WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS

The subject of this article is  about something that involves everything we experience, namely….what Is consciousness?

William James once wrote that the discovery of precisely what is consciousness will make all other scientific discoveries pale by comparison. Taken from a special report by World Science

THE HARD PROBLEM – WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS

In sci­ence, plen­ty of prob­lems are hard. But per­haps just one is so grue­somely try­ing that sci­en­tists them­selves have termed it, well, “the hard prob­lem.” How does con­scious­ness arise—the liv­ing, aware ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing?

Some the­o­ries hold that it comes from, or is even iden­ti­cal to, elec­tri­cal and chem­i­cal pro­cesses known to un­fold in the brain. Oth­ers say it arises else­where: in some even sub­tler, yet-un­dis­cov­ered brain pro­cesses, or per­haps a mind-stuff quite dis­tinct from the brain—some call it a soul.

Few on ei­ther side claim to have fi­nal an­swers. But they of­ten ar­gue pas­sion­ately over who’s at least in the right play­ing field.

TESTING PROPOSITIONS
Now a group of re­search­ers has be­gun a study that they say might set­tle the is­sue. “We can ac­tu­ally test this, and put and end to all these de­bates,” said Sam Par­nia, a crit­i­cal care doc­tor at Weill Cor­nell Med­i­cal Cen­ter in New York.

Par­nia has spent years stu­dying re­ports that some car­di­ac-ar­rest pa­tients keep hav­ing clear, dis­tinct thought pro­cesses af­ter they’re clin­ic­ally dead and de­tect­a­ble brain ac­ti­vity has ceased. Pa­tients com­monly re­count these men­tal ex­pe­ri­ences, which of­ten in­clude see­ing a light at the end of a tun­nel, af­ter be­ing re­vived.

Parnia and colleagues aim to put these re­ports to a test: spe­cif­ic sounds will be played to such pa­tients, and they’ll be asked to re­call the sounds af­ter re­viv­ing. If they do, it would con­firm the ac­counts of thoughts with­out brain ac­ti­vity—sup­port­ing the claims that “con­scious­ness is a sep­a­rate, yet un­disco­vered sci­en­tif­ic ent­ity” from the brain, Par­nia wrote in a pa­per in the the April 23 ad­vance on­line edi­tion of the re­search jour­nal Med­i­cal Hy­pothe­ses.

CRITIQUES
The study “looks like an in­ter­est­ing pro­pos­al,” wrote Da­vid Chal­mers, a phi­los­o­pher and di­rec­tor of the Cen­ter for Con­scious­ness at the Aus­tral­ian Na­tional Un­ivers­ity in Can­ber­ra, Aus­tral­ia, in an e­mail. If the claims are con­firmed, it would “pose an in­ter­est­ing chal­lenge for sci­en­tists to ex­plain,” re­marked Chal­mers, au­thor of sev­er­al books on con­scious­ness.

But it probably would­n’t set­tle the most bas­ic, long­stand­ing dis­pute: wheth­er mind and brain are dif­fer­ent things, Chal­mers added. For in­stance, even if pa­tients’ claims are ver­i­fied, they “could be due to as­pects of brain func­tion­ing dur­ing car­di­ac ar­rest that are not cap­tured by the mea­sure­ments” Par­nia is us­ing, Chal­mers wrote. These mea­sure­ments are tak­en by elec­tro­en­ce­pha­lo­gram, a tech­nique in which sen­si­tive elec­trodes at­tached to the head rec­ord elec­tri­cal brain ac­ti­vity.

TRIALS AND PROTOCOLS
Par­nia said the tri­als be­gan on a pi­lot ba­sis in Jan­u­ary at two U.K. hos­pi­tals with 10 pa­tients; he aims to ex­pand the study to oth­er coun­tries and re­cruit over 1,000 pa­tients.

Per­haps the most strin­gent test in the study is al­so the one that ad­dresses the most ex­tra­or­di­nary no­tion. Crit­ic­ally ill pa­tients some­times re­port “out-of-body” ex­pe­ri­ences in which they feel they have floated out of their own bod­ies and are watch­ing them­selves from above.

Mark well: Par­nia is not test­ing wheth­er pa­tients gen­u­inely feel their minds have floated away. He wants to test wheth­er the minds ac­tu­ally do float away—a con­tro­ver­sial idea to say the least. His team plans to place pic­tures stra­te­gic­ally around pa­tients’ rooms where they’re vis­i­ble only from near the ceil­ing. Pa­tients would la­ter be asked about the im­ages. “Thus, the claims of con­scious awareness and out-of-body ex­pe­ri­ences will be tested in­de­pen­dent­ly,” he wrote in the pa­per.

FOR OR AGAINST AN “OUTRAGEOUS” VIEW?
He ad­mit­ted some would find the idea out­land­ish. A study pub­lished in 2002 found that just elec­tric­ally stim­u­lat­ing spe­cif­ic brain ar­eas could trig­ger an out-of-body-like ex­pe­ri­ence—ev­i­dence to some that the sensa­t­ions are il­lu­so­ry.

Dan­iel Den­nett, di­rec­tor of the Cen­ter for Cog­ni­tive Stud­ies at Tufts Un­ivers­ity in Med­ford, Mass., wrote in an e­mail that he’s nev­er seen ev­i­dence that the events are an­ything more than hal­lu­cina­t­ions. The ex­pe­ri­ments, “if con­ducted with scru­pu­lous care,” will surely con­firm this, added Den­nett, a phil­o­so­pher who is al­so au­thor of sev­er­al books on con­scious­ness.

Yet, said Par­nia—in de­fense of the op­po­site view—pa­tients have ac­cu­rately re­ported events in their hos­pi­tal rooms that oc­curred dur­ing out-of-body ex­pe­ri­ences, while they were clin­ic­ally dead. “If we get 200 peo­ple, and all claim to have an out-of-body ex­pe­ri­ence but none can iden­ti­fy the im­ages, that would very much sup­port the idea that this is a false mem­o­ry,” Par­nia said. “If on the oth­er hand, 200 peo­ple iden­ti­fy these im­ages… then we’d have to ac­cept that may­be hu­man con­scious­ness, as bi­zarre as it may sound, could be non-local to the brain.”

Tag: What Is Consciousness

INTRODUCTORY QUESTION

Why is living consciously an indispensable part of the healing process?

For me, there is much evidence that our healing is enhanced by just simple consciousness being present.  This is why our body immediately sends conscious awareness, and even with lightening or urgent speed, to the site of any acute illness, injury or distress.  If we have an accident such as when a rock falls on my foot…. ouch…. doesn’t it hurt instantaneously and in the very same conscious moment!

Or if we have a car accident and break a bone, modern emergency medicine will come to the rescue. A doctor can give us a pain killer (to make us  fell less conscious) and reset our broken bone mechanically. In such situations, consciousness is amply present and not an issue. We just need the doctor for a mechanical fix, just like  when we need to fix a car. If our consciousness needs fixing, the doctor is not likely to have a clue.

Thus allopathic medicine can well treat acute  or accidental situations, including with pain killers and by again setting bones mechanically. For modern medicine is so immensely grounded in a root math-based, mechanical, consciousness-absent vision of the 17th century. We just don’t recognize it as “a” worldview but rather as “the” worldview. Latter I’ll discuss how critically important it is to wisely choose your healing worldview. This ideology of nature that currently dominates and guides modern medicine actually denies the existence of any “ghost in the machine”  – unless consciousness can be brought into the fold -  “scientifically” described in a lab by math-measured/mechanical means!

BRINGING ISSUE OF CONSCIOUSNESS/UNCONSCIOUSNESS BACK INTO THE HEALING ARTS

With deeper chronic ailments, the opposite, however, is true as to the best treatment approach. The same consciousness that has tried to heal the body now has presumably failed to do so. Imagine it has burnt out in the process, lacks force and ultimately leaves the scene. The pain stops but the illness remains and has deepened. So rather than there being an on-going conscious awareness or connection to whatever is hurt, there is now a disconnection or lack of awareness. And this disconnection or numbness can become deeper and deeper over time until a tissue dies.

If an arthritis patient, for example, still has a lot of pain, this is actually a GREAT sign of hope or that they are not yet too far gone.

And because such consciousness-depletion processes occur unhampered, we now have growing epidemics of what I call consciousness illnesses. Modern medicine profoundly fails to reverse these conditions. Again this is very simply because the underling mechanical worldview hasn’t a clue as to what to do. This tragically applies to the conditions of Alzheimer’s patients, those suffering from diabetes and having neuropathy (stepping on a nail and feeling nothing), or the scary and frightening lack of awareness of spreading cancer.

So to give a clue as to how such unconscious conditions come about and work, first it is vital to know that  “healing” is simply a process of reconnection.

So defined, chronic diseases or ills are actually illnesses of consciousness. Why has to do with consciousness being the gateway to the connection and reconnection of our being.  We then are not first or dominantly focused on fixing what represents matter and energy in our bodies but rather what shows signs of consciousness or unconsciousness! What a different perspective!

MAYA

In the Indian philosophy of consciousness there is such a thing as maya. It is the surface reality that fools us about the depths. Is the western mechanical/math-bound vision of nature grounded in that “maya.” I’m going to argue it is – and sorry for knocking down the presumed highest intelligence and wisdom of an Einstein or other math whiz.

An acute illness happens briefly or in what I call “the surface of time.” The treatment approach is likewise superficial and/or mechanical. With deeper ailments which are consciousness illnesses, the superficial/mechanical approach predictably and always fails. This is because literally all chronic diseases involve a deeper “consciousness-disconnection.”

The gross sign may be a physical tear or cut or open wound. The more subtle signs may include the presence of acidity, toxicity and inflammation. If any of these acute ailments are left as is, not healed but suppressed, over time there is an unnoticed slipping of consciousness - and tragically with little or no knowledge at all of how to reverse the process. Lives are ruined or left to develop worse consciousness ailments.

RE-UNDERSTANDING CHRONIC ILLS

All the major chronic illnesses of our times can be thus or so re-understood, and I will argue very profoundly and more effectively for their treatment and reversal.

Arthritis, for example, is the result of inflammation and acidity, and centered more at the joints (burning out the connective-consciousness where bones are meant to connect as part of the wholeness of our body). It is not the result of a wearing down of those joints as modern medical mythology would prefer to believe – and which better fits the modern underlying mechanical paradigm! Actually the more one uses one’s joints, as with exercise, the less one is ever likely to develops arthritis!

How and why do fire, inflammation, toxicity, oxidation, and acidity “burn out consciousness” is another large topic, but it is one that is very essential for understand healing overall – and imparting that understanding to others makes one quintessentially a healer.

And when a person suffers from a lowered consciousness they are literally in the dark. They do not know where best to turn to find the light.

As when fire burns down a house, inner inflammation will burn away the forces that hold together our body. It will undermine one’s consciousness. The wife of an old friend of mine (75 years of age) the other day emailed me that he, after years of being on the absolute worst of diets – McDonald-type food, couldn’t find his way back home and forgot where he parked his car!

TURNING TO HELP WE CAN TRUST

Now when a chronic ill person turns to someone whom they believe can help and whom they can truly trust to uplift them up and out of their illness – hopefully they will make a wise choice.

They are willing to pay dearly for this help and guidance as well. This tends to be a turning to a licensed MD trained as an allopath or in the mechanical worldview but who evidences his or her knowing with a diploma on the wall or showing they have passed very rigorous requirements of medical school and any subsequent specialized training.

But medical school teaches mostly the zenith high-level left-brain skills (learning calculus and math-based, mechanical principles of physics and chemistry before allowed to enter med school).

Sorry to say, but that healing or unifying worldview actually still leaves one in the dark in relationship to consciousness illnesses. Thus a person in the dark is turning for guidance to another who is also in the dark – and of course this won’t work.

The math-bound vision as an overall guiding map, a healing or unified worldview, is actually not just off the mark. It is the absolute pinnacle left-brain dominant view, the worst of preliminary trainings for knowing how to heal chronic illnesses. It guarantees a later failure in practice – when trying to understand and treat those chronic ills.

It is actually not just non-healing but anti-healing knowledge. This is because it strips awareness of the role of consciousness in healing and promotes what is separative rather than connective on a deeper level than that of maya, the surface of our consciousness.

It opposes the root knowledge of the very simplest principles of how systemic diseases come about through a gradual depletion of consciousness.

However, it works dramatically well and effectively for emergency medicine. The drama of rescuing accident victims feeds the  illusion that the same approach works for deep, non-surface chronic ills.

IMPORTANCE THUS OF (AND CARE IN CHOOSING) A FOUNDATION HEALING WORLDVIEW

There are countless philosophies that philosophers have proposed over the ages but only a few are structured to guide the healing arts. These are the one’s we need to focus on and chose between.  Each has a profoundly different effect. For example, iff I want to take an herb, do I analyze its chemical composition (per the modern western view) its yin/yang properties (Chinese view)  or whether it is still a living or boiled-to-death plant (the Essene view). Or do we look at how it affects different body-types (the Ayurvedic view). Or do we try to figure out its Godly or satanic properties, perhaps as guided by what’s mentioned in the Bible (the medieval, prior western view).

I have a very different philosophy than any of these and for the overall mapping of our healing. My experience tells me there is indeed a  Oneness to nature that all these philosophies recognize and alternatively try to access. Then because we are microcosms of that macrocosm, when we heal we come back to our own oneness within. To heal, we reconnect. We also can lose our way immensely, become ill or disconnect. When we do, we need to have the absolute clearest, most powerful guiding philosophy of how to do so. Otherwise we get lost and remain ill.

