(Healingtalks) It appears that pain is the number one health complaint on the planet.

It is the number one Google searched term on the topic of health. Everyone, at one time or another experiences pain. It is important to know what pain is to best deal with pain.  Upon that simple answer of what is pain  hinges how we approach and best treat pain.

Prelude to exploring what is pain, understanding painlessness

Before delving directly into what is pain, let’s explore the nature of painlessness. It has two manifestations.

• The first is a state of complete health and wholeness.

• The second is a state of extreme illness where there is no longer any consciousness of pain.

Consciousness is at the core of life and in states of extreme illnesses, it leaves the body. So a diabetic patient may step onto a nail and feel nothing, no pain. For type-II diabetes, it takes generally 20 years to develop due to poor eating and lifestyle habits, and as an advanced chronic illness. There is a gradual waning of pain. With metastatic cancer, there is a spreading of toxicity and no feeling of pain. With Alzheimer’s disease there is a loss of consciousness and no constant pain.

What is pain?

Again since pain is an in between state of consciousness, it thus

• Does not exist when we are feeling whole
• It is no longer there also in the later stages of being chronically/systemically ill
• Pain arises when we are hurt.

This means it is at first unwelcome. It tells us something is wrong. Pain is the consciousness of a hurt, injury, harmful/toxic invasion, or something that is making us feel and know that we are suddenly unwhole. But it is also a sign of having our life force there to fight for us and to counter that hurt.

Thus what is hurting us is what is unwelcome, and not the pain

This is critically important to know. Pain is not the enemy. It is our part of our life force or consciousness defenses.

It behooves us to first know, in this context, what is this consciousness that produces pain.

What is consciousness?

We at healingtalks have developed an immensely powerful and revolutionary view of what is consciousness. With that we can better understand what is any consciousness of pain – and derivatively how best to treat pain naturally or have a posture toward pain.

With this in mind, it is vital to present our definition of consciousness as the “universal relationship of connection, the principle of connection itself.”

Imagine it to be both the principle of connection in nature cosmically outside of us, and inside – in and for every cell, tissue, muscle, fiber, bone and organ structure or again universally.

How painless consciousness and the consciousness of pain interact

When a rock falls on our toe we suddenly cry out “Outch, Oh my God, it hurts!

Consciousness rushes instantaneously, and again to any point of the body that is injured, cut, or made unwhole. But this is provided we have ample consciousness in our body to experience pain and are not on any painkilling drugs or subject to anesthesia.

Why does pain rush to the site of a hurt?

This is because the role of that consciousness is to reconnect or heal us.

The presence of consciousness is a) the foundation of all healing and b) something to welcome and rejoice about.

Lowered states of consciousness are marked by the absence of awareness, the absence of pain when hurt.

This means the hurt at the root of the pain is what needs to be eliminated, and not the consciousness of pain (the latter being a healing agent).

Acute and chronic pain

There are essentially two types of pain, acute and chronic.

• Acute pain is an intense one that lasts for just a short while until we are healed. A perfect example is a finger cut which hurts intensely for a little while then subsides, and then goes away as the skin reconnects or heals.
• Chronic pain results when something remains unwhole or not healed inside and we have enough vitality and life for there to continue to be pain – to continue to try to heal the condition – but it is insufficient, It persists and nature thus tells us thereby that we need further help or medical attention from a professional who knows how to help us heal.

Acute pain, in rare occasions may require a drug to suppress it. It may be so intense as to trigger a heart attack, for example. Or we might have some other emergency to attend to, and need to temporarily suppress the pain because something more important than a minor cut needs attending to.

NEVER suppress the consciousness of chronic pain

Yes we want to get rid of pains and there causes, but not the consciousness of pain, the healing agent. The consciousness of chronic pain should thus NEVER be suppressed with toxic drugs. That is the absolute worst thing we can do in a long-term health situation or chronic disease. This kills the healing messenger, to suppress the consciousness of pain – and further toxify what has already been a toxic and chronically ill body.  Doctors generally are not taught this philosophy. This is because, to be blunt, they are trained to become pharmaceutical salespersons and adherants to a mechanical/dead and not consciousness-centered view of our bodies. They are trained to believe in the mechanical/math-based vision of nature, opposite to the consciousness-based vision we are sharing.

Making such a mind shift, and swimming against the conventional tide creates a challenge for the chronic pain sufferer.

He or she has to deal with pain and the courage to do something other than what the doctor might recommend.

New skills need to be learned to not suppress the pain  but rather embrace, welcome, enhance and increase the healing messenger’s gifts, to actually pray and gather the inner forces to increase not the pain (the awareness of which may be dwindling over time) but the consciousness of pain. Boy is that a mind shift! In latter states of illness that consciousness has died and needs to be brought back to life,

Instructive example

Last year I had an ugly red, inflammable and slightly painful pimple on the side of my cheek. It  was about an inch wide in its circular diameter. Two doctors pleaded with me to have it cut out, and I said no way. The growth was nature’s welcoming message that I had some toxicity in my body it was trying to get rid of. Instead of killing the messenger, going against nature, and leaving me in a chronically ill state….instead I went on a three week detox. Thereupon the growth went away as soon as I was clean inside. Had I gone the allopathic route and cut it out, it would have probably left a life-long scar as a reminder of my having gone against nature! Worse, if I had had an autopsy that showed it was cancerous and then had chemo or radiation, I would have further polluted why body to deepen my chronic toxicity and illness – evermore then untended to!

The same as above applies to any encounter with pain. At first and immediate or superficial sight it appears “unwelcome.” But on deeper reflection pain is a most welcome messenger of healing.

What triggers the experience of pain?

Pain happens when a body part is:

• Squashed by a rock
• Cut by a knife
• Burnt by fire.
• Some chemical toxin enters our body
• Toxic forces are brought into our body by microbes
• a resulting inflammation, fever

In all these situations, something make us feel unwhole.Consciousness then rushes to the scene as the healer, which is how we experience pain.

Why avoid using drugs 

Chronic pain is a sign that we need a major lifestyle change to become healthy again. The illness is deep and not bending to the healing force of re-connective consciousness that re-turns us to health. We have grown short of vitality, of life force. The cure thus is not drugs but finding how to get that life forced enhanced.

