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

CT Scans Found To Cause Cancer

OVERVIEW  – DO CT SCANS REALLY CAUSE CANCER?
Two research studies published in the December 15 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine brought to light an evaluation of CT scans and how they deliver more radiation than previously thought. Scans may actually be responsible for nearly 30,000 cancers each year and 14500 deaths. This is the equivalent of the harm of several Twin Towers attacks.

DETAILS
One study, led by prestigious researchers from the National Cancer Institute, examined 1119 patients at four San Francisco hospitals and estimated the number of cancers caused. They found patients exposed to up to 4x as much radiation as previously assumed. It was the equivalent of 74x as much radiation as emitted by a mammogram or 442 chest X-rays. Young people are most at risk and among 20 year old women undergoing CT scans, 1 out of 150 will develop cancer.

MOSTLY UNNECESSARY
Some radiologist may be up in arms over these findings but Dr. Rita Redberg of the University of California at San Francisco wrote that “up to 1/3rd of CT scans are unnecessary.”

In my opinion, most are unnecessary since they only give a surface or superficial view and no real depth insight into the etiology of what brings about systemic diseased conditions. Looking at surface appearances is like looking at illusions. Contrary to belief, examining such scans in order to develop chronic-disease-treatment protocols  is not an advanced science.  Not everything is really what “meets the eye on the surface.” Unfortunately doctors are not taught a real and advanced science of conscious, borrowing instead from the mechanical philosophy of nature of the 17th century – the math-based, which poorly guides consciousness. If that were understood,  all of modern medicine would change.

GOOD AND THE BAD
Modern medicine is actually to be commended and admired for its advanced emergency treatments, especially some mechanical fixes like high-tech mending of broken bones. This, however, feeds an illusion that modern medicine is also good at treating other health conditions – the systemic and chronic. It is not.  That is why we have uncontrolled or not-reigned-in health pandemics like cancer, diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

REVOLUTION IN THOUGHT
What we thus need is a deep revolution in thought, moving away from the 17th century’s  mechanical vision of nature that underlies how doctors view the whole of our bodies and treat virtually all systemic disease conditions.

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.

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.