Or we turn again to doctors, and hope or trust they know their way and are not themselves in the dark. If so, they will misguide us and we get yet more ill.

Thus it is critical to have an overall philosophy of healing that is sound. Mine begins with a recognition of the underlying oneness, which all such philosophies again do so as well. The formula E=mc² expresses this in the mathematical view, or matter and energy being seen as one. The taichi symbol does the same in Chinese healing philosophy – showing how yin and yang are integrally one. But the way these philosophies disagree or diverge and differ is that they all begin to choose different  first dualities - like again matter and energy in the mathematical view and yin and yang in the Chinese view. With the Essene philosophy it was a path or life and death guided by the Godly and Satanic – a prelude to the medieval view.

Thus and again, before you even begin to try to heal yourself, take time to study and choose a healing philosophy. Down the line, it will determine all else – and the final outcome of your efforts. Make the choice with utmost care as a first step. Make the choice consciously and you will see the powerful impact it has.

HOW MY HEALING VIEW DIFFERS

My view differs from all the visions that have ever been proposed in the past on our planet. The reason there is a divergence is because I insist that the defining first duality of my worldview – the first split of consciousness differentiations  – the movement away of seeing the Oneness – is defined strictly by the Oneness and absolutely nothing else.

Why? Internally this is because when I was a teenager, and after having been a math prodigy, my left brain shut down and I learned to not only see the world in a right brain way – but more importantly how to use the right brain dominantly to tell the left how to conceptualize a real, non-illusionary way of seeing our world.

Externally or the second reason why is to eliminate cultural subjectivity, bias  – the cultural whim of choosing one path or the other that isn’t really getting us back to the true underlying Oneness directly and most powerfully so we can heal. If the path is most purely known, the methods of healing become far more potent and authentic. Otherwise it is easy to chose very illusionary paths to remain yet more  ill.

My healing philosophy is the foundation of our all. It is what I trust the most to guide everything else. Don’t thus skip this step of choosing a workable philosophy. And I thus emphasize the importance of that philosophy because it is again, if I need to repeat this a thousand times, what most powerfullypulls the whole understanding together as One. Iself represents the healing process itself.

So now to the next step. How do we define a first distinguishing duality in such a worldview? We need to choose it carefully.

OUR CONSCIOUSNESS AND BRAIN SPLIT

Nature tells us how its best done, if we pay attention or become self-conscious.

Consciousness itself has a first “split” or duality. It manifests in the two root ways that our right and left brains tune into the reality of our world.

Each becomes a receiver of opposite forms of consciousness, what I call the separative and the connective – the flowing away from the underlying oneness  or separative consciousness, and the flowing or returning thereto or connective consciousness. The latter knows the truer, deeper road to healing. This works like an ocean wave coming out of an ocean and always returning to it constantly. We enact this paradigm daily when we expend energy and return to sleep or reconnect our inner consciousness.

Let us look at this in more detail because it is very, very, very critical for a deepest understanding of an effective healing art.

The left brain is skilled to best separate all elements of consciousness and dramatically so. Its highest paradigms are quantitative and mathematical. Why?  Because math symbols guide the pinnacle and universal separation of all elements of consciousness. Without getting too technical on this subject (most of us are not math whizzes), you can’t count two apples that are mushed together to make applesauce. The apples first have to appear as separate in our consciousness to count them. These math symbols best help us to design atomic weapons which most powerfully tear our world apart.

Thanks Einstein for your mathematical genius.

They are the absolute and incomparably worst symbols to use in guiding the depths of healing arts!

They can, however, help us superficially, and thus in fooling ways if we think there are also appropriate for deeper uses. We can use mathematical/mechanical approaches in what I call reversal modes. A simple example is measuring how far a thermometer’s temperature departs, separates away from a point of balance. We then reverse that departure to bring about healing.  We use 98.6% Fahrenheit or the equivalent in Celcius as the point of temperature balance. The point of balance represents the connective or healing state. But numbers like 98.6% are totally useless in any absolute or objective sense. They actually stand in the way of any deeper, real, and profound wisdom of what’s truly going on. A second example is where we use mechanical tools designed mathematically to help us avoid doing things mechanically – things anathema or counter to life. Once again this is a reversal use.

Reversals involve the negation of a negative, which yields but a superficial positive.

The right brain does the exact and polar opposite. The right brain tends to intimately and deeply connect all elements of our consciousness. It needs no reversal use. The connection is integral, truly and deeply connective/healing, not superficially or skin-deep or surface-fooling. It is thus the gateway, the authentic way to approach a healing of ourselves.

Ever wonder why the push to give everyone chemical drugs or pharmaceutical is a sham.

Now you know.

On a very deep level, this is because these drugs are math-designed.

It is precisely for that reason that they intrinsically cannot heal us.

None of the other major healing philosophies of our planet – the Chinese, Indian, Middle-East, and Roman/Greek – will give you this insight because they all start with different first dualities. None have strongly resisted the avalanche of pharmaceutical uses in the West nor what is the foundations of the growing pollution epidemics of the West.

To do so requires a different knowledge.

CONSCIOUSNESS DOMINANCE

While we have these two sides split, we really need both  to function well in a complementary way.  What matters rather is which side dominates. If the right brain dominates, we tend to connect what is most separate. We heal the worst of diseases. We also make connective sense of our world. If the left brain dominates, we separate what is most whole. We harm consciousness and destroy organic life. Also right-brain damaged patients become schizophrenic, unable to connect their world. Newton, one of the greatest of mathematical genius or with the highest of left-brain skills, died a schizophrenic.

Parenthetically I once made contact with a direct descendant of Sir Isaac Newton. Actually he work for me during the time when I dared to explore  being in the “Belly of the Behemoth” or Wall Street. I was running a securities brokerage firm at the time, if you believe that but its true. The employee’s last name was also Newton. He was very mechanically-inclined, would fix things around the office like no one else. But like his ancestor, for me he knew almost nothing about a much truer foundation of our world.

He did, however, have a great sense of humor.

So to continue, if those left brain skills are used in say a reversal or self-negating or connective mode (under right-brain dominant guidance) they will help us.

If not, they can easily take us down some immensely toxic, polluting, non-sustainable and globally life-harmful and destroying roads.

The ecological history of the past 350 years bears this out strongly.

Healing worldviews are meant to bring us essentially into harmony – to being at one – with the world around us.

The very fact that medical wastes so immensely pollute the planet is just another screaming example and hint that the underlying guiding philosophy is profoundly false, very much out of tune and out-of-harmony taking. When pharmacists themselves get cancer for just handling the chemical drugs they dispense – drugs supposedly made to heal patients – we wonder how much more off the track this train could be?

The right-brain dominant approach is for me the most enlightened and conscious way of seeing our world. It gives us depth of insight and reliable healing knowledge. It teaches us the importance of all things “connective” – like the importance of love, the practice of peace, of tolerance and acceptance. It teaches us the role of peaceful meditation and of eating in ways that are more alkaline rather than acid. In so many endless ways, it guides us to very reliable, not sham, commercially-corrupted and fooling ways back to our own Oneness, to our own healing, to the raising of our connective consciousness.

Continued in Part II

Our guided meditation techniques are based on a certain philosophy and science of consciousness – see the article what is raw wisdom? and/or the you tube

To understand this, touch yourself for a moment anywhere on your body. On one level you experience yourself as a body and on another level that experience is always and entirely an experience of just consciousness.

Imagine thus that as human beings and living organisms, it is our consciousness that really forms our essence and not just the physical, surface-experienced ”shell” (the outer appearance). Thus to heal ourselves deeply we must heal not just our bodies but even far more importantly our consciousness within. Actually the healing of the body follows the healing of our consciousness – and the understanding thus of what is consciousness – or reflects it that thin level of surface appearances we call and experience as ”physical.”

Or the healing of our consciousness is the much more primary aim of our guided meditation techniques. Think of the body as, over and over again,  just forming the razor thin appearance of the layers of our consciousness that make up who we are.

To heal something it is necessary to know its nature and there are many thinkers on this subject worth listening to.  The classical western worldview, however, did not provide that knowledge and only in the last half a century did influences from Asia inundate our culture with meditation techniques.

Imagine now that consciousness, and in all of its forms or surface masks, represents a kind of universal relationship of connection.

“Universal” is a big word and it refers here to a connection to everything and in every direction. This is why living organisms – which of course are conscious - will grow in solarly-radiant and organic directions as with tree branches and the veins of a leaf and the iris of our eyes, all depicted above. This means that it is our consciousness that connects us both inwardly and outwardly. Inwardly it allows us to also be whole and keeps us alive. Outwardly it connects us to the world around us.

Our guided meditation techniques thus attempt to tune in to the connective essence of consciousness, what also heals us spiritually and physically.

A SPLIT

Next to develop the details of our guided meditation techniques, imagine this same consciousness – which exists not only in us but in all of nature – further splits fundamentally into two activities, functions and directions. One is towards its own essence (connective consciousness) and the other away (towards separative consciousness). One direction is healing and the other illness-generating. We also have right and left hemispheres in our brain that tune into the same bilaterally. Studying these brain differences impartially, we find that one side of our brain tends to see things as separate, with sequential details and the other more in terms of a connected whole.

Also consider that these two directions involve our aligning ourselves with what moves to-and-from the underlying oneness of all of consciousness, and derivatively of all of nature. As we are a microcosm of the greater macrocosm, our own consciousness moves us to-and-from the wholeness, oneness and healing of ourselves.

In advanced guided meditation techniques we learn the concentrated movement of our guided awareness again towards what is connective and thus healing of ourselves.

In everyday life we expend energy and may try to explosively accomplish the most that we can. With guided meditations techniques we do the counterbalancing opposite – being as quiet and still or collected as possible.

In the expending of energy, we are drawing on the holistic resources within, and if we overextend ourselves we will become ill. Thus the need to return to the quiet within and we do something akin during sleep. With guided meditation, we can more consciously direct the process.

In the western worldview, we also first try to heal ourselves physically and then maybe psychologically (with both often treated chemically using drugs). There is rarely a vision of healing our consciousness as the first priority and by means of simply guiding that awareness through powerful forms of meditation.

In Raw-Wisdom’s alternative view, that is the focus. We again use guided meditation techniques to essential heal our consciousness first and above all – and moving awareness in directions that are in harmony with the connective, right-brain side – allowing this to become dominant. The rest, including the body and social, ethical, and environmental consciousness, then falls into alignment.

SPLIT BRAIN

To reiterate the two sides of our brain, the right and left hemispheres, tend to tune into the world in opposite ways. The right brain tends to best take in what above was described as connective consciousness, and the left brain the opposite separative consciousness. The highest paradigms of the left-brain are mathematical. Math symbols abstract how to best separate elements of consciousness with precision. Thus we know exactly how much money you have in the bank, mathematically – and stress over it too often. This is thus not a symbolism for the healing of consciousness though sacred mathematics and geometry can be reguided to point back to the underlying oneness.

WHAT THIS MEANS IN OUR GUIDED MEDITATION TECHNIQUES

HEALING OUR CONSCIOUSNESS

What this means is that we choose in meditations techniques that form images, use symbols and select words which reflect what is more “connective” aspect of our consciousness, its essence and ultimately the essence of ourselves and all of nature.

For example, we veer toward a consciousness of love, harmony, relaxation, letting go of stress, being at ease, melting, feeling at one, forgiving, letting be, flowing, and ultimately being completely at peace. What makes our consciousness oppositely not at peace or ill (as reflected or condensed in physical diseases) involves experiencing conflict, being stressed out, at war, violently upset, hateful, addicted, fearful, toxic, confused, worried, depressed, in pain, or simply not at peace/at one.

Raw-wisdom teaches uniquely that the mathematical view, when universally and deeply applied, actually and really does not point to the depth-real and objective understanding of the world we live in (and again of ourselves and all of nature). This is a  very revolutionary and paradigm shifting or global mind change view.

It means that to truly heal our collective consciousness we very deeply must move away from the math-centered vision that has dominated our culture since the 17th century. Actually the growing pollution of the planet, and internally of our bodies (as when math-designed synthetic chemicals trigger cancer and other ailments) is but a bi-product of the most deep pollution of the innermost vision and depth-understanding.

Studying this divide between separative and connective awareness is a master key for reaching this conclusion. Or it is like a master compass for charting as well all of our meditations.

LEARNING FROM NATUROPATHY

In the natural healing arts there is a reversal of diseased conditions that follows a certain order, namely in reverse of how symptoms manifested over time. We learn from classical naturopathy that “dis-eased” conditions are experienced in an uneasy way. They progress from mild irritations, to inflammations/fevers/rashes, to more serious “burning outs” of the vital life force. Thus having cancerous tumors, and with no feeling or consciousness while metastasizing, is scary – but that is the natural course from heightened to lowered consciousness within. Or lowered consciousness is part of the later-stage degenerative process because the state of our consciousness really determines our health and well-being. The body is just a mirror that reflects it.

In meditations we therefore undue what is held tight, melt what feels hard, and “put out” what feels like it is on fire or inflamed – and to ultimately return to being at peace, at-one and thereby and truly or integrally depth-healed.