If we have a new leaf growing on a plant, notice how shinny it is. If we have a newborn child, notice how a similar shine radiates in their eyes along with a bouncing vitality. As we age, we may lose gradually a little of that vitality, that life, that light, and that consciousness. The skill to know how to retain as much as possible of that life force is critically important. The use of drugs does not accomplish this. Drugs work suppress symptoms, which is of value only in emergencies (the surface of time). On a deeper level and with prolonged use they harm life. Why? Drugs are math-designed. Mathematics abstracts universal separation. At the core of life is consciousness, universal connection. The two oppose each other. This is why drugs can so readily become the messengers of both approaching death and unconsciousness. We see this with nursing home patients given multiple drugs and who walk the halls like zombies.

This is why it is vitally important to avoid drugs whenever you are in chronic pain.  Do not kill the healing messenger.

The truth about Big Pharma and Big Chem

These economic groups have created an industry, including via the funding of modern medical education, that is based on a false ideology of nature. We do not get “better living through chemistry. We get a failed understanding of what keeps us and all of living nature connected together as well as what heals living organisms.

Compost heap test

Drug companies spend billions for lab studies to try to convince us, with the stamp of government approval, that some isolated symptom, isolated or separated out in a lab experiment is improved using a patented drugs.

But the scientifically objective way (the non-fooling) to test chemical drugs is to test their impact as a whole. And what better place to do that than in a compost heap where all plants decay to form the building materials of all other plants, in an unbroken circle of Unity. It is where the Oneness of nature is displayed. But drugs can be shown to break, not enhance that order of unity. This why when we take any random and large mix of drugs, to test the chemical/mathematical order as such, and thrown these chemicals into a compost heap, what happens?

We find it kills all of life and therefore makes the heap into a super-toxic dump.

The same happens through out nature as we pollute and threaten life as well as inside our bodies when we apply this very false philosophy to a falsely grounded system of medical care. These same drugs are used as pain killers to kill the consciousness inside of us.

On multiple levels the chemical approach…. fails abysmally

On multiple levels, taking pharmaceutical drugs will lead us ever more downhill states until indeed we feel no more pain and are dead. It kills not only the messenger, but the message of a hurt that needs attending – and what nature gives us to heal with.

Because that system of medicine fails, we have unchecked chronic health epidemics. Our medical care system is little more than a disease care system in shambles. It misleads people who have lost the light inside to lose it even further, to go downhill until they reach full painlessness and death.

Ten major sites of pain

The major sites of pain in our body tend to be:

• leg and foot pain
• shoulder pain
• neck pain
• knee pain
• back pain
• abdominal pain
• hip pain
• side pain
• joint pain
• arm and hand pain

But actually pain can occur in any and all parts of our body – in any cell, tissue, muscle, fiber, bone, or organ system.  We also have headaches, eye pain, ear pain, and the like. This is because pain is a state of consciousness, and consciousness is the universal relationship of connection inside of us.

Acute pain treatment

Acute pains are fairly easy to treat. At the skin level, if you have a cut, you put a bandage on. If you have a fiery pain or stinging pain, you can put on a soothing and cooling natural balm.

With acute emotional pain, you need to calm down and find a quick solution – a loving, sharing resolution for what emotionally irks one.

One can, likewise have acute mental pain or a headache and the answer is to solve the problem that plagues the mind.

As one can see, acute pain bridges mind, body and spirit – being a state of consciousness.

Chronic pain treatment

The chronic pain exists as an intermediate state. There is vitality and consciousness present otherwise one would feel no pain. But the degree of consciousness is not enough to overcome the ill state. So the solution is to ramp up the vital healing forces in the body. One then needs to make lifestyle changes, deeper changes – and not just popping a pill for immediate relief. Among the advice we give is:

• Steer away from what allopatic medicine. Thus avoid chemical drugs (synthetic or math-designed, except in emergencies), surgery (cutting the body apart, again except in emergencies), and radiation (based on a decay, falling apart, not healing process).
• Steer towards the four pillars of natural healing.

Meditations

No one wants to welcome any new pain, which is the sign of a hurt until we learn to distinguish the source of the hurt and the pain. The consciousness of pain, itself, is a sign of healing. We welcome with love, joy and further consciousness that pain.

Consider saying  “thank you God that I feel pain, that I have the life force to be conscious of this pain.”

It may seem stranger yet to say “Let me feel it and be present to this pain yet more intensely.”

But this counter-cultural, counter allopathic approach. It is again one of embracing and loving rather than killing and destroying the pain that is the messenger of healing and the teacher o what needs to be done.

Actually this approach works miracles. The opposite approach of suppressing the messenger leave one chronically ill with the root cause of the hurt unattended to.

Four pillars of naturopathy

Instead we turn to the following four pillars of natural healing:

• Nutrition – getting the best vital forces into our body
• Detoxification – getting the worst, most toxic forces out of our body, including traces of pharmaceutical drugs
• Exercise/Circulation – enhancing the movement of both the above processes
• Mind/Body – keeping the mind on the path to follow the above three natural approaches, and using meditation or intentionally altered states of consciousness as an added means to directly raise consciousness and heal

I – Nutrition

Here the ideal diet is plant-based because plants carry the strongest life force and one that is at least 80% composed of living, uncooked, raw, fresh, whole organic foods. See our many postings on this diet. In addition it is important to add fresh juices to the diet, freshly made and drunk within 20 minutes of making because otherwise they oxidize and lose their vitality.

• Green juices

Juices are the most powerful medium to transfer life-force and consciousness back into the body to overcome and overwhelm pain. Among juices, the green juices have an advantage or edge.

Furthermore among green juices, grasses produce the most powerful of all forms of healing. They oxidize our bloodstream – and oxygen is the connective bridge between the chemical and the life and consciousness-based vision of nature. We thus need that oxygen (if you want to refer to the chemical model) or we need consciousness (if you refer to the alternative model) and it is one and the same to heal.

• Green is the middle color of the rainbow

The seven colors of the rainbow are actually formed out of three primary colors in radiant life – the red at one end of the rainboew, green in the middle, and violet-blue at the other end. When these three colors are pointed together as one, and only these three, they make white or color-separationless-light. Green pulls together the extreme opposites. Green is the ultimate healing color.

