to observe is nevertheless recorded in the unconscious, which many believe lies beyond the physical brain, out there, somewhere in ‘the field.’ Furthermore, there have been studies done that conclude less than 50 per cent of what we see is actually based on the information coming in via the eyes. The remaining 50 per cent is constructed out of our expectationsof what we think the world should look like; demonstrating that while the eyes are our organs of vision, it is the brain that actually ‘sees’. And what it is ‘seeing’, is what we expect to see, based on our past experiences and stored somewhere beneath our conscious awareness, in the mysterious unconscious. This is the mind at work – creating distinctions on a more subtle level. The vast repository of information held in the unconscious is non-local – they have never found a ‘location’ for the unconscious in the physical brain. It exists purely in an energetic form and only becomes known to us when consciousness plucks it out of the wave world and by the sensory perceptive processes of observation (or attention), turns it into a particle. This observation could be in the form of focusing attention on an event in the past, a memory in other words. Memory has the potential to evoke emotions, as we know, just as if that event was happening in real time. The body responds by producing the neuropeptides of emotion that we experience as actual physiological sensations. So the memory of a past event becomes a present ‘reality’ for us. And what is the present in fact? The moment we try to grasp it, it has already fallen into the past. It too, like memory, has become just a thought, an idea. What then, is this thing we call reality? Clearly, there is no fixed reality. Reality is relative. It is all a subjective experience, with the brain appearing to be a receiver, decoder and transmitter of information.

So far…

So far we have established that consciousness is a background field that, according to the esoteric tradition emanates from the Divine, Kosmic Mind – or the larger consciousness system. Consciousness descends down through the levels or planes of existence in concentric arrangement right down to the cell and the atom, impregnating all with the essence of the Divine. It is the life force itself, the animator of all of life. Present even in rudimentary forms from the elemental kingdom up through the plant and animal kingdoms. We have seen that the physical world we see is anything but solid. Rather, it is an ever fluctuating sea of energy. Our minds via the brain are deciphering this energetic sea. The mind brings an invisible ethereal order down into the manifest visible world of form through the decoding apparatus of our sensory system. More simply, the mind is a device that enables us to create distinctions. It enables us to perceive a world of separateness. Contrary to the scientific view that matter gives rise to consciousness, consciousness is in fact primary to matter.