STEPS OF OUR GUIDED  MEDITATION TECHNIQUES

FIND OR CREATE A QUIET PLACE WHERE YOU CAN DEEPLY RELAX

Meditation can be sitting up or lying down. You can meditate first thing in the morning when you wake up, midday or late at night. Mornings I find it most helpful to first take a shower, and where the state of cleanliness helps make the consciousness clearer. In one’s meditation space, it may also be helpful to bring in pictures or works of art that set the mood to deeply relax. Blue-green decorations are advisable. There can be an altar with sacred objects, pictures of loved ones and so on.

LOVE BUBBLE

Imagine a surrounding force-field or bubble that fills you with an intense sense of being loved and of projecting love.

Thus there is a flowing sense of each finger, moving in and out of the consciousness of the finger and in all directions.

We can also image a flow sideways and diagonally or in every other imaginable course (including spherically and revolving). This can all end with a general and consummating dissolving or a total relaxation.

From the fingers we can move up to the same with the inner experience of our palms, wrists, lower and upper arms, shoulders, neck and head. Then the middle and lower parts of the body can be likewise relaxed as deeply. The process can be repeated in the same or reverse order if one does not yet feel fully relaxed.

The intent again is to make the experience all-encompassing.  Remember that it takes about ten times as much alkalinity to counter acidity (a concentrated “separative consciousness”). The same happens with meditations, especially when directed at relieving or unwinding fiery stress and pain.

Be patient.  Keep repeating similar healing images until there is success in terms of peace within at the deeper layers.  Try to meditate daily, and best at the beginning or end of the day, and keep going deeper.

Don’t be discouraged by a few tries that don’t quite make it.  As water overcomes fire so consciousness can overcome unconsciousness. Healing processes ultimately will conquer the worst of ailments if one submits or puts oneself into true alignment. That is the law.

Separation (end in unconsciousness) is just a surface thin appearance of the deeper connected flow from which we are separated.  Connectedness (consciousness) reconnects us to that flow and forms the deeper or fuller essence also of ourselves and all of nature.

COLOR

In the mind’s eye we can imagine being in a  room that is painted blue and in which we have buckets of blue waters poured over us.  With this color therapy we might imagine also drinking the juice of blueberries.

Or we might imagine your body being covered by a blue light coming through stained glass windows as in the Tiffany depiction of blue wisteria.

Green, blue and violet colors are always on the relaxing side of the rainbow. You can imagine these colors being sprayed onto you like a mist or with the finest of nano-particles that penetrate deepest within.

You can further imagine standing under a color-filled waterfall in a lush tropical forest and smelling its lavender-blue flowers and drinking purple-blue ambrosia juice made from tropical fruits that help you to most deeply relax.

SOUND

There are many meditation music tapes that help set the tone. I especially like the music of Steve Halpern.

Also chants can help.

The words “home” (a place to be at peace) and “shalom” (being at peace), the “om” sound all have a circular rounding of the lips to make the “o” (symbolizing oneness).

A circle or “o” has no “oppositional corners” or all points are blended smoothly to form a circle. This represents what consciousness needs to emulate to be raised and healed – the lack of conflict, opposition, and stress in order to be at one.

The “m” sound then helps to reverberate the “o”  and in a gentle almost whispered and deep flowing out. Sometimes I imagine a small group or multitude of old and wise Tibetan monks surrounding me, and thus helping me with these deep reverberating chants. The sounds can also be directed into the parts of our bodies that need the most conscious attention or healing. For more information on sound healing, explore the sound healing network and several sound healing conferences and gatherings.

CONCLUSION

Combine all these above elements and the body will begin to ease out and be at peace.

Start your morning this way instead of drinking a cup of coffee.

We often turn to coffee in the morning because we have not slept deeply enough to rejuvenate our consciousness and thus wake up full of energy.  What caffeine does is to stimulate the adrenalin glands to create a further depletion. These are the fire-glands that set us in motion, but only in the way a car is set in motion by burning fuel. It triggers also fight and flight.  The adrenalin fire energy is on the separative or non-healing and non-consciousness raising side.

That fiery energy is, nevertheless, helpful in doing mechanical work. If we want to work at a higher level of consciousness, however, and with depth of healing and productivity, it is best to do the very opposite. Skip the coffee and start your day by deeply relaxing in meditations.

When you feel sufficiently at one, bring the meditation to a soft landing and with a promise to keep that sense of calm – and thus consciousness presence – throughout your entire peaceful day.

Shalom, Om Shanti, and Be Blessed

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The act of meditating is meant to heal consciousness or bring it to the connective side and thus focusing on love – a connective emotion – supports that consciousness. As life can been seen as the concentrated presence of consciousness, the aliveness of ourselves – body, mind, and spirit – then depends on the healing of that consciousness.

VISUALIZE BEING IN A SACRED HEALING SPACE

Something sacred elicits the feelings of wholeness and thus assists the healing of consciousness.

We can imagine being in a temple or any sacred space (and which then tends to materialize). For each person, coming from a different cultural, family and personal background, this may differ. One vision is that of a temple at the center of a small island surrounded by a  panoramic view of the ocean. Inside there is a main room for experiencing that core sense of sacredness, and where one can let go of all that feels ill, dis-easing, stressing and so on – as if one leaves behind all of one’s most heavy baggage.

Other rooms (as created in our imagination) in the temple may have other purposes, such as one for a deeply healing massages, cleansings, chantings and so on. Imagine also that the temple has a porch, and after we have undergone all our consciousness rejuvenations we can rest on the porch, in a blue hammock, and where the vista is one of the surrounding ocean. All our spinal tensions can then melt.

MELTING WHAT IS HARD AND LIKE BUTTER

We can scan your entire body for any sense of hardness, and one part of your body at a time until the whole is encompassed.

A wonderful image for this purpose is that of butter melting.  We melt what feels hard, tight, and tense. This also evolves into releasing stress. I have found this extremely useful to apply to the seven cervical or neck processes – imagining that each is molded as if out of butter that then melts in a heated pan. I imagine a kind of ritual for this at an alter in a stadium filled with monks who partake with me in this visualization.

The spine is the most important bone structure in our body to thus revitalize in our meditations.

RELAX

The deeper we relax, the more our consciousness is rejuvenated and heightened.

This is easy enough to experience. Imagine we are caught up in a day’s affairs and then close your eyes to concentrate on your body. We then find it takes a while to be quietly present. A half hour later, we are much more aware of both your body and surroundings. If we start out angry and upset it may take an hour to calm down and be present to the moment.

This helps to explain that a “raising of consciousness” is not something mystical, imagined or hypothetical but quite simple and real.

Consciousness rises as we relax. We are more fully connected with and to our own state of being and on a road to our healing.  Thus it is important to relax whenever possible, and directing that relaxation to every part of your body.

Because connective consciousness forms, in my experience, the essence of life therefore we are not machines made of separate parts (defined mathematically or by high abstractions of separation) – and to be ever fired up like an engine.

In trying to deeply relax, sometimes it helps to first tense all the muscles and then relax them. This doesn’t work for me personally as it tends to stimulate my adrenalin, but for others it does. I prefer to relax the physical through mostly mental means. And the mind is powerful. It has been shown in hypnosis that visualizing a hot iron touching the skin can cause the forming of blisters. So how you visualize your body can and will change its form.

It is best to experiment what works for you. Try different images that best suit you to let go of your physical tensions - such as the image of lying in a hammock along a beach, having a deep massage, or being touched by the wand of angels – most soft and tenderly.

LET GO OF EMOTIONAL/MENTAL CONFLICTS

We sometimes define ourselves by our struggles, worries, addictions, illnesses – everything that seems to make us unwhole.  I am the person who underwent this, lost that, and so on.

By contrast, during meditations we veer to “getting over it.”

We become also more than ourselves as part of the flow of all of consciousness and all of life.

LETTING GO OF BAGGAGE

Think of all the tons of  emotional, mental, spiritual and physical “baggage” you may be carrying in a given day, and let yourself love yourself - enough to take out time to let go.

Imagine carrying heavy baggage in both hands or on a yoke and then dropping all that weight at once – and in the most sacred temple of your inner world.

DEALING WITH “SEPARATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS” WITHIN – WITH ITCHING, PAIN, BURNING REDNESS AND HYPERACTIVITY

As water puts out fire, so images of gentle water flowing can help to counter the experience of what is fiery, stressful, painful, itching and inflamed. Later ill states of consciousness manifest as fogginess or a loss of attentiveness to the flow of the whole. The early stages manifest the opposite, a heightened awareness of what is “separative” – and via Inflammatory/itching/burning/painful conditions. This is really a spiked awareness in the beginnings or acute, at first minor stage of a physical illness.

Thus if we cut a finger, our consciousness will travel instantaneously to the site of the tear, the separation, and in order to heal or reconnect. That is the essential function of consciousness. This tells us divinely that something needs to be mended. We are made aware of the problem. If stand in the way of this sacred process by taking pain killers, it may prevent, slow and even stop the healing.

Instead here we can use meditation to work with that consciousness in the healing process. We can imagine seeing the equivalent of water putting out fire, so images of gentle waves flowing over what feels fiery, in pain, stress-engendering, itching, and again inflamed. All the host of inflammatory/itching/burning conditions – a thousand and one “itis” like arthritis are manifestations of “separative consciousness” – the inner experience of the beginnings of outer and deeper illnesses.

If we later lose the experience of pain, or find ourselves in states of mental fogginess or loss of attentiveness, it means we need to regain and rejuvenate our consciousness from within.

SOFTLY, GENTLY FLOWING WAVES OF WATER

Images of gentle water waves can be powerfully relaxing. We can apply this to all the “parts” of our body. Actually what we experience is the focusing/separating of an element of consciousness we look at as being physical – and that experience is then softened and made to be more flowing. And the flow can be not only soft and gentle but encompassing. It is important to repeat this imagery and in different directions.

Consciousness Consiousness Conciousness

ENGLISH PREFIX….. CO-CON-COM
No matter how you spell it, the word contains the prefix “con.” In the English language, the prefixes “co” “con” and “com” both seem to refer to “what is with or together.” Something with or together is also “connective” or “connected” in our consciousness. Here are some examples in the English language. We can highlight this by conjoining the world “together” next to each term.

EXAMPLES
Connect to each other
Co-operate with all
Commune to something higher
Communicate with a neighbor
Command a group
Co-found an organization
Combine ingredients together
Be community-minded
Conjoin two things
Contain a multitude
Concern oneself with the world
Consider two thoughts together
Walk on common ground

Note that also “com” has the universally sound “om”  (pre-verbally or right-brain understood as the sound that is most consciousness-connective. Note that in forming the “o” sound, our lips become circularly rounded to, with the “m” sound then reverberate the tone of oneness). We see this in the Indian word “om,”  the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic “shalom” as well as the modern English “home.”

ENGLISH SUFFIX…… OUS-IOUS
At the end of these terms is the suffix “ious” which means “having or full of.”

EXAMPLES
joyous – full of joy
copious – full and abundant
suspicious – full of suspicions
audacious – full of audacity
pugnacious – full of a fighting spirit

ENGLISH SUFFIX – NESS
This simply refers to a state or condition, and there are numerous example of its use

EXAMPLES
happiness
joyousness
forgiveness
goodness
kindness

CONSCIOUSNESS-CONSIOUSNESS-CONCIOUSNESS
It is so wonderful and beautiful that English has combined this prefix and suffix or conjoined them to mean a fullness of connections, as employed in the most extraordinary of words – however it may be spelled – as consciousness, consiousness or consiousness. It is as if there is a subliminal deep wisdom in the English language. This connects now to our core and pivotal definition of

what is consciousness

what is consiousness

what is conciousness…….

The universal principle of connection in the whole or fullness of nature.

MUCHO WEB VISITORS
Our websites are attracting well over 12,000 visitors a month and 400+ a day.

TOP RANKED SITE BY ALEXA
Healingtalks.com, the new fledgling in our family started at the end of last year, is already Alexa-ranked in the top 90,000 sites in the US. Our traffic has also doubled in the past month.

GREEN BUILDING PROJECT
Our green sustainable home office project is gaining “steam” or the anticipated solar tubes will eventually create steam for us.

EXPANDED STAFF
With the new office, we are expanding our staff and looking for dedicated interns – especially with green construction, community- building, computer, writing, gardening, and web-marketing skills.

WRITING PROJECTS
We have two major writing projects for this spring. I hope to combine these with a PhD thesis at Binghamton University. We are intent and excited at the prospect of bringing out a more healing and authentic vision of nature to help transform ourselves and the planet.

LARGER ORGANIC GARDENS
Last year we started a new organic garden, besides continuing the community garden, and this year we hope to expand it (now that some fencing is in, to keep out the deer. Saving year-round organic scraps inside our worm farm to make compost will also help fertilize the gardens.

ZERO WASTE POLICY
We are proud to institute a zero waste policy. This takes serious the responsibility for all and everything that we use and consume.

EARTH DAY YOUTUBES
Our soon to be released YouTubes will share Earth Day events, seminars and lectures which are educational, inspiring and enlightening. The recent festival locally covered topics such zero waste and how to transform one’s home and office into a green haven.

VEGETARIAN  MUSIC FESTIVAL
This August 28th we’ll help Turquoise Barn, a community member, organize a vegetarian & music festival for Central New York and the surrounding areas.

SOLAR, SUSTAINABLE & HEALTH PRODUCTS
We hope to greatly expand what we offer in solar, sustainable and heath products.