• Using grasses and green baby shoots

Being the simplest of plants, green grasses are the most connected within, the most “consciousness-carrying” or health-delivering. The use of wheatgrass to heal was pioneered by Ann Wigmore and the Hippocrates Health Institute. They also use green baby shoots, such as pea sprouts and sunflower sprouts, juicing them and adding them to a base of cucumber and/or celery juice. This is given to their guests twice a day, along with 2 ounce shots of wheatgrass twice a day. The Gerson Institute similarly uses green juices and throughout the day to heal what otherwise might seem incurable diseases. These institutions, and their offshoots, have treated millions of people from around the world to reverse chronic ills and befuddle and startle allopathic or conventional practitioners.

They represent a paradigm shift toward natural healing.

II – Detoxification

There are many great ways to detoxify. Among them we can use skin brushing, juice fasting, water fasting (under supervision), enemas, colonics, intravenous chelation, oral chelation, mineral-bath bathing and saunas. They all have the same effect of helping to remove what is most toxic, what is most life depleting and helping to take such elements out of the body. This happens to include traces of pharmaceuticals, especially chemotherapy.

III – Exercise and enhanced circulation

There are many ways to aide both improved nutrition and detoxification and by combining these two with a regular program of weekly exercise and/or circulation enhancement. The latter can include massages, other forms of body work and the use of whirlpool baths. Strength exercises help to not only improve bone density but to help the body open up channels of consciousness. Aerobic exercises strengthen the heart to oxidize or raise the consciousness of every cell in the body. Gentle exercises such as tai chi and qui gong work to direct consciousness in the moving process and as a means to heal.

IV – Mind body work

This is necessary in the final and crowning effort to heal. Mind/body work comes both first and last, and everywhere in between.

Related articles

• Four Master Keys to Natural Healing
• A New Consciousness-Centered Vision of Nature
• What is Consciousness in Nature
• Almost Half of Americans Take At Least One Prescription Drug
• Keeping a Healthy Circulation
• Holistic Healing Targets Mind Body and Soul
• Daily Nutrition Guidelines
  

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Heal Pain Naturally – by Jenny Manion

Keywords

What is consciousness, pain management, pain symptoms, nerve pain, painful, treating pain

(Healingtalks) We have long advocated a Global Mind Change – one that moves us from the current math-based, mechanical view of nature to one where life and consciousness are really at the core of all of nature.

Lorna Green’s vision

One of the exception proponents of this view is Lorna Green, PhD and here is a synopsis of her vision:

Themes for the now

• We are in deep trouble – with both the state of the Earth and ourselves. Our Earth’s ecosystems, millions of years in the making, are globally collapsing. The oceans and the Arctic are at a ‘tipping point.’ Fisheries are disappearing and coral reefs are disintegrating. The bark beetle, and other undertakers of nature, are poised to take out what is left of the North American forests and while bees are dying en masse.
• Greatest extinction of life - Some environmental scientists predict future waves of extinction will rival those when dinosaurs disappeared and when 97% of all life forms vanished, presumably due to an asteroid. Now it seems to be due to our own foolishness.
• A broken web - The disappearing species are not isolated creatures. They are vital links in the whole interconnected web of life and thus also our food chains upon which we are dependent. So we too are ultimately threatened with extinction along with the whole web. But the crisis for the Earth and ourselves is again of our own doing: driven by a conquering arrogance and blind ignorance.
• An indictment – So we find ourselves in deep trouble that is an indictment of civilization – its ideas, values, attitudes and practices. We are ravaging and raping the Earth, being led by thought forms that are ill. To put it simply: we have no idea of what we are doing and who we really are to be doing what we are doing.
• Revising root assumptions - Many people say that we have to revise our root assumptions about nature and ourselves. We do know the old paradigms are not working and driving the destruction of the Earth. So obviously we need some new ideas to support a more thriving planet and a viable future for us all.
• To save the Earth and ourselves – Ultimately the true foundation of civilization is our Earth. We destroy the Earth, we destroy ourselves. Obviously the human race has not got the Earth and perhaps the universe right – so we must now get it right to avoid self-destruction. There is ‘an army of Light’ engaged in this struggle toward more wisdom, to save us and the Earth. This includes those who struggle for the inalienable rights of men and women, all peoples, and ultimately of the earth that supports us – visualizing a world based on love and truth rather than ongoing wars of aggression and lies.

Themes for the future

• Big questions – ponder the metaphysics of all things, what is nature, what is the universe, and all of life therein.
• Our human place in the universe – explore how we human beings are a key to the universe, and the universe is a key to understanding ourselves. But if we do not change our human ways, humanity’s arrogant, adventuresome thrusts may soon be over.
• Our scientific age – critique the view of many people that science is the new and truest religion. Modern science owes much to Descartes, having written his views over 300 years ago, and where the debate between science and religion was cast in a split Cartesian framework – viewing nature as Spirit-stripped and mechanical.
  
