A Journey into Consciousness

Scientists now say that energy and matter are one.  They must take the next full step to realize that consciousness and energy and matter are one.
Seth – Dreams, ‘Evolution’ and Value Fulfillment Sept 25th, 1979

Are we there yet?

Quite a huge leap for us isn’t it?  Especially, I’d guess, for scientists.  By and large, they don’t seem to like Consciousness very much.  I suspect that’s because Intelligence gets in the way.

But I digress.  Already.  Before I’ve even started.

Re-finding that Seth quote yesterday, I discovered that – while it had gone right over my head the first time I read it – I was now ready to look it squarely in the eye and at least attempt to see what it was showing me.

I’ll start by travelling, figuratively, inside my body.  Here I can locate a cell.  It’s very small.  I’d need a microscope to see it.  However I know it’s there.  At this very moment it’s busily doing whatever it is that cell is supposed to do, in order to keep my body working.  The cell is matter – definitely; it’s part of me.  It is also energy; if I could look deeper, I’d see all the electrons and photons and so forth whizzing around it – pure energy.  And is it conscious?  Yes.  I’m happy to accept that ‘my’ consciousness is spread around my body, not lodged in my head or heart, for example.  I’m also aware of the concept of Cellular Consciousness, as proposed by Bruce Lipton, which is gradually taking hold in some areas of science.

Right, so my cells are conscious units of matter/energy – every single one of them.  Are they conscious of the entity I call me?  Maybe, dimly.  They certainly work very hard to keep me in shape, to repair me when bits get injured or protect me when I’m ‘under attack’ from other conscious bits of energy/matter.  Perhaps somewhere in their consciousness they have a blueprint of the organ they are part of – the lung or kidney or nerve.  Possibly their consciousness extends to the physical body that contains all those organs and substances – the one encased in skin – the one I’m accustomed to define as ‘me’.  Or not.

Where shall I go next?  I’m tempted to start scrabbling around hunting for the consciousness in my pen, my mug, my keyboard.  They all have matter, after all, and thus energy.  And I think I’m just catching a glimpse of the consciousness inherent in them, but to find it, I need to head off somewhere else first.

Let’s go here:

Oh I love fractals!  They make it all so easy.  So that – if we think in terms of pure consciousness – could have been me heading into my body and finding an organ, and then a cell, then delving into that cell and finding other stuff that is also a perfect replica of all the rest.  Similarly, the ‘me-body-thing’ could have been somewhere in the middle of the zoom and ‘my’ consciousness would be out there in something far vaster and wider.  Am I aware that I am a part of that something?  Maybe dimly…  Maybe a bit more so than I was a year ago.

Like the scientists (and others) I get ensnared in Intelligence.  I start out wondering how conscious something is, although I never ask ‘how matter’ or ‘how energy’ it is.  That’s because I’m linking consciousness to thinking and knowing.  I may know things a cat doesn’t and think things it can’t, and vice versa, but I’m no more or less conscious than it.  When I can shake off the intelligence thing and accept that consciousness simply IS, it becomes far easier.

I’m all caught up in ‘I think, therefore I am’.  But where am I when I stop thinking?  When am I, where I stop thinking, for that matter?  It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, I’m no place and no time.  I’ve moved beyond them and beyond my physical body, yet ‘I’ am still conscious.

Regular readers won’t be surprised to find remote viewing popping in here.  I’m quoting it because it’s a state in which logical/intelligent thinking seriously gets in the way.  My viewing partner and I find that frequently.  Sensations arrive from the location or object to be viewed, whether that is in the past, present or future, but then the mind starts to suggest something like, “Ah, well if I’m viewing a railway station that must be the platform, or the buffet…” and then you lose it.  When the intelligent mind has nothing much to latch on to (the location of a specific person a week into the future, for example) the viewings tend to work best.

In a recent post from Ask The Council, I was given answers to a question about how RV works.  Here’s a small portion of the reply:

The Council says when you are able to do remote viewing, you are very connected to your higher spiritual self. They say because we are all one, in a spiritual sense, someone who is able to view remotely is theoretically able to know anything about anyone, anywhere.

The Council says remote viewing works as we become more than our human selves. With the belief in remote viewing and by trying to accomplish this, you open up part of yourself that’s ready to see what you choose to view remotely. Because we are all connected and all one, when you view remotely you are really looking at an expanded version of yourself that includes others you are connected to.

Is ‘c’ the speed of enlightenment/consciousness?

So Consciousness:  We have it at cellular level and beyond, and those of us ‘evolved’ enough to be able to, can expand it outwards to where time/space/physicality is no longer a barrier and connect with those with whom we have a conscious connection.  Beyond that, of course, we’re connected to everyone and everything – even my mug and my pen…

 

Living in Fractals

I could easily get lost in fractals.  If you clicked on the link in the previous sentence, you might begin to see what I mean.

There’s something about fractals that has fascinated me since I first started playing with them in the early eighties on my Z X Spectrum.  I had no idea what they were, back then.  The mathematics completely passed me by.  It still does, to be honest, but at least now I know how they work and why they matter so much to LIFE.

I could explain fractals simply by saying they are self-similar patterns that repeat at many scales, from the cosmic to the microscopic – like the way a branch from a tree resembles the shape of the tree itself, and a twig from the branch resembles both and so on.  A picture can paint a thousand words, though, so I strongly recommend that you go exploring the breathtakingly beautiful fractal patterns to be found on You Tube.

If you have about an hour to spare sometime, there’s a good overview of fractals in this film, made while Mandlebrot – the man who discovered them – was still alive:

Benoit Mandlebrot is a total hero of mine.  His genius in moving away from the traditional smoothness of geometry and “opening up roughness for investigation” allowed the discovery of a dimension somewhere between the second and third – which is truly awesome.

The more you look for them, the more you find fractals.  Obviously they are there in nature.  We see them in cloud formations, coastlines, mountains, plants and within our own bodies.  It’s no coincidence that a frost pattern looks like a fern or that the structures in my lungs branch like a tree.  No such thing as coincidence…

I have another theory, though.   I think fractals operate in time just as they do in space.  I think we live in and through fractals.  They explain why patterns of behaviour keep on repeating through history.  They allow us to see why ‘self-similar’ events, ranging in scale from one person’s internal conflicts, through family or workplace disputes to full-on civil wars continue to rattle through time and space, reappearing with the same swirls and eddies we see in a Julia set.

Once I look at at the underlying pattern of ‘life, the universe and everything’ in fractal terms, I can see how my mood or health at a given point relates to what is happening for people I’m connected to at an emotional or mental level despite being many miles away in physical terms.

Even the transits and conjunctions my astrologically-minded friends describe to me in terms of planets, eclipses and new moons fit in effortlessly to the pattern.  I no longer have to struggle to see how or why Mercury retrograde  is ‘causing’ me communication problems.  It’s pure chicken-and-egg – with all the patterns (cosmic to cellular) being intricately bound together in an ever-changing pattern, of which my – and your – life is an infinitesimal yet vital part.

 

 

 

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I devote a couple of chapters to the way fractals and physical life are interconnected in my book LIFE: A Player’s Guide – my best attempt to date to explain how LIFE works.