PARTAKE IN FESTIVALS AND RAISING CONSCIOUSNESS GATHERINGS
Our spring and summer calendar is not fully planned out, but we will participate in a variety of festivals, especially those dedicated to raising consciousness.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS AT THE CORE OF LIFE AND NATURE
We are working to bring out a philosophy of nature where the principles of life rather than the mechanical are at the core.

Toward A New Science Of Consciousness

In our ongoing series of posts on consciousness here we focus on the movement towards  a new science of consciousness. To envision that, we really need to carefully define our two key terms: science and consciousness.

Science
It is word derived from the Latin “scientia” meaning knowledge. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary refers more specifically to a “knowledge attained through study or practice… knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, esp. as obtained and tested through scientific method [and] concerned with the physical world.”

Forms Of Science
Here we refer to both a) the strict discipline that uses “the scientific method” for observing and experimenting rather than just vaguely believing in something about our world, and b) the body of knowledge that results from applying this method. There is also pure science looking for facts and applied science seeking applications of those facts tied together to form theories.

Consciousness
All words are pointing tools used to separate elements of our consciousness, and consciousness itself might point to the whole unseparated whole. Webster, not surprisingly, gives several definitions for consciousness. These include a reference to any quality or state of being aware, whether of what’s within or outside; and whether of sensation, thought, emotion or again the whole of all conscious states – and whether we are awake, aware, present, oriented or in dream and altered states. Lastly, and alternatively, it refers to “the upper level of mental life of which the person is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes.”  The etymology of the term conscious comes from an ancient Latin word conscius which means “to know.”

Thus the terms scientia (knowledge) and conscius (to know) thus beg for a marriage.

Contrast To Create Identity
Because “consciousness” partly refers to just about everything we ever have or could experience, or the medium thereof. It thus seems to be something very non-distinct. We, nevertheless, can give it a distinct identity via the quite stark contrast to “unconsciousness.” This is similar to defining a level of darkness by the level of the absence of light.

Close Association With Human Consciousness
Also we cannot experience consciousness in other life form. Thus we can only infer something like that exists (as by observing how animals act the way we do) . Otherwise the term “consciousness” is tied to just human awareness – and especially within our brain, including the higher order self-aware ways the brain might function.

Toward A Trans-Personal Definition Of Consciousness
Let us consider, in this context, the following alternative definition. It sees consciousness in an broader context than even the whole of what we humanly experience. Namely it postures consciousness to have some trans-personal and trans-human qualities as belonging or proprietary to all of nature. This is awfully hard, if impossible to prove with finality since we cannot really ever go outside of our own consciousness. We cannot do that trick anymore than we can jump over our own knees. Thus perhaps this is merely a pure inference. It is derived, however, of a kind of detached observation and therefore can form a quite sane theory. It is a theory of consciousness which can further be put to practice and even tested. This is why there is such a true need for a science of consciousness, namely and again to test such theories or to tell us which might be valid or not.

OUR DEFINITION
The definition here states that: consciousness forms the potentially universal relationship of connection in nature It thereby can form nature’s core essence  or what holds all of nature together as one to derivatively define its essential essence. This is like chocolate making up the essence of a chocolate bar.

Implications Of This Definition/Theory For A Science of Consciousness
The above definition and theory has some profound implications. If valid, if begs for a really new science of consciousness – and for that matter, a new science of nature as such. It focuses away from the presence of the western way of envisioning all of the essence of nature – as with the periodic table of elements or with the view of matter or energy defined mathematically predominating. The latter points primarily to a physical, machine-like world and wherein consciousness seems dispensable. It might either be of secondary, derivative, emerging,  irrelevant, or shadowy value. In more extreme views, consciousness is appears unreal, a phantom or the ghost in the machine.

Why Propose A Non-Mechanical Science of Nature?
How do we focus away from this western vision with our new definition in hand? There are two main ways. First, we don’t start with the intellectual bias of assuming that math symbols will exclusively lay open the bosom of nature. For the distinct identity of those symbols – those pointing and consciousness biasing tools -  is that they abstract  how best to separate all elements of consciousness, and b) the physical world is exactly what those symbols best point to or bias our attention towards. They cause us to prefer giving attention to what is most clearly separate in our awareness and also thus having separating surfaces in our vision. This is definitely the physical or material world or what is composed of “matter.” The assumption is that this scientific view is not a metaphysics or ideology of nature. But let us counter-culturally consider that  it is!

A Different Root Vision
Rather than starting then with this math-bound apriori metaphysics – an ideology that preferentially points towards certain directions – let us instead look more at the experience of both what is distinctly connective and separative consciousness – and in a pre-physical pure and raw experience of consciousness. Why chose this first duality? One side, the connective, points to the underlying oneness of nature, and the other as systematically away. Thus the origin of this duality is directly from nature’s oneness – as a true duality should and must be. This is why we don’t use words or pointing tools like yin yang, or matter, energy – each derived from a different cultural perspective.

Right/Left Brain Split
This alternative duality is easily correlated to the differences between our two main brain hemispheres, something well documented in empirical psychology.  The thesis here is that neurons do not produce this split in brain consciousness, or consciousness as such, but rather just tune in like a radio to the more primordial, connected, ocean of consciousness that precedes the separative-seen or surface-perceived physical world of our senses.

Conclusion
If taken seriously, the above view creates a deep and profound revolution in our whole knowing and understanding of nature as such or essentially. This is why a scientific study of consciousness can be so pivotal and important for different fields. This especially applies to the healing arts that treat consciousness ailments. Integral healing is usually a connection to wholeness, and if we do not understand the very root foundations of connection in nature, we will also not know how to truly, integrally and deeply heal ourselves and our loved ones. We can only treat them symptomatically because the understanding is surface-bound. Secondly, if science is exclusively associated with the quantitative study of what is but physical and material, and if at the very same time our new alternative definition of consciousness holds true, then any mechanical or traditional science of consciousness will predictably  fail.  It will fall flat on its face because it takes a very different, non-mechanical, non-mathematical, and non-consciousness-separative approach. This whole notion aims to overturn, to revolutionize, to form a global mind change in relation to the vision promoted by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton and which really established the inner foundation for our modern industrial/commercial civilization

The question of what is consciousness is not at all trivial nor ordinary.

NON-PHYSICAL & EVER-PRESENT
To approach consciousness, you have to know it isn’t something you can simply wrap your hands around. It is not physically contained. To make matters worse, consciousness is always present. You can’t escape it. You can go to China to study China but you have to be open to go everywhere to study consciousness. We can argue all is nothing but an experience of inner and outer, normal or altered consciousness. Do we limit ourselves to just human consciousness studies? To whole streams or separate bits of consciousness? But how do we approach this vast global subject – in order to know and explain what is consciousness itself beyond its different higher or lower levels, contents, maps, charts, diagrams, states or stages and laws? And what is the difference between real and artificial consciousness?

CRITICAL QUESTION TO ANSWER
This question is especially important when we are faced with a variety of “consciousness diseases.”  A diabetic may step on a nail and not  feel a thing. How is it that an Alzheimer’s patient can’t recognize a closest relative, child or spouse?  Thus knowing exactly and precisely “what is consciousness” may be the single most vital for our extremely health and environmentally challenged times. Consciousness disease pandemics are such a powerful sign that whatever we know falls short of deepest insight.

SOLVING THIS RIDDLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In my own life, and after an experience where my left-brain shut down to help me see things in the raw, I came to the conclusion that – or began to put into words for the left brain, what is the right brain experience. From that came the following definition to understand collective and cosmic consciousness: Consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature. This means that matter, which we experience as separate things, is not really what nature’s root foundation is all about. It only appears so in an illusionary, phenomenal or surface consciousness, but not in  the deeper layers, levels and states of consciousness. Imagine the latter really connect everything. Also mathematics is not a well-designed tool to then understand that consciousness because math symbols point to consciousness separations or actually directly away from the essence of consciousness, which here is seen as forming the essence of nature. Can this create problems? You betcha. Take a look at global pollution or fact that life dies in the presence of large mixes of synthetic chemicals,. As you can see, if we try to seriously overturn the taproot premise of physics and chemistry, the math-bound view, this leads to a vast and deepest of revolutions in thought.

AS A NATUROPATH
As a naturopath, I have  applied this consciousness revolution to the natural healing arts, to help reverse cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and less serious consciousness diseases. Consciousness is real. We can directly induce, raise, awaken or bring it out of nature as simply as we pour water over a seed.  The reason we generally don’t or fail to fathom it is because we are knee-deep stuck in the 17th century’s stale, math-bound vision – the mechanical, unconscious, dead-bound view. Thus knowing “what is consciousness” becomes a the pivotal catapult for a most powerful revolutionary global mind change or shift in the whole of our lives.

Copernican Revolution - With the Sun at the Center

Are we in the midst of a consciousness revolution? The answer depends on our understanding these two terms.

WHAT IS A REVOLUTION?
The word revolution means a reverse movement a complete change in perspective – originally as applied to celestial bodies. It come from the old French and was latter and aptly to the  impact of the Copernican “revolution.”

“Nicolas Copernicas had introduced the idea that the earth might revolve around the sun – the reverse of what had previously been believed. This created a complete turnaround or “revolution” in our vision of the cosmos. The same word was latter applied politically, as in the French revolution, the American Revolution and also the Russian, Mexican and Chinese Revolutions – among the most popular applications of this term. There was also an Industrial Revolution and a Scientific Revolution. It was therefore applied to the vast changes in our ideas in many other fields, especially a revolution in our paradigms of physics. We also have the terms cultural revolution, market revolution, information revolution and sexual revolution. Interestingly enough, political revolutions tended to follow the ideological – including even the Copernican. Thus when Copernicus introduced his novel ideas, they later led to a loss of a degree of faith, culturally, in the Bible as the final say or arbiter in our understanding of the universe. During the Middle Ages, the power of the Pope in Rome was to delegate authority to rule of countries in Europe. This was dependent on the deepest faith in the Pope as receiving that vast authority directly from God and through divine inspiration.  When the dominance of the biblical worldview was challenged by Copernicus and later by the new scientific vision of Newton, Galileo and Descartes, there followed a derivative revolution in political authority. The entire royal lineage of Russia was murdered one night in the Russian Revolution. This overturned that countries political rule, among others and in the French and American revolutions.

ARE WE IN THE MIDST OF A CONSCIOUSNESS REVOLUTION?
Are we really undergoing a consciousness revolution or is this just a comforting phrase? That depends on how we understand consciousness and its dynamics. I’ve repeatedly emphasized and elucidated that, in essence, consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature. Now why is that, in and of itself, a revolutionary perspective? Well we all know consciousness interacts with our mind. Our mind forms outline images (which are translated into written and spoken words). These help us to focus consciousness in endless directions. They help separate elements of our consciousness. This can happen again in universal directions.

Now what if the more silent, quiet, meditative, integrative, pre-conceptual, word-empty mind (our right-brain) were to suddenly dominate our whole consciousness? Our worldview would then become more holistic and spiritual – as in the Buddhist traditions. On the other hand, if the conceptual mind predominates (the left brain), I would predict that an opposite material worldview would become dominant as more “rational.” I would also argue it ultimately becomes quantitative. Rational comes from the word “ratio,”  a mathematical term. This is because math symbols represent the very highest, most universal of all inner pointing tools of the mind to separate elements of consciousness and thus to point to separate matter. I think of this as the surface appearance of things, reverse postured as the most objective or depth view.

ON THE CUSP
It is finally my orientation that we are on the cusp of moving away from that current dominance of the present math-bound vision of nature, of physics, chemistry and biotechnology (the dominantly left-brain view of the cosmos) – and derivatively of a primarily commercial society. If this indeed occurs, it will be a genuine turnaround of the inner foundations of our modern world, of our modern consciousness. It will represent a true reversal in core brain polarities, and thus a true and real “consciousness revolution.”

Definition of Consciousness

We can diligently and carefully search the web to find many of what l call “standard definitions of consciousness.”  Here are a few examples of such definitions of consciousness, with critiques.

SOME  STANDARD DEFINITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

An cognitive state
This makes the assumption that consciousness is tied to cognitive functions and thus much of what plants and animals experience would be considered unconscious.

A feature or force of life
Some Vedanta traditions see consciousness this way. Certainly some form of consciousness is a universal feature of life, but what does that really tells us? If bubble gum sticks to a wall, does that define the stuck-to wall?

The state of being aware
This is a very redundant definition. Awareness can be called consciousness and consciousness can be called awareness. It doesn’t really tell us very much. It offers no deep insight into what is the nature of consciousness.

Alert perceptions
To be alert is to be in a state of feisty awareness, which again doesn’t tell us very much.

Awake and self-aware
A living organism can be sentient, or present to its surrounding, and grounded in a time and space framework/reference without necessarily being self-aware. Does self-awareness really define the full spectrum of what is consciousness or in its absence, unconsciousness?

Higher order awareness
This is tied to a mix of cognition, self-awareness, and being awake or in advanced levels of consciousness – including having greater inner peace and heightened, clear and brilliant perceptions. But what give us the hubris or vain authority to be so selective in this  elite view of consciousness?

By-product of neuron firing
This reduces consciousness to various physical mechanisms. This implies certain organisms which do not have such neurons then do not have consciousness. Nevertheless they are sentient and aware, unlike rocks.