• Revolutionary role for consciousness –consider how consciousness has emerged as a problem in modern science. Most scientists believe it cannot be explained by other than scientific principles or that consciousness is something produced by matter, and can thus can only be explained mechanically. But what if the exact reverse is more true. What if a depth understanding of consciousness turns on a light bulb inside and calls into question mechanical principles standing on their own. What if consciousness, not matter and energy, form the root foundation and the overall essence of nature. In other words, what if consciousness is the truer basis of the universe, and where matter is an expression of consciousness.
• Native wisdom – honor the native view for if consciousness is more truly the root foundation of nature then ancient cultures, like the Native American Indians, “had it right.” They may have used different key words, such as the term “Spirit” and to describe various principles of consciousness in and throughout nature.
• Consciousness-centered view – letus mine deeply into the implication that matter and all else becomes viewed as a surface expression of that consciousness – experienced in, though and by consciousness – and where all is ultimately consciousness or Spirit.
• New heaven within/without– imagine the experience of consciousness, steeped in the nurturing of life and with love, is not reducible to mechanistic physics and chemistry but rather the reverse.
• New universe – visualize a universe of  not matter and mechanism, symbolized by a Grand Machine, clock-like, functioning in accordance with chance and necessity, and ruled by forces that are ‘blind’ or unconscious – but rather see the universe awake, aware, intelligent, creative and spirited – and where what Aristotle called ‘final causality’ belongs ultimately to consciousness.
• New earth, see the universe as not made up of matter and mechanism, commodities and resources (and reduced to board feet or measurements) but habituated by awake, aware, alive and intelligence or spirited things throughout. Imagine the existence of consciousness within consciousness within consciousness, and so on – as a continuous consciousness reaching out to Oneness.
• New human  – know that immortal spiritual beings may be seen to reincarnate, and to come here not once, but again and with conscious plans and purposes for being here.
• Loving to write – visit Lorna in her chair by the window through which she sees ancient trees, tall grasses, and fields beyond, and then hills, and snow-capped mountain peak. So she writes from a place of prayer with words, insights, and ideas that come through my Earth connection, plus a place of heart-warmth and peace.
• We are the Elders – speaking up for the Earth and a conscious universe, if we do not do so, who will? As the Earth is being destroyed, is dying, we cannot remain silent. What we are doing destructively is an indictment of ourselves. We have surrounded ourselves in a human-fabricated world (machines never occur naturally in pristine nature and thus do not represent or model nature’s essence) and of the mechanical ideas that have led us thereto. It is time to re-write our old “man-u-factured” paradigms. It is time to show that the Emperor has no clothes.

Global mind change

Imagine finally that a truer science will and must emerge with a vision of the universe made up of consciousness in and throughout – as wise shamans and spiritual leaders have told us before – and that physical nature is but an outer reflection and revelation of Spirit.

With this view, we can re-think most deeply the foundations of everything – science, philosophy, religion, society, culture, you name it – in a “global change of mind” as we re-envision the universe.

This is similar to the change that happened from the medieval to the modern world, but this time, for God’s sake….. let’s get it right!

About the Author

Lorna Green, PhD: While highly educated in conventional science, philosophy, and great books of our world’s cultural and spiritual traditions, she now finds herself amidst America’s southwest deserts, with nothing between herself and a view of the Universe or where she can live deeply, walk windswept paths to heights and pester the Spirit for ultimate answers.

Related articles

• Summary of Lorna Green’s Theory of Consciousness
• A New Consciousness-Centered Vision of Nature
• What is Consciousness in Nature
• Advocating a Life-Centered Vision of Nature
• Toward a Non-Mechanical Science of Consciousness

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Key words

Subconscious conscious, consciousness mind, conciousness, conscious and unconscious, the science of the mind, mind conscious, definition of consciousness, meaning of consciousness, conscious define, states of consciousness, conscious thoughts, nature of the mind, theory consciousness, levels of consciousness

My intense study of consciousness, the essence of life, led me to the conclusion that it forms the universal essence of nature as well. This means that life, and not the principles of the machine, lie at the core of nature. The modern world has a different view. It uses mathematics to describe the essence of all things in nature. But math symbols abstract how to separate all elements of consciousness – creating mechanical things made of separate parts and going directly against the depth essence of consciousness and life. Force that vision deeply onto nature and you inevitably harm and ultimately destroy  living nature, and the nature of ourselves.

If you wonder why our world today is an incredible mess…why we are on the verge of economic and ecological collapse…why there are vast health pandemics out of control…go to the taproot reason…take a look at the core guiding (or misguiding) philosophy of nature …its sister profit/quantification of consciousness motive..or what has dominated us pervasively the last four hundred years. Wherever there is a deepest  corruption of consciousness, socially, money motives are involved and an essential left-brain dominance to disintegrate vision.

This is not accidental and is a trend that has been on the rise since ancient Greek times, culminating in the 17th century European culture and coming to a dark fruition in our times – global pollution, atomic weapons, and GMOs, among those fruits.

Lorna powerfully keys into this. Here is a synopsis of her ideas.

Summary of Lorna Green’s Theory of Consciousness

Here is a brief summary of Lorna Green’s points in her What Is Consciousness In the Scheme of Things. Her thesis is something I wholeheartedly agree with:

Consciousness As An Anomaly
Thomas Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions pointed out that the discovery of anomalies (evidence that contradicts a theory and cannot be explained within it) is the foundation of all scientific revolutions. In this context

• Understanding “what is consciousness” appears at a leading-edge frontier of modern science. It is the last of the major unconquered territory for the real depth understanding of our world.
• At the same time consciousness fails to be explained by existing scientific principles that are mechanical. It precisely an anomaly.
• Thus if consciousness were to be explained, it tends while it fit uneasily in our classical assumptions, this can become the trigger for revolutionizing our whole modern worldview.

Let me add my own example to Lorna’s thesis. Living organisms actually and really violate all of Newton’s mechanical laws of motion – one of the foundation assumptions of physics that that is how nature works – mechanically. A runner, for example, can run around a track and with a certain inertia or momentum. But being conscious and alive, he can then decide to abruptly turnaround. Where is that explained in Newton’s laws? How and why does that happen? Why, in fact, is mechanical motion anathema to life, as in working on an assembly line all day long.  Suppose the reasons are profound, and why cannot be reduced to mechanical explanations (which was how 18th century philosophers tried to solve this unresolved problem).

Moving Away From Old Renaissance Assumptions
In order to thus revolutionize our worldview, we must move away from century-old notions about consciousness such as:

• A) Consciousness emerges at only the high end of a path of physical evolution
• Consciousness is tied to the development or evolution of  our physical brain’s activities. It is produced and derived from neuron activities,  a by-product of a computational organ with impressions.  It is not something existing in its own right.
• Consciousness is a helpless ghost or shadow in the machine, in the material/physical world
• Matter and energy defined mathematically is exclusively what is really or objectively real in our world.

Near Death Experiences – The Means to Overthrow Old Consciousness Assumptions
Lorna points out that a study of near death experiences may offer the pivotal means to overthrow our old assumptions about the world we live in. There are several on-going studies worldwide to determine if consciousness is really separable from the body or can exist independently on its own – with real powers of its own.

