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.

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.

Consciousness in Nature

DEFINING CONSCIOUSNESS
An effective study of Consciousness In Nature is dependent on how we first define the term “consciousness.” A word is an invention of the mind that serves as a pointing tool of our consciousness. How do we uniquely point that consciousness, using words, to nothing but itself? If we associate this word with an advanced human cognitive function then “consciousness”  becomes something narrow or severely constrictive to point to. It becomes just a human attribute. In my experience, this may only help us feel superior when in reality this is a deep illusion born of  what I call a left-brain dominant ”hubris.”  Hubris is a wonderful  ancient Greek term that means overbearing pride, presumption and arrogance. Yielding a sense of superiority, it feeds the drive to dominate and control. When we are so driven to conquer “it” – or something outside of us including nature – then that outside “it” becomes separate from us. When we are at one with something, there is no inside/outside group to contend with. There is no need to conquer and no need for a sense of superiority or inferiority.  When we fall out of this loop, we are estranged.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS BELONGING TO ALL OF NATURE
My life-long study of consciousness has yielded a very different if not opposite conclusion, namely that what we experience as every  day “consciousness” is not a special attribute that belongs to us humans. It is rather proprietary to all of nature that formed us. In fact  my view goes further. It states that consciousness also makes up the essential essence of nature or  the cosmos we live in. Nothing in conventional mechanical science teaches us this proposition. In fact, we need to actually learn a different language than “matter and energy, defined mathematically” to understand this viewpoint deeply. Again words are but pointing tools and changing the language to point with changes the focus of consciousness and life. When the focus is unconventional it will of course be challenged. Yet  I stand firm in my conviction that, really and truly, atoms and sub-atomic particles do not represent the essence of nature (rather they represent the cultural-ideology of a math-based view of nature) and that instead consciousness lies at the very core of our world and of ourselves.

DIFFERENT THAN THE DOMINANT WESTERN VISION
Naturally this stance puts me at odds with chemistry and physics, the mathematical and the systematically mechanical viewpoint. We have been culturally convinced that the latter holds the key to the ” really true”  unifying laws or objective principles of nature.

My experience tells me otherwise, and definitively.

THE SHELL OF THE TORTOISE
What I know of nature is symbolized by a tortoise and its shell.

This is a metaphor for the difference between the surface appearance of nature (like that of a hard shell) and its depths.  The shell exhibits not hardness and relative lifelessness. Separate from the turtle, it cannot function other than mechanically. Imagine that the depth of nature work  exactly on the opposite principles. The flesh of the turtle is soft. It is consciousness, not mechanical. It is self-moving. It does not stay fixed, unmoving or dead. If you try to transplant the principles of the shell, of the surface, to the depths, what happens? If we inject into the turtle’s blood vessels only the hard shell’s minerals, the turtle will die.

In my opinion, western civilization is on a like path. It has mistaken the illusion of nature’s surface mechanical appearances for the essence of all of nature and thus has begun to supplant and displace surrounding nature’s inner conscious and living depths.

If we assume all is mechanical and then try to remake everything in that image, the result will naturally be to destroy the bounty of living Eden.

HOW THIS COMES ABOUT
Imagine that “consciousness” is not something amorphous, that is without a unique identity. If we can identify that identity, we can familiarize ourselves more deeply with that consciousness, evolve a science, and then help support and nourish rather than destroy consciousness/life in nature. Let me describe this identity as best I understand it. Not to be treated lightly, this definition is the result of about a half a century of inner explorations:

Consciousness-in-nature forms a potentially universal relationship of connection.

Now when two things are glued together they connect. When we think of how this works conventionally, we think of a chemical formula for the glue. However, the glue  may be generating a strong relationship of connection on the surface bond but not necessarily in regard to deeper kind of connective consciousness. The glue is dead. It does not respond or connect to its surroundings. The glue shows no signs of alive awareness.

BADGE OF ORGANICITY
Imagine a flower with pedals that radiate outward in 360 degree directions. The radiations then also point inward to a single center to unify the whole. Now imagine that not  just a flower but most all organic life wear or display one or another surface badge of its connective essence  and organicity- at least while alive and consciousness. Afterwords they may turn to dust.  This includes  the swirls of a snail, the veins of a leaf, the radiance of our own human eye. Suppose we now work on bringing out this consciousness to sustain life, and rather than what is mechanical. We can begin by constructing a very different global view of the nature and nature’s Oneness and derivative laws. What this implies is a vision that is very different from the mathematical ideology of machine principles that currently dominates modernity – and that is taught virtually everywhere to be believed in.

WHY ARE WE HARMING NATURE’S CONSCIOUSNESS?
Obviously the mechanical view of nature, math-defined, is a not an especially consciousness-centered vision of nature. I would argue that its core principles actually stand in opposition to what is consciousness at the core of nature. Would it then be surprising that we are ubiquitously destroying life all over the planet? To understand this innate opposition, let me explain the following. Western civilization has, since the 17th century, been on a course of progressively adopting a math-based vision of nature, the mechanical whose ambassadors are physics, chemistry and biotechnology. Brought into the fold are geology, oceanography, and atmospheric sciences – all ultimately helping to reduce all of nature to mathematics or the principles of a machine.

MACHINES
Machines are distinctly “Alzheimerish”  or unconscious.  We sense this best when speaking to a telephone machine that can’t distinguish between someone saying a thing or two lovingly or in an angry voice. “May I have your credit card please?” We curse at it, and the machine can’t make it out. We also sense can get a sense of this when a bulldozer tramples over a life-form with no real consciousness, feeling or remorse. In this context, mathematics abstracts how to, with potential universality, separate all elements of consciousness. To count objects is to consider each as separate units. The three apples that make up a cup of applesauce cannot be counted as three anymore.  There are endless examples of how mathematics dominantly abstracts relationships of separation, and geometry of spatial separation. Now imagine that consciousness in its essence , and with the same potential universality, represents the opposite or what connects most deeply. Symbols are not mystical tools to discover nature with. They are just inner pointing utencils. Thus mathematics, because of the limitations of what those symbols represent, will not be able to point to consciousness in nature.

Trusting the pointing path of those symbols to blindly – which is what ideologies do -  we end up then adopting a worldview that solemnly claims “objectivity” but actually points in a bias away from the very quintessence of our world. What math symbols do point to well and design even better is machines -  things made most distinctively of separate parts – thus easily math-defined. Bottom line following this ideology of nature, we then either begin to supplant or impinge what is life  and consciousness, and with the opposite principles that really deliver and represent death in nature. We see this with chemical pollution concentrated in supertoxic waste sites that kill all of life and the proliferation of atomic weapons that can do the same.

Our sense of already knowing the core secrets of nature offers a good feeling or sense of a hubris-endowed superior knowledge that ultimately blinds us.

ENVIRONMENTAL RESCUE
Thus to  urgently rescue us from both our  inner global foolishness and our outer global environment crises we urgently need a what may be called a global mind change or paradigm shift. This means a universal shift in inner perspectives. It is the same as a central or core paradigm shift, one which redirects us from a new core to something universal. Historically there have been very few such shifts One occurred in the transition from the medieval Bible-centered to the present mechanical/ math-centered orientation of our modern times. Imagine we will make the subsequent shift, this time from th math-based view as pinnacle (Principia Naturalis Mathematica) to a consciousness/life based vision.

SPLIT-BRAIN VIEW
In a study of our split brain, this same shift can also be considered a transition from a left-to-right brain dominant view. We can shift from a dominant separative consciousness to a dominant connective consciousness. In the process we can literally reconstruct, transform and revolutionize the whole of our essential vision of the cosmos.

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.