HOW TO GO  BEYOND THIS STANDARD LIST
We could go on with this standard list and related critiques. Keep in mind that with a valid definition we must ask:

a) Does it give us an objective, trans-personal, outside-ourselves point of view of consciousness itself?

b) Does the definition of consciousness have practical, proving and valuable applications?

None of the above seem to meet these tests for me.

MOVING TO AN ALTERNATIVE
Thus I’ve evolved an alternative definition of consciousness. This came to me after an inner experience as a teenager when, subsequent to a high fever, my left-brain shut down and I was thrown, outside of my mind, into a wordless and oceanic, connected and whole experience of consciousness. What I learned from that experience is the following definition of consciousness. It is one that yields revolutionary implications and also vast practical applications – mainly for the healing ourselves (as when we fall prey to consciousness illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and diabetes) and the healing our planet. Such applications are  really the acid test of definition, understanding or theory of consciousness.

Alternative Definition
The alternative as well as extended definition is as follows:

Consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in nature.

This includes our own human nature and the nature of the world around us. Imagine consciousness underlies the thin surface appearance, the illusion of a world  fundamentally composed  of hard, separate, mechanically-acting, math-defined physical forms or “matter.”

Imagine thus that the underlying oceanic consciousness is at the real depth core of nature, of everything existing in the cosmos. We really never experience anything outside our consciousness so anyone who tells you this is far-fetched are themselves out of touch with their own inner consciousness. They are locked into the surface appearance. In my experience,  consciousness really forms nature’s ultimate and primordial essence and quintessence. Because “laws” are what “connect” events (as in the laws of cause and effect or the laws of action and reaction – including billiard balls bouncing off each other) then consciousness so defined as above suddenly underlies the taproot foundation of all connections in nature an thus of nature’s laws. This means that consciousness forms the authentic and abiding “principia” of nature, contrary to Newtons core thesis in his Principia Naturalis Mathematica or his “laws of nature as mathematical.”  Math symbols do expertly abstract separation and therefore cannot truly point to what connects nature in its essence – namely consciousness. Newton very abysmally and foolishly lost sight of this simple common sense. He was self-engrossed, bedazzled by his own newly invented calculus.  This critique of Newton’s vision may seem harsh, but I must beg to differ. We do need to revisit his old, stale, moldy premises, the ideology of his that took root to form our modern world. It is a vision that is now failing to work and falling apart. We do need, quite urgently, to make some vast and revolutionary inner shifts in our visions. Then we can uncover or bring out more fully out (as when we water seeds), nurture and discover the underlying laws of consciousness, life, and connection – rather than of the mechanical, death-delivering, math-defined, separative patterns that now almost totally predominate our prevailing industrial/commercial/material worldview. We need to re-structure our collective consciousness from the ground up or from its 17th century crumbling foundations. Why? Because those foundation stones has mislead a building process of the Industrial Revolution. That metaphysics has yielded a failing medical system, helpless in the face of pandemics, and focused on surface symptoms plus  misdirecting us towards a disintegrating, dying parade of living ecologies. These are not minor problems or crises. We need to thus face the root inner cause of global pollution, global warming and a more massive destruction of life and consciousness on our earth than ever before, and which is proceeding at ever faster and faster paces.

Going Past Current Definitions
Lame definitions of consciousness will not help us on this score or to extricate us from the larger, self-created problems of our modern world. They fall short in giving us the simple needed insight to  turn around our major looming planetary trends, derivative of an extraordinarily and extended loss of wisdom.

For more information on such a philosophy and definition of consciousness – and its implications  – visit http://www.raw-wisdom.com

Consciousness and Healing

What is the relationship between consciousness and healing? This hinges on understanding the essence of both these phenomena in nature.

We define healing as a process of connection to wholeness – whether of consciousness itself, mind, emotions, body, or our surrounding living environment. Healing occurs integrally where there is life.

Next comes the understanding of what is consciousness. We define it as the universal and primordial relationship of connection in and underlying all of nature. We also look at life as the concentrated presence of consciousness. Thus healing only proceeds in the presence of life and consciousness. It makes logical and real sense. This is also the foundation understanding for a different system of healing than what we are used to in the west – allopathic medicine that uses drugs, radiation and surgery to “heal.” Surgery cuts the body apart and thus can only mechanically fix things, not deeply heal or restore consciousness and life. Drugs are designed mathematically, where math symbols are universal abstractions of separation. Thus such creations also cannot integrally heal or restore life and consciousness. Radiation is derivative of the math-bound understanding of physics and thus also only kills mechanically but does not restore systematically what is life and consciousness.

This is why true healing, and not just treatment, involves a deep and profound understanding of the role and nature of consciousness.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS DEMONSTRATED

MORE THAN JUST A THEORY
A theory of “what is consciousness” generally consists of an outline image in our minds that supposedly points to something  real in the world on this subject matter. All our words and symbols are just inner pointing tools to something. Theories are organized ways of orienting or pointing our awareness to things in our world and in relationship to each other. Thus to demonstrate that a particular theory or set of ideas actually points to something systematic, real, valuable and predictable becomes an event.

THE HARDER PROBLEM
Consciousness, however, represents potentially such a vast-touching -upon-all-the-world phenomena that its exploration can take a trillion different confusing directions. Everything we know is something we know in our consciousness.  And sophisticated and intricate theories may only point to some relatively narrow or ivory tower vistas of a part of that whole. These can result in a variety of entanglements of mind which miss the whole point of seeing “what is consciousness” in its full essence. Or one can easily fail to fathom a truly inner-mountain-peak vantage point of this unified and vastest of arenas for knowing.  Adeptly using high abstractions (universal concepts) in a philosophy of consciousness and states of consciousness may thus give but the deceptive appearance of having latched onto this transcendent highest view with some mastery. This is the harder problem in dealing with “consciousness.” However this is easier to be said than attained. An acid test is whether that proposed theory or definition of consciousness can actually help anyone enhance their consciousness or resist the slippages into consciousness diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Otherwise the theory is  just so much  disingenuous jibber-jabber.

TACKLING CONSCIOUSNESS
One highly effective way to get past this “harder problem” is having again an authentically high overview and not a personal or cultural, conceptually-biased orientation. this means looking from above the pointing paths of all concepts because touches everything. This is as if one must look at consciousness from above the entire left/right brain divide which is a superhuman feat.  The left-brain conceptualizes. It forms outline images as pointing tools or the world of ideas as Plato referred to this.  It uses these ideas to separate elements of consciousness and thereby to focus one’s attention. The right brain does the opposite. It helps us unpoint and unfocus. It looks at things as a whole or connectively and non-conceptually or intuitively. Sometimes what is called “right-brain” ends up dominantly functioning in the left-hemisphere of the brain and visa versa because these are two forms of consciousness that are tuning into dominantly by one side or the other, rather than physically bound. One verbalizes and philosophizes with concepts and the other cannot and has no inclination or need.  Here I consider myself to have an advantage in overviewing this study of a trans-split-brain view. This is simply because first I was trained in dominant left-brain skills as a philosopher and math prodigy and experienced the exact opposite, a radical left-brain meltdown causing a brain polarity shift to right-brain or connective consciousness dominance. This was similar to what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard brain scientists who had a stroke that also shut her left-brain down.  It allowed her, and myself similarly, to  visit the internal highways in unusual ways – and from what I consider again a seeing from a higher vantage point. This didn’t mean that when I later returned to using  familiar words and comfortable sentences – speaking English or German or Chinese or Hebrew – that then I discounted the importance of words. I did not abandon the dominantly verbal/mathematical approaches of the west in favor of a solely non-verbal, intuitive, vague or right-brain dominant mysticism – as with indigenous shamans . On the contrary, I sensed the huge and profound need to bridge these two worlds. It seemed now that I had a gift, and could do so with an impersonal, conscious and intentional approach.

BREAKING GROUND FOR A DEFINITION
Ultimately I came to some unique conclusions about truly what consciousness is, and resulting in  the following definition and theory which I consider of priceless value for the development of a higher consciousness and a conscious mind.  When one enters the raw world of consciousness there is no such thing as a “theory.”  Theories only exist when right and left brain consciousness is severed. When I try thus to state this in so many words – but not really needing those words -  it may make little or no ripples with others at first if my language of expression is not translated.  It is like writing a physics formula on a blackboard and about how to create an atom bomb  – and without first explaining how to apply the formula. The formulas appear meaningless and insignificant – just white marks on a dark blackboard – except to a person who knows the vast implications and pointing paths of those symbols. The responsibility then remains to demonstrate the value of what is created by those symbols (and here for the making of not bombs but  integral healing of life and consciousness within ourselves and throughout nature).

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
With this said, let me now offer a definition of consciousness that shakes the foundations of the western worldview – the matter/energy math-defined vision. Imagine that  consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature.

Just as chocolate makes up the permeating “essence” of a chocolate bar,  it is another discussion to show that this consciousness also and thereby forms the penetrating, defining and universal essence of nature  (and not mathematical relationships or the  postulated microscopic atomic/subatomic model as what should be centrally focused upon). This means that at the core of nature there is a dance of consciousness and unconsciousness, of connection and separation, rather than a dance of matter and energy defined mathematically. This one idea, theory or definition thus has the potential to change the whole of our vision of nature.   Or when adopted, it can change the heart and soul of the collective view of what is nature and the functioning of our cosmos.

A third discussion is how this same consciousness can permeate nature to higher and lower degrees. The greater permeation or concentration manifests in  life. This means that living organisms, rather than machines brought into being by math-designs, thereby represent nature’s core essence to be elicited or brought out to dominate natural terrains – rather than machines and what is mechanical.

Some philosophers may not at all be open to this kind of thinking about consciousness.

In their minds, they may think it is far more rational and flattering to view the essence of consciousness as tied to higher-order skills in human beings – include self-cognizance  triggered by human brain neurons.  Everyone can define consciousness as they choose, with resulting limited foci. The defining words I use point to a larger and highly revolutionary vision. Here consciousness is not seen as something small, special and proprietary to  human brain cells but as arising out of a universal cosmic terrain from the core of all of nature.  This may shatter the view of the Renaissance, namely of humans being so special.

This view also came to me via a dissolving of the functions of my left-brain conceptual faculty – leaving behind attachments to such flattering conceptualizations.

The foregoing definition still can for a long time remain meaningless until examples are given of how it applies. The applications are powerful.

Note that we really want to know 1) what best brings out consciousness or maintains, nurtures, supports and raises that consciousness and 2) what does the opposite or takes away, destroys, corrupts or lowers consciousness, and how and with what procedures we follow this divide.

AT THE FOUNDATION OF LIFE
Above we referred to a close link between consciousness and life.  Here we refer to, among other things, the sentience and awareness of all living creatures, not just higher order brain skills. It is this awareness that manifests with life and among millions of species as a common denominator. Let us therefore think for a moment of life as the concentrated expression and presence of consciousness. This means living organisms are expressive containers for what brings out the connective essence of nature (consciousness) and rather than machines (per the math-based vision of nature) reflecting nature’s essential laws. So what is the first sign of this special presence of consciousness coming out of the core of nature? Life per se.

Organic life brings forth also certain distinct common features. In fact when an organism remains alive will it retain its connected wholeness. It will display on the surface or as seen in a silvered mirror what I would  call the “badges of organicity.” These are  thin outer signs of  the more important full depth-inner presence of depth-connectedness.

These outer signs include the solar radiance of a flower’s pedals, the rings of a tree, the organic-in-form branching veins of a leaf, the swirls of sea shell, and so on. Again organic forms show off  these beautifully attractive badges when they are reflective of a more deeply present connected whole via living consciousness.

Consider the possibility that consciousness again lies at the foundation of that depth-connectedness which keeps all living forms alive.  Therefore when an organic life dies, it then predictably loses both  the outer organic badge, the whole appearance on the surface,  and its more important inner-depth consciousness or fuller connectedness with. Trigger this undoing of life with a bullet or surgical knife or sword -  cut a living organism progressively into parts – and again it dies. There are exceptions, as the hard form of shells displays the organic badge longer until time it’s elements dissolves into its surroundings.  Ultimately the body’s flesh separates into parts or “falls apart.” It turns to dust in earthen graves. The inner consciousness once connected it more deeply within, and to the world around it as well. Now it is no longer present. This is but a first step in demonstrating  how this theory, definition and understanding  functions in nature. Next we need to visit what are tell-tale signs of any rising, eliciting and support of the presence of  consciousness – and derivatively life?

MORE EXAMPLES OF HOW AND WHY
Here are a few more genres of examples. We can discuss the details in future blog post.

A) Water elicits life and consciousness
Water’s essence in the mechanical/math-based/atomic worldview is H2O. In a life-centered worldview it establishes the connective relationship to elicits life and consciousness from every seed – and detoxifies, purifies, and helps re-establish life and raise consciousness in ourselves. There are several ways of demonstrating how water so function, and in this context why it brings out the rainbow, forms bubbles, rounds the sharp/oppositional corners of rocks, puts out fire, and so on.

B) Fire destroys life and consciousness
This is works on the same principle in reverse. This is why various states of inflammation are acute harbinger of later chronic illnesses,  when inflammation is not healed. The effect is a lowered state of inner health, wholeness, connectedness and overall awareness. When a person is angry, or their emotions are inflamed, the This is why largely uncooked,

C) Love elicits life and consciousness; hate and fear the  opposite
Love establishes an emotional connective relationship. Hate and fear do the opposite. This is why an angry person is not well aware of their surroundings, another persons feelings, etc. Anger and fear inflame emotions and bring on fiery adrenalin . Love guides us to connective oneness with what is loved. Hate and fear brake us away from that connective oneness in our consciousness.