We Are In The Position of Forming A Second/New Copernican Revolution
If the results of on-going Dutch and English experiments show that consciousness is incontrovertibly separable from the body, then our modern worldview must change in ways that are almost unimaginable. It could involve of reversal of root terms – or where consciousness becomes the primary and fundamental stuff of the world, and not matter. She calls this The Consciousness Paradigm. Matter become derivative and secondary  rather than the other way around. This, by the way I would add, can go beyond conventional panpsychism – or the philosophy that consciousness is in all of nature. The latter can still presuppose that consciousness emerges from matter. Here we make a radically backwards inference. The universe suddenly becomes no longer just a machine, Newton’s Grand Clock, or acting blind and unconscious. Just about everything we believe about nature, and ourselves, then is revolutionized. Or the whole of nature and its causal laws might be seen as primarily or first an express of consciousness in things (rather than an expression of what is the machine-like functioning of matter). Also consciousness might ever exist within consciousness… ad infinitum, like a Russian doll is made with a smaller doll inside which in turn has ever smaller dolls.

I would add a stirring example to Lorna’s point. A person, in deep hypnosis, can often image a hot iron touching the skin with the result that a blister forms. Matter here then emerges out of mind and consciousness rather than the other way around – the common modern assumption.

Impact Of A New Theory Of Consciousness
With the above revolution in thought, or reverse understanding of the foundations of nature, all departments of knowledge and all human activities are impacted. This is what happened in the 17th century with the transition from the biblical worldview to the modern mechanical underlying the Industrial Revolution. This kind of a global mind change can happen again.

What really

is consciousness

When I tell people I really know the transpersonal nature of consciousness, one reaction I can anticipate, especially from philosophers and scientists, is skepticism. And there is nothing wrong with having such healthy skepticism. One should generally never believe what we can’t see or verify.

Still I make this claim about something that has escaped some of the greatest minds of all times. So what makes me so self-assured that I truly and really know the solution to this most ultimate and difficult of all puzzles?

There are a couple major reasons.

One of these is that my model actually works in practice and helps explain some inscrutibl phenomenon. For example, why does money so powerfully corrupt consciousness. We cannot know the answer to that important question without first knowing what consciousness is. Similarly, we can’t help reverse consciousness diseases without intimately knowing the nature of consciousness. A second reason is how I came to this understanding, as explained below.

Now having a hypothesis about the nature consciousness that really works in practice and also helps explain things that otherwise can’t be explained….all of this is not minor event.

It ladens me personally with a responsibility to explain or to share this message no matter how difficult that task may be.

For this understanding has radical, revolutionary and powerful implications and thus applications.

How I came  to an intimate first sense of what consciousness is

But the simple fact is that I was the beneficiary of some unique circumstances and experiences.

In my youth I was a math prodigy who, like Jill Bolte Taylor, had a left-brain shut.

This changed my life as it had changed her life indelibly. But my take on that traumatic experience was very different. Just as I had once mastered certain math skills to a high degree and quickly, I now was drawn to an accelerated mastering or gaining the commanding knowledge of something very special – the transcendent, transpersonal nature of our right/left brain divide and derivatively of the interconnecting nature of consciousness itself.

What I discovered is invaluable knowledge.

It also and absolutely cannot be understood immediately.

It took me decades to pinpoint and find just the right words to express that nature, working on an accelerated schedule.

The reach of this knowledge of consciousness

When the mathematical philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton was first introduced in the 17th century, his Principia naturalis mathematica,  no one really knew where this whole Newtonian/Cartesian/Galilean cosmic vision would ultimately lead us to know or master. There was just an exciting sense that nature’s truest truths had been tapped into and that would push forward the evolution of all of human life.

Yes and of course they knew it could give us a commanding knowledge of mechanical motion, but otherwise little else concrete.

It took at least 400 years for all of us nowadays to experience more of the fullness and depth and breadth of their vision’s implications and applications. This includes the rise of the modern Industrial Revolution and its supporting commercial society. It includes all the inventions that have come about thereby – manufacturing equipment, cars, trains, jet planes, TVs, radios, computers, cell phones, a host of chemicals, genetic engineering, atomic weapons and so on.

Similarly knowing what consciousness is, and the vast implications and applications of that knowledge, cannot quickly be fathomed. It takes time to apply a universal vision universally, but this makes the task all of the more exciting.

Secondly this knowledge materializes in an essentially different domain (different than that of building ever better machines or mechanical moving things) – which also opens the door to surprise us.

If I tell you, the reader, now immediately “what is consciousness,” and in a single sentence, the knowledge then may appear cheapened.

“Oh that is what you think it is.  Sure..hmm”

Then it goes potentially, so to speak, in one ear and out the other. It takes an open mind – consciously and subconsciously open, to grasp a vast idea with revolutionary implications and expectations.

What I can answer to this smirking reaction is…. “No, it is not really and truly what I  think it is at all, but rather….”

So let me explain this further.

Consciousness “in the raw”

When I had a left-brain shutdown, I didn’t just think verbally or in words about “what is consciousness.” In fact, I couldn’t.

For a while I was distinctly aphasic, unable to even speak in any whole sentences.

But I continued to experience consciousness without words or “in the raw”  (why I later called this the pathway of raw-wisdom).

Consciousness translation

The right brain “silently speaks” actually very different language than that of the left.

In fact the connective syntax or grammar of each  language has an opposite nature. It thus became a huge task, as a translator, to find a language that would best tell the verbal brain what the non-verbal one “thinks” or experiences.

I had to create a Rosetta Stone to bridge the gap, and rather than the reverse. What I mean by “rather than the reverse” is as follows. The right brain can explain its language to the left, providing a right-over-left dominant view. This is rather than the left-brain, which tends to be normally dominant, to aggressive, telling the quiet shy right brain how to bridge the gap and see reality.

To compound the problem, we really have these two fundamental kinds of consciousness. There are these two opposite forms of consciousness (with a common ground) which, when separately tuned into, really create a right/left brain split.

Is then consciousness brain-centered or derived?

One of those two fundamental forms of consciousness requires our left-brain to function and to project consciousness outward from itself. This can give the powerful appearance that consciousness originates from the brain.

Seen from a left-brain point of view, there is some truth to that appearance.

But ultimately consciousness has a more transcendent and trans-personal and trans-human foundation. This is innately difficult to see because we are bound in our human consciousness, and proud of and in love with our rare human brain skills. We can, with our brains, make a million and one language distinctions while cats can only meow or hiss and dogs growl and wine. So with our brains we have an edge. And what gives us that edge makes it appear that our consciousness comes from our brain. Yet it really isn’t so.

With that said, I have to ultimately conclude this introduction and then “spill the beans” or tell the reader finally what is my understanding of consciousness. This is at the risk of saying this prematurely, whereby it is minimally understood or misunderstood.  But ultimately I have to unveil my definition of “what is consciousness” and open myself to challenges.

This view embraces, by the way, no mysticism or religious view to explain consciousness based on a belief system.

What I discovered rather by observation, as if from outside, is that….

Consciousness is simply the universal relationship of connection in nature.

Said in a simpler way, consciousness is nature’s principle of connection itself.

The average person can read this explanation and thereby know what this string of words is saying conceptually. We can understand it with our left-brain.

Or we can alternatively look at some Asiatic paintings/mandala of meditative postures and which show a yogic radiation of consciousness in every direction. We can intuitively have a visual, pre-verbal or right brain sense.

But for a still more whole-brain and depth understanding, what do we need to know? That really comes about with a more depth application to one’s life, and thus knowing the links from the one-to-the-many,  or the far-reaching, cosmic, cultural and personal  implications of a revolutionary re-understanding of our whole world.

If accepted, processed and applied universally, these implications are more than powerful than anything we can imagine.

This refers to vision reconstruction of all of consciousness in every direction.

All civilizations somehow intuitively strive to have an integrally integrated or healthy and whole core view of nature. It is what binds everything together without flaws or contradictions- and such views tend to be dominantly monopolistic. You really cannot have two competing views that tie everything together as One.

We are rather left with an unreconciled duality.

Visually you cannot have two centers of a flower unifying all of its pedals together as one.

This is why the early 17th century attempted at a marriage or coalition government between science and the Church that soon fell apart as it had to.

Initially the former studied the outer world. The latter ruled the inner.

But within a hundred years the science of psychology developed to really evolve one central paradigm view of the whole to dominate. As a result, the spiritual power of the Church further declined. Architecturally and symbolically, modern municipal and later commercial structures soon dwarfed medieval church steeples – which previously were the highest architectural structures built at the center of cities and pointing to God.

Thus a new core vision, if it really universally reintegrates all of consciousness, must also supplant and surpass the dominance of any prior or existing view of a similar sort! It cannot be otherwise

In this case, if our vision of consciousness is true to itself, it must then supplant the taproot inner foundation for western civilization as introduced in the 17th century – the vision that supplanted the medieval.

This would trigger a second major global mind change.

The original global mind change of the 17th century catapulted us straight out of the medieval world (with its aim for humanity to come ever closer to the will of God)  and into the new modern world (with the aim of  ever more commercial, industrial and technological progress).

Again another replacement core vision changes the latter.

It offers not just a re-understanding of our cosmos and its quintessence, but derivatively of the essential aim of life, our own and that of all others coming together to form a civilization.

It changes the vision of what life really is all about.

Nathan Batalion CTN

Five Deepest Insights

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor

(Healingtalks) The following is a an introduction to my life-and-consciousness centered worldview, a core philosophy that can be used to help transform all the healing arts, in fact all of modern life that has been using the mechanical vision of nature, and that has been leading us to our own global self-destruction.

It is a positive message that life need not to be lived that ill way.

1 -  How does consciousness
emerge out of nature?

A related question is how does consciousness emerge out of ourselves and to a higher level. In our culture it really doesn’t.

In fact statistically it tends to recede over a lifetime as is evidenced by the wildfire growing epidemic of Alzheimer’s – the fastest of all the major growing health epidemics of our time.

That disease now affects more than half of those over age 85 or older. Not far behind are two other major consciousness epidemics – diabetes where one suffers from neuropathy or conscious loss of feeling in the hands and feet….and the epidemic of cancer spreading silently, that is unconsciously. Modern medicine, through lack of wisdom, helps creates the multi-drugged, walking the halls like zombies residents of old-age nursing homes. It is a travesty, a practice of medicine rooted in criminal ignorance. But all of this is really the result of a faulty worldview, the mechanical.

While it is obviously true that our bodies house life – and this includes consciousness – is it also true that our brains appear to be the main storage house of that consciousness. Or is that really true?

It is one of the deepest insights of my life that life and consciousness do not come out of the physical world at all, and thus with the latter not arising out of our brains (an illusion derived from our left brain male-like function, projecting-images-outward-from itself like a penis)  but rather the reverse.

This means the physical world comes out of what makes up consciousness.

How is this possible? This begs the question, first and foremost, what is this consciousness?

2 -  What is consciousness ?

There is a growing movement in modern science  “towards a science consciousness.” But the movement is grounded again in the 17th century mechanical worldview that created classical physics, chemistry and modern medicine.

These three disciplines point to a math-defined physical world as the foundation of nature.

Mathematics designs machines. It is thus the mechanical, life-less view.

This overall physical world also includes our physical bodies with distinct brain hemispheres and brain cells that undergo chemical reactions. This all supposedly creates what we experience as consciousness in us. If those brain cells are damaged, the consciousness is no longer the same way – which seems to support this thesis.

My alternative view is that our experience of consciousness actually represents something deeper to the taproot foundation of nature.  This would require consciousness not to arise just out of our brain cells.

So let us first define consciousness in a novel way, namely imagine that consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature.

What does that mean and imply?

A symbolic analogy and image is a body of water or an ocean that connects countless separate drops as one, and out of which those separate drops manifest.

In the ocean we also find fish.

Now it would be a stretch to believe that the ocean arises out of the fish! We instead are more convinced that fish are birthed, grow, and develop  out of the ocean, out of their source environment.

Imagine the same could apply to the relationship between a physical world made up of separate objects and an inner world composed of the connected “ocean” of consciousness. Forget what you learned in high school about physics and chemistry making up our world.

3 -  What is Life?

Imagine that life concentrates and models the presence of consciousness – just like machines model mechanicality and/or a mathematical order of nature.

In short, imagine that consciousness is at the core of life and creates life.

Secondly imagine it connects us to the world around us and within. It makes whole and healthy. So to be healthy you don’t need chemical balance through drugs, you need simply more consciousness.