D) Money corrupts consciousness.
Money mathematizes awareness. The lusting for money makes a marriage with the mechanical worldview.  This lowers consciousness, brings us into deeper states of illusion and corruptions of consciousness – where illusion is the falling apart of the integrity of the essence consciousness, its awareness of connective oneness. A money-centered society thus traps others in countless deceptions. It  puts everyone in competitive opposition to each other. It elicits fiery friction and feeds on fears and addictions to move an economy “forward.” It does not integrally evolve our human consciousness, the essence of our being, and the key to our evolution.

E) Chemicals harm Life; pollute the environment; upset the ecology of the whole planet, cause species to die
Take a random and large mix of chemicals, to test not individual separate chemicals but the underlying math-based order, and the mix will kill and destroy all of life and consciousness in the compost heap. The compost heap is symbolic. It is were a large and random mix, in fact all plant life forms can decay to form the building materials of all other plant life forms in an endless and integral circle of unity. The philosophy of chemistry, the math-based worldview, clashes and thus when widely and deeply applied will destroy life and consciousness in nature. This is why we have an epidemic of species dying.

F) Surgery, radiation and chemical drugs – chief tools of allopathic medicine – fail to truly heal consciousness ailments .
We see this with the health epidemics of cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. To reverse these ills both in ourselves, and on a culture-wide basis, involves a true and revolutionary global mind change – a moving to a different essential vision of what is the core  of nature, and our innermost being. It sets us on a different course to healing rather than ills. A true global mind change thus first heals our consciousness and its relationship to our mind’s understanding of the world, then emotions, body, and being in this world or to all that surrounds us each day of our lives.

What Is Consciousness

What is consciousness is no small topic at all.

LOSING ONE’S CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE LOSS OF A GREATEST TREASURE
There is hardly anything more sad and tragic in life than a progressive withering of one’s consciousness, especially after a life of richly gathering  knowledge, experience and wisdom. We see this especially in Alzheimer’s patients who can’t recognize their loved ones. This happen rather often and after long periods of  illness or insipid advancing old age. About half of Americans over 85 suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. With this receding of consciousness we lose the natural enjoyment, joy and zest for life. Life becomes a true drag. We may become chronically depressed with one foot in the grave. Colors then can become less vivacious, sounds less sonorous, thoughts less clear as the mind dulls, and motions slower and shaky. The ability to accomplish dreams is seriously impinged. We can’t pull really things off and pull them together.

WHY?
Whydoes all this tragically happen? Why isn’t life a more constant joyous upward journey? What causes this awful slippage into unconsciousness and how can it mostly be avoided or at least slowed?

COMPARED TO OTHER RICHES
Among one’s greatest life accomplishments a person can point to their livelihood  – as a  doctor, lawyer, accountant,  nuclear physicist, artist or entrepreneur. Or they may be a homemaker or parent. Without the knowledge however of what is consciousness, and thus the essence of life contained in different forms, all other riches and enjoyments of life can be taken away. One can say thus that the knowledge of what is consciousness (and as the essence of one’s life) is really the important study of all.

IF WE ONLY KNEW!
If we therefore and intimately knew what is consciousness and how it functions – whether how it rises or recedes – we could very greatly alter and improve the course of our lives.

BREAKTHROUGH KNOWLEDGE FOR HEALING
In my experience that kind of knowledge is entirely possible. It  is dear and precious to have. It can be accessible but only with an open, receptive mind that can think out of the box. One of my life aims, as I keep envisioning it,  is to write a popular book of  50 simple ways of healing the whole of ourselves, beginning thus first and foremost with a healing of our consciousness. This is because the healing of our consciousness is really at the foundation of all other major forms of healing.  This then supports and spreads out to improve the whole of our lives.

HOW I CAME TO THIS PERSPECTIVE
I came to this perspective through some trying experiences of my own, as outlined  in my bio. This influenced me to become a natural healer or naturopath – ever showing the path of healing journeys to others.

What Is Consciousness?

The question of what is consciousness is not at all trivial nor ordinary. For example, you can walk into a department store, go to the sports section and find a pair of skies. Or you can go to a library and find a book specifically about glass lamps. But where do you go to find what is consciousness or even just a book that truly describes what consciousness is?

NON-PHYSICAL & EVER-PRESENT
Consciousness isn’t something you can simply wrap your hand or mind around. It is not physically contained. No matter what we are engaged in, somehow consciousness is to a degree present. It is part of everything we experience. Does that mean it has no specific identity whose knowledge we can master?

CRITICAL QUESTION TO ANSWER
It has been my experience that this riddle can and must be solved. It becomes critically importance to know the answer when suffering from a variety of “consciousness diseases” - such as those evidence by neuropathy, lack of circulation where the bloodstream fails to carry consciousness to our cells. We see this also with diabetes and atherosclerosis. A diabetic will thus step on a nail and not necessarily feel anything. Someone who has had a stroke similarly has part of their brain or related body part no longer feeling. A sense of consciousness is lost. Alzheimer’s patients have this especially with certain brain functions. With metastatic cancer a given  illness spreads unnoticed to destroy life. Actually most all chronic and systemic diseases have some inner component that involves a recession of consciousness.  Thus knowing and understanding  exactly and precisely “what is consciousness” may be the single most important and vital of all question to answer in our times. This is why even Nobel Laureates in physics, chemistry, and biotechnology have fallen prey to Alzheimer’s disease. Somehow physics, chemistry, and biotech disciplines  have not yielded optimal answers to our key and central question.

PANDEMIC
Note also that consciousness diseases are very much pandemic in our times. This is powerful evidence that we are far afield in  our inner knowing of what is consciousness really and thus how to help support, nurture and retain rather than lose and hinder its presence.

SOLVING THIS RIDDLE
In my own life, I have come to certain powerful and clear conclusions on this critical question and not based on borrowing secondhand from the ideas of others I know or have read about from the distant past. This is not gathered from any ancient tradition such as  Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, shamanistic or other alternative views. Rather my breakthrough view came about via a rare left-brain meltdown. This allowed me to peep through a small hole to see our world “in a raw” or in a conceptually-stripped way – a view chronicled in my bio at www.raw-wisdom.com/bio. What I most deeply learned is that consciousness forms a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature. It is thus distinctively not an exclusively human attribute or possession, especially not of just our brain and brain neurons. This phenomenon of consciousness then internally unifies or forms the binding-together connective essence of our entire world! What a statement this is to make. This profound view also differs from the vast cultural assumption that has been promoted since  the 17th century that supposedly  matter and energy postured in time and space and described or defined mathematically forms the essence of nature. I find this not to be true but a surface illusion. This view spearheaded the Industrial Revolution and the distinctiveness of our modern world.

AS A NATUROPATH
As a naturopath, I have  applied a very different root understanding of nature and ourselves to help reverse consciousness diseases. The effectiveness of this reversal becomes a true litmus test for a real definition and also real (and not imagined or academic or philosophical or faith-based, or spiritual-tradition concocted) understanding of “what is consciousness.” Otherwise our theories are but self-gratifying nonsense that fail to liberate the conditions of impeded consciousness. Understanding “what is consciousness” when grounded in substantive objective reality forms thus a vast revolution in impersonal and true understanding – a revolution  in our whole vision of what is nature’s essence or the essence of the entirety of the cosmos we live in.

Knowing  thus “what is consciousness” can have some of the most profound and powerfully revolutionary effects on the whole of our lives.

Can there be a science of consciousness that is real and substantive – with practical applications – rather than a mystical, feel-nice discipline that really leads us nowhere?

Obviously there can be such a thing when consciousness is an incredibly vital component of our daily lives. How can we master this consciousness and as more than a whimsical art?

DIABETES
For example, at the foundation of diabetes is a stark consciousness disease. We call it neuropathy. It manifests when a diabetic steps on a nail and can’t feel a thing. Understanding consciousness as a science could help us dramatically heal diabetes (which is presently considered  incurable). We see this potential reflected in Gabriel Cousens’ new program that actually helps reverse diabetes within just 30 days. He applies consciousness principles.

METASTATIC  CANCER
Spreading and unnoticed cancer can reflect a consciousness disease. A person who understands consciousness could then help another and oneself overcome this scourge. I discovered this when I worked with Charlotte Gerson to help many patients reverse metastatic cancer conditions.

ALZHEIMER’S
Alzheimer’s disease is still another consciousness ailment. Just dispensing  wonder drugs generally doesn’t work. Quite seriously we then need a different kind of understanding and science.

A REAL SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Thus if the presence and absence of consciousness is strikingly real for healthy and ill persons, then the knowledge thereof can help reverse our ill states of consciousness. First we need to know exactly “what is consciousness” to begin with.

MASTER KEY
I have tried to outline a certain powerful definition. Prior to grappling with this, it may be helpful to forgo any personal arrogance that assumes “consciousness” is merely a human attribute. Imagine instead that consciousness forms a a potentially universal relationship of connection in and throughout all of nature.  Imagine also that this allows various microorganisms to have sentience. Imagine lastly that this consciousness co-habits with its opposite or  unconsciousness. Exact knowledge of this “co-habitation” or how the two interact, can help us heal ourselves and revolutionize our personal lives and overall culture.
For more in depth discussions  the reader is invited to visit other blog posts under the categories of consciousness and raw wisdom and to visit www.raw-wisdom.com

Healing Consciousness

In order to know how to “heal consciousness,” we first need reliable means to know what it is to “heal” and to have  “consciousness” or to become “conscious.”

What Does “Healing” Mean?

Healing, in one form or another, tends to be a way of connecting something living to wholeness. This is why when a cut mends we say it is “healed.” Also when a heart is broken and then mends we say it is healed.  The former connects something physically asunder. The latter connects something in our spirit. There also can be mental healing, environmental healing and so on.

Nature of Consciousness

Imagine that what is consciousness forms “a potentially universal relationship of connection in all of nature.”  This is a powerful definition when practically applied.  Thus to be “aware” or “conscious” imagine that we simply connect to something we are so aware or conscious of. If this is a reliable and depth insightful definition, then  the very presence of onsciousness will tend to mend or heal what is asunder.

Evidence of Healing Consciousness

There is evidence of this. Thus when a stone falls on our foot, for example, and we have a cut or bruise,  there also immediately occurs a heightened awareness we call “pain.” I might cry out, for example,  “Oh my God it hurts.” God here is a connective inner cosmic image – trying to pull down the power of healing within = and the experience of pain is also subliminally connected to the connective healing process. This is why I strongly oppose most pain killers or chemical drugs that engender just unconsciousness and therefore interfere with integral healing.

Healing Consciousness

This phase has two major meanings:

• Healing Consciousness can use the word “healing” as an adjective. This  means consciousness with the characteristic of being healing. But this is actually a redundant phrase, something that is critical to know. Western medicine is grounded in the mechanical, math-based vision of nature. Mathematics abstracts how best to separate elements of consciousness – moving our awareness away from the very essence of consciousness itself! This is why machines, made of separate, math-delineated or designed parts, tend to be relatively unconsciousness. Also in modern medicine, based on the allopathic/mechanical model, we can expect trouble with any attempt to depth heal systemic ailments since there is no science therein for the foundational healing of consciousness.
• Healing Consciousness can use the word “healing” as a verb. This can mean the mending of our state of consciousness. Consciousness itself actually can never be healed as it is foundation of healing itself. It is rather that our state of incomplete consciousness is what can be mended, reconnected or made whole.

To do so requires a deeper understanding and an advanced inner technology.

Healing Our Entire Being

This can be accomplished by physical, mental and emotional means. Actually we have potentially seven waves of depth and complete healing, beginning with the healing of our state of consciousness and then expanding progressively to transform mind, emotions, body, immediate family and social relationships and finally our overall posture to our environment and cosmos as a whole.

This is the core of the raw-wisdom philosophy.

Nature of Consciousness

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Nature of Consciousness

NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS – WHAT IS IT?
In a kind of comprehensive overview of approaches, Ken Wilber has a post on the Web taken from his Journal of Consciousness Studies article   (February 1997, pp. 71-92) and which outlines his Integral Theory of Consciousness. It  integrates twelve different approaches to apparently understanding the nature of consciousness. These include  the approaches of cognitive, introspective, neuro-psychological, clinical psychological & psychiatric, social and developmental psychological, psychosomatic, eastern and contemplative traditions, quantum theories, subtle energy studies and adventures into non-ordinary and drug-induced states.  The list is long enough to certainly make the subject matter confusing to some. To make matters worse, we could expand that list profoundly. Where then do we truly understand the core essence of consciousness? Is there a core binding-together essence or a disintegration into so many forms?

SIMPLIFYING THE UNDERSTANDING
In most all other studies of life one can garnish a specialized expertise. But the study consciousness potentially can involve all of life and all of knowledge that we consciously take in ad infinitum. How then again do we arrive at its core essence? An essence is something that universally penetrates and thus is singular and simple – like the essence of a chocolate bar being made of chocolate. We might add an almond to the bar, but what primarily permeates remains simply chocolate. Is there a comparable essence to consciousness, or something that unifies the whole – in and throughout all of the potential categorizations or approaches. In my experience the answer is yes. However, to arrive at the seeing of what that is takes a vastly transcending mental, beyond the right/brain split perspective.  You almost have to step outside and above the human mind/brain and its perpetual constructs to reach such a high perspective.