An Alzheimer’s patient who has vastly receded consciousness cannot connect events or memories to each other. He or she cannot connect parts of a face to recognize the whole, even of a life-long loved one. He or she has so little or no sense of the whole that they may have trouble even knowing where they are in crossing a street. Their inner vision is totally disconnected.

This is why, if the essence of life is consciousness, it would make sense that life requires an organically whole or connected physical form to thrive in – like the radiant form of a flower or the iris of our eyes.

Life therefore would leave whenever that physical form is cut apart severed or dissected to death.

It would leave if transformed into a schemata of just machine parts, as in the mechanical hand shown above. Knowing this it suddenly makes sense that if our food is progressively cut apart, processed or made no longer whole, like milled flour products for example (cookies, breads, pasta) and that are subject to life-killing high-heat, it would make complete sense that eating such dead foods as a staple will eventually cause us to develop consciousness diseases.

And this is precisely what is happening in our modern industrialized and commercial world where dead foods have greater shelf life, greater commercial value, better mathematical-dollar-tagging qualities, better death values.

Life, when fully alive, also feels conscious pain when its organic form is disconnected.

Life also becomes polluted and has its consciousness recede when it is drugged into a stupor by synthetic chemicals.

Why?

Chemicals are organized mathematically. It is as simple as that. This is why the vision fails in a living terrains. Mathematics uniquely abstracts how to separate all elements of consciousness. Three separate apples can be counted as three until you make applesauce. When connected the apples cannot be counted.

This is why there is no chemical drug to cure Alzheimer’s and there never will be!

So if we compare something living (organically connected) with something dead or mechanical, unconscious or robotic (math-designed mechanical) and disassemble the latter back into its separate machine parts… we can always put those separate machine parts, such as of a car, back together as a whole… and the machine or car will not only continue to run it may even run better.

We cannot do the same with life or with a whole organism that is conscious.

Cut it apart systematically and it dies. Life leaves. Consciousness goes away.

Imagine this is because consciousness, at the core of life, is the root principle of connection itself in nature. 

The equal sign of a mathematical formula does not connect nature or replace that principle.

4 -  Are there laws of this consciousness, akin to the mechanical, math-defined?

Absolutely and they can be powerfully applied, especially in the healing arts.

They function, however, in an entirely different way than again the laws of physics and chemistry.

Let us first look at the mathematical view of nature.

Numbers beginning with the simple number “1″ represents the universal separate and indivisible whole  (1/1=1) or one divided by one equals one. Its the final building block.

We can call numbers the building blocks of mathematics as a resutl, like individual dots are the building blocks of lines and the rest of geometric space.

With this understanding, if nature is truly mathematical, then nature must also  be organized in this way. This arrogant presumption, and it is a left-brain-originating assumption, can be easily shown to be both illogical and non-empirical or unreal.

But this means putting our consciousness above the mathematizing process, which the 17th century, in its arrogance, never bothered to do. Galileo, Descartes, Newton and others  just applied the vision universally with blind self-assurance to lead us to our modern Industrialized age.

When through the invention of high-powered electric microscopes, atoms were found not to be indivisible,  how inconvenient was. Still this blind ideology was kept in tact because otherwise the whole system of this bankrupt understanding would collapse.

Returning to our core question, are there laws of consciousness?  Looking at the picture above, we can contrast how fight and flight, or fear and anger represent separative emotions while love represents a connective posture. If consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature, having a loving posture becomes more conscious. It is as simple as that.

A universal principle of connection is what can integrally make our world one.

Something that moves toward oneness ends up being simple. Complex things are not at one.

The simple understand is, at the same time, a deep and profound understanding.

5-  Revolutionary understanding to re-guide daily life

In the modern western worldview, the most powerful applications of the math-bound view became Industrial Revolution – large-scale machine applications from simple sewing machines to computers that have helped build the modern world.

But the same vision fails to halt the more important modern receding of consciousness.

Newton especially helped guide the transition from the medieval (bible-centered) to the modern math-centered vision of nature.  This was his revolutionary thesis of his main text Principia Naturalis Mathematica (The Laws of Nature as Mathematics). The later was more often translated as The Mathematical Principles of Nature because it was an ideology assumed to be absolutely true.

The fact is that machines never once occur naturally in pristine nature didn’t bother them. How can what never occurs anywhere in  nature represent the universal order of nature?

Newton’s vision is essentially contradictory. Abstractions of separation cannot possible best connect the essence of our world. This is why the vision fails to support what is most connective in nature – life and consciousness.  This is why it destroys life globally on earth, and its consciousness. This is why the earth is becoming ever more polluted and species are become extinct – something Newton or Galileo never foresaw, being blinded by their own ideology!

Newton, the left brain genius (the left brain separates elements of consciousness)  went insane toward to the end of his life – symbolic of the fact that one cannot connect a vision of nature using the absolutely most separative  symbols in the whole of our human consciousness! Newton went crazy and schizophrenic.

What those symbols can best help us do is to create atomic weapons that can destroy all of life on earth.

This is because that vision is the by-product of a root contradiction.

Yet it still dominates our times as our modern world is falling apart at multiple seams. It is not leading us toward higher consciousness.

The most powerful applications of an alternative vision is not for building atomic weapons but rather for a deeper and greater support of  healing – reconnection of the life-and-consciousness.

We thus need a new…..bio principia naturalis.…..a virtual opposite vision to that of Newton’s.

The primary focus is no longer again toward creating machines made of separate parts but rather toward the discovery and creation of what connects us within (and all of organic life) to a higher level of consciousness and health and wholeness.  We gain the knowledge of a mending of the life together – of mind, emotions, sensations, body and consciousness as one.

It also is a model for mending of our social bonds with each other, and not through a dominantly commercial society.

Will the Newtonian view take us to the same place?

I am afraid not. The proof abounds as in the pictures below.

Again no pharmaceutical (math-designed) drug will cure Alzheimer’s patients. This is because we hold on unconsciously to the Newtonian vision, and patients are fed not one but multiple chemical drugs to mislead them down the path of unconsciousness and death.

Multiple drugged patients then occupy nursing room halls like zombies.