LITMUS TEST
Supposing you get that far, how do you know that your conclusions are trans-personally or objectively true – true from all sides and past side-views, subjectivity and limited biases? There is really a Litmus Test. Our modern world is presently plagued with a variety of what I call growing consciousness diseases. It can be argued that all diseases are really carriers of a consciousness-depleting element. Some are so more dramatically than others. Thus we can have cancer that silently or without our consciousness spreads to kill us. We can become severely diabetic, and where when we step on a nail we feel nothing as we suffer from neuropathy – a loss of feeling, a loss of consciousness in the extremities primarily. We can fall also into the throws of Alzheimer’s disease where our mental consciousness breaks down. Now if a theory of consciousness can be tested in its applications to help reverse all three of these and similar condition,  then we really and powerfully are onto something. With out such proof, we remain groping in the dark just as the patients with those ailments may be too.

IS THERE SUCH AN ANIMAL?
After nearly half a century of searching for such a viable theory, I can  honestly share my conclusion that there is such an animal. Most philosophers and scientists won’t make this kind of assured statement. I do because my experiences transcended my own personal identity or concern with such an identity. The implications of that “theory” I am referring to are revolutionary. The application are more than immensely powerful. For when one has a far better understanding of consciousness,. it  can truly help those who have let it slip away, unconsciously – which seems a terribly helpless state. When physicians try to help such patients, but they can’t, they too are at a loss to understand what consciousness is, why we need a transcending understanding.

IMPLICATIONS
This “theory” is such an understanding. Its implications are profound. When understood, it has the vast potential to not only help those who are consciousness-ill, but to more so overturn the very taproot foundations of our whole modern worldview or vision of the essence of nature. This may seem a very bloated statement indeed. But, nevertheless, in my experience it happens to be true. The fact is that what we take to be  our very highest truths in physics and chemistry – buttressed by mathematical formulations as the anchoring crutch, actually fail to factor in the existence, identity, or nature of consciousness in nature.

CORE PURPOSE OF BLOG
Once on does factor in that phenomena, everything else changes. As to this “theory” (written in quotation marks because it has ceased to be a theory for me)  it is the core mission of this blog and of our original and related site, namely  raw-wisdom.com
to bring out to the public this understanding.

NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
With that said, now let me present the gist of this theory states of consciousness’ defining identity. Through that special identity we can fathom it in a conquering way. I’ve not learned this via any lab studies because a laboratory setting and all the tools of measurement it coalesces are actually the wrong tools with which to understand consciousness’ essence. Rather my “theory” is the  result of other experiences. In my youth I was a math prodigy whose left-brain shut down temporarily forcing me to befriend an opposite brain vista. Later I tried to make peace between the split-brain views. Through that reconciliation, I came up with what I consider a piercing of the veils of consciousness. This requires super normal skills. I don’t state that to bloat my ego but simply because the need for transcendent is a given.

A DEFINITION
With this introduction now let me outline a set of words that for me best point to the quintessence of consciousness.  Consciousness can be seen as the primary potentially universal relationship of connection in and throughout all of nature. It thereby forms nature’s core essence and the basis for nature’s  oneness.

VAST IMPLICATIONS
Our math-based vision of nature no loner holds true if our definition of consciousness is valid. The nature of consciousness supplants what math symbols point to in defining the essence of our world. Just imagine how profound the implications of this simple statement are. Math symbols generally abstract how to separate all elements of consciousness. Given the prior definition of consciousness, however, math symbols then cannot possibly point us to the essence of nature. This violates of central and thought to be bedrock thesis of chemistry and physics – the deep assumption that mathematics offers a universal paradigm for integrating the objective understanding of the oneness of nature. Again the preceding definition denies that.

IS THIS VIEW OBJECTIVELY VALID?  OR A PERSONAL SUBJECTIVE VISTA?
Many think that consciousness is solely the byproduct of  human evolution as animals and plants presumably are not really, truly conscious or at least as cognitive and self-conscious.  To move to a more nature-permeating definition of consciousness, as in pansychism, requires proof or a Litmus test. Again suppose we can use our “theory” to actually reverse the most persistent consciousness illnesses. The details are outlined in this blogs.  Without such proof, the theory would only be a set of empty words promoted by our egos. With such backup evidence, we can advance our understanding of the world we live in – and of ourselves.

This is no small statement.

Here is a gist or abstract for a paper entitled Toward a Non-Mechanical Science of Consciousness to be presented at the next 2010 global conference of ASSC – Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. This is pending approval by ASSC. For more information and details on a non-mechanical and non-math-based view of nature, plus a unique and revolutionary philosophy of consciousness and our cosmos, visit our  www.raw-wisdom.com website.

PROVOCATIVE TITLE
The above title of Toward A Non-Mechanical Science of Consciousness or even a Non-Science of Consciousness seemingly goes against the core thrust of ASSC and allied organizations. It definitely offers a revolutionary thesis that counters some central beliefs of our modern world.  No doubt we need a more advanced and non-mystical (not just vaguely and comfortably believed in) view about what consciousness is. It needs to have practical and effective applications that really work to enhance our consciousness. This study, however, has resisted those kinds of results and even with the best of conventional scientific thrusts to fathom exactly and precisely what the essence of consciousness is.

This paper examines  the reason why this innate resistance not only exists but has non-accidentally persisted.

AUTHOR’S  EXPERIENCE
In his earlier years, the author Nathan Batalion was a math prodigy who at the age of 17 had an high fever that caused his left-brain to shut down.  Subsequent decades of deep inner explorations, led him to develop a radically different view of not only the nature of consciousness but of our cosmos as such. He went past his mathematical training and astute knowledge of physics to see through the essential left-brain dominant perspective that supposedly math-bound formulations pointed us to nature’s true essence . He went past the 17th century catapulted ideology of Galileo and Newton or the vision of a solely math-defined/machine-principle-eliciting view of nature and our cosmos.

THUS GOING PAST CONVENTIONAL LABORATORY APPROACHES
The distinctive features of a modern laboratory include a converging of measuring tools in order to buttress, reinforce and ever expand this same 17th century ideology of nature. A common assumption of the phrase “toward a science of consciousness” is thus that we need to break down consciousness to conform and fit into this mold. Or we need some breakthrough conventional lab protocol to fathom exactly what consciousness is in a measured way. We may thus study consciousness in the same way we study a geological rock – using precise lab assays or a test tub chemical analysis.  We might then reduce the rock to a few chemical components, each delineated by an exact atomic structure. But can we really discover the nature of  consciousness by these means – breaking it up into such atomistic parts or something akin? We may employ the very sharpest tools of measurement and/or microscopy to explore this approach and still somehow it has resisted that exploration – and for extremely good reasons.

The resistance, of course, is not what we would expect being “scientists.” We would anticipate our efforts bearing fruit soon – as we use our most exacting and reliable tool for “objective perspectives” and to satisfy peer reviews. However, peer review and peer pressure can be closely related what then engenders still more deeply ingrained cultural bias.

RADICAL THESIS
Here a radical thesis is proposed that we need to escape most of the conventional paths for arriving at a trans-left/right brain dominant, truly impartial, culturally non-tainted, impersonal and/or objective view of what consciousness is.

THE MAIN MISSTEP
Back in the 17^th century western civilization experienced a hugely revolutionary and dramatic inner transformation. There was a shift from the dominance of the Bible-centered view of the world. This was symbolized by the steeples of churches that rose the highest or assumed cultural dominance. The biblical truths were the organizing core beliefs of the medieval vision. The biblical view was as deeply entrenched then as the math-centered vision that replaced that perspective is now. Civilization, guided by the likes of Galileo, Descartes, Newton aggressively sought to uncover nature-conquering truths that supposedly were more free of beliefs and blind metaphysics than the prior biblical.  All elements of consciousness could now be subdued, fully known and reunited into a new order – the purely math-led and defined. All else was less real or less reliable to lean upon. This lead to a reconstruction of most major fields of knowledge and the transition from medieval religious culture to our modern industrial/commercial world.

AUDACIOUS THESIS GLOBALLY APPLIED
No longer the word of the biblical God, now where math symbols pointed presumably gave us bedrock truths of  the “principia” or  laws of nature. This very audacious thesis, if right, could help us evolve to heights or if wrong  (because it is so universally and aggressively applied) could destroy us. This presumption, nevertheless, was promoted with an unbridled lack of doubt. It manifest in the global proliferation of the fruits of chemistry, physics, biotechnology, pharmaceutical medicine and the centuries-long experiences of our Industrial Revolution.

HEALTH “SIDE-EFFECTS”
Galileo, Descartes and Newton naively envisioned a kind of glorious future Utopia evolving out of their ideas, and which was to manifest later with the Industrial Revolution. However, they never vaguely imagined the same future to filled with chemical pollution, atomic weapons proliferation or health pandemics like cancer. It was far from their consciousness to suspect that their ideas might be implicated in such threatening developments. They rather and again, with little self-scrutiny, foresaw blinding progress to be led by the discovery of nature’s “truly objective” laws. Nevertheless we now experience certain “side-effects.” They can be named “side-effects” to make them appear less significant. On the issue of health “side-effects,” we must face the fact that the collective health of our planet’s human population is not improving at present. A generation ago in the US, for example, 2% of children were known to suffered from chronic diseases. Now it is closer to 8%, the figure having quadrupled in just one generation. Cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease are especially pandemic and they are what I call “consciousness diseases.” For example, cancer spreads unnoticed within. Diabetes manifests with neuropathy or lack of feeling, especially of the extremities. A diabetes patient may step on a nail and not feel the penetration. Alzheimer’s disease obviously involves another kind of extreme loss of consciousness. If consciousness diseases are actually growing in our modern world, it becomes obvious that culturally we do not fathom deeply, we have not conquered the knowing of this phenomenon – not via our most conventional, trusted understandings.

ENVIRONMENTAL “SIDE-EFFECTS”
From an ecological point of view, we also find ourselves approaching a kind of precipice. Our global collective path is not just energy-wise non-sustainable, it also threatens the extinction of life and therefore the extinguishing of consciousness. Some estimate that in the next 10o years 1/2 of all life forms on earth, plant and animal, will be threatened with extincting. This implies that present trends will continue. The recent wholesale death of bee colonies portends this.  Avatar was a film with a script that captured a little of this gist. The integrity of the whole web of life and consciousness on Earth is being threatened on multiple fronts. Something is obviously very wrong which implies our modern knowledge of nature is faulty.

CONCLUSION
This paper assembles potent and piercing ways to challenged, transcend, and replace our conventional, taproot and mechanical understanding of nature. This means we also deeply reorient our understanding of waht is the nature and organization of consciousness within us and in our great universe. Here we thus challenge the depth-validity, integrity and true wisdom of the core of core philosophies of our times, the mathematical, and that just 400 years ago began guiding the formation of our uniquely modern world. So to move toward a genuinely objective science of consciousness we need a different approach.

STATISTICS
The Center for Disease Control in the US has reported that 1 in 100 children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum Disorder (ASD). This is up from 1 out of 150 in 2007. The statistics were 1 out of 5,000 20 years ago. A study conducted by the journal Pediatrics showed similar numbers 1 out of 90 children – and for boys the rate was 1 out of 58.  This makes autism the fastest growing disability in the US. It affects more infants than cancer, diabetes, and AIDS combined.

A CONSCIOUSNESS DISEASE
It is one of several of what I call “consciousness” diseases. Children who are affected are so-called “self-absorbed” which refers back to the Greek root “autos.”  What are autism signs and symptoms? Actually they may not respond in their behavior to various stimuli, make eye contact or hear even their own name. Consciousness is an ability to connect an thus here are the signs of disconnection, loss of consciousness. What is the cause?

OUR MODERN WORLD’S VISION
Our modern world has evolved out of the mechanical vision of nature of the 17th century. Its root paradigm is mathematics – the universal abstractions of how to separate all elements of consciousness. As we reorganize nature to fit this paradigm, we end up with synthetic chemicals throughout and an essentially commercial society. The chief problem with that paradigm, as I learned in my younger years, is simply that the essence of consciousness is the polar opposite.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
What is consciousness? It forms a universal relationship of connection. We can thus use the mechanical model to support life’s consciousness only in what I call a double negative way - by helping us avoid the mechanical as in using machines that do mechanical chores. If we instead transform nature to become  mechanical, we harm the essence of nature. We pollute and the earth and then our bodies,. Thus a distinctive feature of the modern world is a meteoric rise in consciousness illnesses. This is complete predictable.

A VICIOUS CYCLE
It takes no lab tests to demonstrate this. It is vital to understand that the mechanical worldview points us always back to the modern lab environment for ultimate objective truths. Autism research is thus lab research looking at isolated, separate elements that are mathematized – not the holistic impact of our worldview as a whole. In the lab, everything must be measured to be considered “real.”  This always keeps us bound tightly within and promotes the validity of that core and root vision. So there is a vicious cycle we tend to fail to break out of – a very deep spiritual and cultural rut.

WHY THERE IS AN EPIDEMIC
This is why in an age of some of the very highest and most dazzling developments of mechanical things/technology, we still have brutal epidemics of diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and autism – rampant consciousness ailments – and why no chemical drugs ever provide  any real cure. Autism therapy and treatments with drugs tend to be disastrously ineffective.  They do not deal with the cause of autism. Adding more chemicals to our bodies via drugs makes the pollution intentional, especially when the “medicines” contain  heavy metals,  like mercury, as in modern vaccines.

SHAMBLES
Our medical care system is a shambles because our understanding is. We are thus not preventing or reversing such disorders via conventional means. We are rather deepy and profoundly misled by core paradigms of nature that are flawed. Our children, and all of us, suffer as a result.

RAW WISDOM
We thus need to turn to alternative paradigms, why I found it necessary to evolve a philosophy of raw-wisdom – and means of detoxing ourselves from the effects of our modern world – mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

All of my writings are essentially attempts to share what I have learned about “seeing beneath the veils” or the surface illusions of life and to better heal ourselves – and more deeply at all levels. Seeing a deeper cause for disease is a part of this.

LOWERED CONSCIOUSNESS
John Tilden, in his Toxemia Explained, apparently made the very famous claim that “all diseases have one root cause, toxemia.”  Many naturopaths follow this philosophy. My view is this  is partly true and party not. A root cause means, strictly speaking, something so encompassing that it explains the origins of all forms of diseases and at their foundation.  Now I can be ill by having my finger cut and  then infected. This has nothing to do with toxemia!

HEALING PHILOSOPHY OF RAW-WISDOM
My own healing philosophy of raw-wisdom offers a different view. Toxins are physical substances that are poisonous. Emotions and thoughts can also be toxic. They all take life, inner light and consciousness out of our bodies. Ultimately it is this taking away of connective consciousness that engenders disconnection, not-being-whole or experiencing disease.  This is why Alzheimer’s is obviously a consciousness disease. So is diabetes  or where a person can step on a nail and not feel anything due to necrosis in the extremities. Cancer is another dramatically consciousness-depleted disease as it can grow unnoticed to destroy life.

There are further reasons why I uphold this view.

CONSCIOUSNESS DEFINED
At the foundation of the raw-wisdom view is the simple but revolutionary proposition that “consciousness forms a potentially  universal relationship of connection in nature.”

IMPLICATIONS
Among the powerful implications of the above unique statement is a direct challenge to the math-based vision of nature that has fully dominated us for four centuries and which supposedly best helps connect our vision and understanding of the cosmos – the philosophy of Newton, Galileo and Descartes. This  formed the essentially modern way of seeing nature.

WHY THE MODERN VISION IS CONTRADICTORY
That view is actually and very deeply contradictory. It lacks lacks integrity because of what I will explain in a moment and it  points only to surface appearances. The reason is that math symbols uniquely direct us to principles of separation in nature. To count two apples they have to be separate. Make applesauce and you can’t count them anymore. Math symbols are not the mystical tools for God’s plan for nature that Newton assumed and then popularized. This is why those quantitative symbols do direct us to build machines made of separate parts and that are distinctly unconscious. This is also why the modern world is so globally destroying much of living and sentient nature. Ultimately this is why allopathic medicine, grounded in this misguiding worldview, fails to integrally heal with chemical drugs, surgery and radiation – and also points to mostly surface  or symptom ameliorations which are not depth-real.

AT THE ROOT OF HEALING
What consciousness does is it c-o-n-n-e-c-t-s our inner being together as one. The presence of consciousness keeps us whole and alive.  The absence or loss fosters diseases. Lose more consciousness, and we lose life  in the body. The body falls apart then and turns to dust.  Thus raising consciousness either by physical or inner means is very integral to all healing. Healing is symbolized by a cut that mends or re-c0nnects – that regains integral consciousness within. But healing can also be engendered simply by educating, by raising the  level of insight past illusions and deceptions about things that do not heal but harm our bodies.

ULTIMATELY
Ultimately it is a lowering of consciousness that forms the disease process. Each just has a different surface mask. This is also why non-physical approaches like meditation, emotional healing and adequate sleep can further help pull us together or to heal.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
This, first and foremost, happens to be a really vital question, especially when we are trying to help a diabetic person suffering from neuropathy (loss of feeling and awareness in some part of their  body), dementia (as with Alzheimer’s patients) and metastatic cancer (where cancers spread silently, unconsciously to kill).

There is a whole movement to try to answer what is consciousness or to develop a real science  of levels of consciousness that considers this the “hard question” or the hardest of unanswered riddles of science. Some call this the last major frontier of science. A discovery of what is consciousness will likely be the most significant finding of not only this century but the whole millennium.

WHY PHARMACEUTICALS FAIL TO HEAL
The fact that we don’t really understand consciousness or a conscious mind is quite obvious in a typical modern nursing home where over half of the residents over the age of 85 suffer from Alzheimer’s.

Nobel Prize winning physicists have succumbed to Alzheimer’s, indicating the laws of physics don’t necessarily reveal what is consciousness. Also if you give an Alzheimer’s patient a cocktail of the very “best” pharmaceutical or synthetic chemical drugs, they tend not to work, indicating furthermore that the discoveries of chemistry also appear to fail us. Despite extraordinary efforts of modern science, we continue to have dementia patients walking the halls of nursing homes in zombie-like unconscious states. There is too often a dullness rather than brilliance to their eyes.  “No one is at home inside” and to the extent that they may be unable to recognize their children or spouses. But the next miracle discovery in physics, chemistry or genetics  may be  around the corner about a higher consciousness mind!  Without going into details, the current science of what is consciousness is, for me, quite unsatisfying. That emerging science as yet doesn’t help those in greatest need. Therefore if we can regularly effect a turnaround of Alzheimer’s,diabetes and cancer patients’ altered state of consciousness, this becomes an acid test. Personal opinion and ideologies matter less.

TOWARDS  A REAL SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
There are several  international organizations working “toward a science of consciousness” and I have presented my ideas about what is consciousness at two of these organization’s conferences  - one in Tuscon, AZ and the other in Taipei Taiwan. The usual academic approach is to define consciousness scientifically or within a conventional lab-generated  understanding, e.g. some reflex reactions numerically expressed or electric and chemical reaction (neurons firing mostly in the brain) or via neuroscience. This tries to define what is consciousness within our most familiar or comforting mechanical models of nature. In my experience, we are going up the wrong alley so that such efforts are doomed to fail.

SINGLE GREATEST DISCOVERY
The single greatest discovery of my own life offers a solution to this most stumping problem. It is an answer which, when applied, breaks through what I consider the deepest illusions (breakdowns in the integrity) of consciousness and can thus truly reverse chronic consciousness-illnesses in ourselves, in others, in our society at large and for the benefit of  life on our planet. This huge discovery led me to make it a major aim of my life to bring out this understanding. The subsequent applications are again the acid test. Can we take someone from a lower to a higher state of consciousness via a real science? The shocking commentary here is: not within the model of science we currently have. Actually that model stands in the way.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
In my youth I was a math prodigy. Then one day something traumatic happened. No, an apple did not fall on my head! Rather I had a high fever that caused my left-brain to shut down. This was similar to what occurred to Jill Bollte Taylor, a Harvard brain researcher who had a stroke and subsequent left-brain shut-down. For a while I was aphasic or could not talk in whole sentences as the left-brain is both the verbal and the mathematical. For myself from then on, however, I began to study the nature of consciousness as if it was the single greatest urgency of my life. This was because, for a while, I had lost not only typical left-brain skills but all of my inner bearings. I was lost in a new ocean of consciousness without an anchor. Looking fo an anchor I was greatly helped by living in a community called ”The Barn” and which taught me consciousness-observation techniques developed by the Russian philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. After a decade of pursuing such studies or trying to discover “what is consciousness,” I came to unique and independent conclusions. Among these was my deep conviction that consciousness is not just a human-possessed or elite attribute. I saw human consciousness as an off-shoot of the greater consciousness that belongs to all of life on earth an in our cosmos.

Secondly, and still more profoundly, consciousness expressed for me the “essence of nature” – and whether an element of nature appeared to be living or not. When something permeates through and through it forms an “essence,” like brown chocolate forms the essence of a brown chocolate bar. Thirdly for me,  consciousness also forms nature’s universal relationship of connection. This is why it can assume the status of being an “eco-essence” as it permeates then throughout. Consider this, if two events are connected, might consciousness be the basis  of that connection? Usually we think math-formula-defined or mechanical causality explains phenomena, but math symbols abstract how to separate elements of consciousness. This makes math-defined causality actually illogical, implausible, foolish and even impossible. On a far deeper level, for me it is the phenomenon of consciousness that connects all of nature’s surface appearances, and “together as one” (being a universal relationship of connection). Lastly that same consciousness, when concentrated, brings out the most profound of all natural phenomenon: living organisms or life!

Living organisms then express, display, and bring out nature’s essence, rather than machines displaying, expressing and bringing out mathematical order!

This is a revolutionary and profound shift in visions.

IMPLICATIONS OF THIS REVOLUTIONARY VIEW
There are vastly potent  implications to answering the core question, what is consciousness. Here we express a derivative consciousness-centered view of nature or where consciousness thus again is the essence of nature,  not what is pictured with math-formulas integrated as one. This is a step beyond the philosophy of panpsychism.

Panpsychism sees consciousness as present within all of nature’s matter, but often as a subordinate attribute of matter or with matter and the mechanical orientation of chemistry, physics, and biotechnology remaining primary. The consciousness-centered view, however, creates an entirely different core understanding of  nature. It departs from rather than creates another subsidiary branch of the 17th century-outlined view which was formed via the inspirations of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. It offers again a countering vision  to that of chemistry, physics and biotechnology. It does not, for example, focus on atoms and subatomic particles and their interrelationships expressed mathematically nor on genes at the core of each cell.  It sees all chronic illnesses as surface manifestations of inner lowered consciousness – especially diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s.  Thus to reverse such illnesses we re-elicit entirely different natural approaches rather than surgery, radiation and chemotherapy/drugs in order to return us to connectedness, wholeness, and healing.

LIFE-CENTERED
Since living organisms, not machines, are seen as representing nature’s depth-essence, this again forms a evolutionary consciousness and life-centered vision of nature.

MECHANICAL
Machines then and again no longer bring out or express a “discovering” of nature’s quintessence, nor the related mechanical principles via mathematical formulation as supposedly representing the laws of nature (Newton’s Principia Natualis Mathematica that guided the Industrial Revolution). They rather represent a math-constructed, and actually non-objective, culturally-created ideology for the depths of nature.  Because math symbols point us to an exactly opposite essence in a reversal illusionnature simply by being symbols for how to separate all elements of consciousness, it follows then that we can predict unavoidable problems arising, especially with aggressive, self-certain global applications. These problems can be extremely serious. As I see it, they may actually threaten life’s long-term sustainability on Earth. The dilemmas include the development of  atomic weapons plus a level of global chemical pollution that yields ubiquitous toxic residues. These can cause, among other things, the present pandemics of cancer.

UNDERMINING CONSCIOUSNESS
Chemical cocktails bring out and represent this mathematical ideology and generally do not  support consciousness or life in nature and ourselves. Thus drug-based medical care merely can mask surface symptoms (in lieu of depth-healing) while there is a simultaneous undermining of consciousness.

COMPOST HEAP
A compost heap or where all possible plants may be thrown in to disintegrate and later reintegrate  to form new living plants, symbolizes an unbroken circle of unity in nature. However, throw in any large random mix of chemicals to test the whole math-based vision which creates synthetic chemicals and the circle is broken. Life in the heap dies. We see this with super-toxic waste sites. Nature’s premier unity is violated. For example, Monsanto’s Roundup is symbolic of the modern thrust that kills what is green around it.

EXTINCTIONS
Since the 17th century, we have followed a death-delivering or “thanoptic” vision of nature.  The proof is in the pudding. Life extinctions on earth have skyrocketed. It is predicted that half of all species will be dead and gone forever by the end of this century. We are destroying Eden.

HEALTH DECLINING
In regard to the healing arts or where healing connects us to wholeness and awakens consciousness,  the mechanical approach fails.Thus surgery, which cuts the body apart, is not a true depth-healing/connective modality nor is the prescribing of chemical drugs or radiation. Again the proof is in the pudding as health pandemics (cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and other ailments) are on the rise.

COMMERCIAL SOCIETY
A commercial society is one where monetary (math-bound) relationships dominate. It doesn’t matter who owns the means of production, (corporate or socialist rulers), not if they both follow the same essential vision of the 17th century and at the expense of  the earth.  The underlying worldview has not changed an iota. It is not life-centered. It is not concerned or knowledgeable  about what is consciousness to help evolve our lives. At the same time, socio-political relationships have suffered intensely as a result. For example, the single person living alone is now the  largest growing social statistic. At the same time the political arenas are ever more corrupted by monetary influences, in capitalist and socialist societies, that have both consolidated and merged their power and influence internally and externally around the globe.

GLOBAL MIND CHANGE
The GREAT NEWS is that we can turn around all our greatest health, environmental, social and politically trends by making a global mind change. This means changing the deepest soul of our culture. Such a change occurred  in the 17th century or in the shift from the Biblical to the current math-bound view. This was triggered by the discovery of an external reversal illusion by Copernicus (helio rather than geo-centricity) and corroborated  by Galileo. We really need a similar global mind change.This is because our vision actually reverses, in my experience, the universal essence of nature – life and consciousness – and thereby creates a looming “culture of death” This is not something to take lightly. What is consciousness and derivatively what is life are among  the most important if not the most important of all questions to ask in our times. This, therefore, needs to be answered with the greatest of possible knowledge and the deepest of wisdom.