Crudely said, they become cash-machines for Big Pharma rather than functional, living, conscious human beings.

Notable Physicists Who Became Alzheimer’s Sufferers

Charles Kuen Kao                              Raymond Davis, Jr.                       Gerson Goldhaber
(2009 NOBEL/Physics)                  (2002 NOBEL/Physics)                 (1976 NOBEL/Physics)

Nowadays half of those 85+ again suffer from Alzheimer’s.

These terrible victims include Nobel-prize-winning laureates in physics (the above pictured Charles Kuen Kao, Raymond Davis, Jr., Gerson Goldhaber, etc.).

This is because, as I contend, their Newtonian vision fails to well guide them.

This is a hugely revolutionary statement.

It knocks on the door of overturing the core modern worldview that has ruined indigenous wisdom.

Newton’s vision overturned also the medieval God-centered view, forming the core spirit of our modern world. This means we need a second and vast global mind change to overturn the Newtonian view – otherwise we are headed down an ever darker path.

As noted by an organization of senior citizens(AARP). “you have brilliant physicists, physicians, and mathematicians getting Alzheimer’s as well as average people in familiar occupations.”

What this means is that the worldview they learned does not really enlighten us.

John Douglas French MD
Founder of the first Alzheimer’s treatment center in the US  who
himself became a sufferer! & Newton, portrayed at age 81

The great Sir Isaac Newton himself died with the  fate of severe schizophrenia.

That illness manifests when the right brain’s connective consciousness shuts down and the left-brain’s separative  (disintegrative, falling-apart consciousness) prevails.

Mathematics once again is the zenith left-brain dominant symbolism for the separation of all elements of consciousness.

Math squiggles on a blackboard are the very highest and most universal symbols for that separation.

They are the mental tools for therefore designing machines made of separate parts.

But these are immensely misguiding symbols in trying to optimally connect both a vision of nature’s essence and the healing arts that bring our life and consciousness back together as one.

Thus the failure of even Nobel-laureates, or greatest mathematicians or a preeminent  MD who formed the first exclusively Alzheimer’s treating center in the US, himself falling prey.

This is telling.

Briefly My Life Story as a Renegade and Global Health Activist

As a former child math prodigy, I had a high fever and apparent stroke at the age of 17 that caused my left-brain to shut down.I was escaped thereby the ideological confines of our modern vision. I broke through its deep illusions, to become a mathematical renegade, I left the fold and abandoned the Newtonian vision.

I made the leap rather to a life-and-consciousness centered view of nature

The Biocentric View

A life-centered vision has been called “biocentric.” This is ecoed by Robert Lanza, MD in a book called biocentrism – and where this knowledge builds not dazzling machines but helps us heal and reach our real and true highest potential of life.

Closing Statement

Our civilization appears rich in material things, but is not integrally rich. Out health statistics contradict the surface appearances of all things being well. This is why we need the deepest of new insights to liberate us from the declining environmental and health condition we have created.

This can only happen through a new and deep revolution of thought and toward a more authentic, healing vision.

In the following article, consciousness is seen as coming out of  or being “caused” by our human brain processes.  The deeper-held and larger assumption is the overall worldview represented by chemistry and physics – that consciousness and all else comes out of something physical that’s best explained mathematically.

Consciousness “somehow” fits in but we don’t know how as an attribute of this supposedly “objective physical-based worldview.” Thus there is a movement ”towards a science of consciousness” within that mechano-physical or brain-tied framework. In this core understanding of nature (brought to prominence in the 17th century and still dominant today) “true” reality is made up of only separate physical things, again like brain cells and in turn made of individually separate chemicals (and where math symbols abstract the separation of all elements of consciousness – their uniquely identifying  bias). These separate physical things, more precisely seen at cut magnification levels of light, are purported operating as separate things. They function therefore like billiard-balls bumping into each other or moving mechanically.

So where would consciousness fit into this endlessly disjointed picture of chemical/atomic puzzle pieces moving in mathematical cadence?

Consciousness we are told could be a kind of  “arising out of ” -  a secondary, surface or superficial attribute of matter – like the color or texture of a billiard ball. But the mechanical components are  the holy primary reality to study.

With our philosophy of raw-wisdom, we follow a paradigm-busting orientation. We propose the polar opposite. This can be called a right-brain dominant view (where the mathematical view is the pinnacle left-brain dominant orientation) and where the two sides of the brain actually see in opposite ways. Imagine that nature’s primary reality is not really nor truly encompassed by matter and energy defined mathematically but rather, and with depth integrity, by what is consciousness – the experience of an integrally connected ocean of consciousness arising out of nature’s depths, its oneness, and where the physical world is the veil, the surface view, the non-objective illusion – the thin appearance that lacks depth integrity and of separate things functioning in separate-stepped or mechanical ways….. and where consciousness is just a minor or secondary an attribute.

The math-based physical view is again seen as non-objective – meaning lacking depth-perspective truth. During the Middle Ages, the earth looked like it was moving around the sun from one viewpoint – from the earth or from a self-centered vista. But from multiple and depth perspectives this was seen through as a powerful illusion. The same applies here or toward the math/mechanical based perspective. From this late 17th century orientation, the nature of consciousness doesn’t really fit – not into that ideological worldview – and never will - because that view is itself in need of huge fixing. Over the past 350 years, that vision has already produced waves of toxic chemical pollution, atomic weapons’ proliferation, and a dozen more major threatening consequences taking us towards the destruction of the earth and ourselves.

Furthermore, the two opposite orientations support two opposite approaches to the essential medical arts – the natural and allopathic – as means to make us whole. The latter is not very adept at preventing, healing or reversing consciousness illnesses like Alzheimer’s. For it is grounded and stuck in the 17th century’s  consciousness-stripping definition of a “scientific” worldview – again the math-based mechanical vision of nature.

Thus the following elucidates a little more of a derivative conventional view of consciousness and its study. It comes from a paper written by Professor John R. Searle and entitled The Problem of Consciousness

- Nathan Batalion

Abstract: This paper attempts to begin to answer four questions. 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of consciousness to the brain? 3. What are some of the features that an empirical theory of consciousness should try to explain? 4. What are some common mistakes to avoid?

Importance of Consciousness

The most important scientific discovery of the present era will come when someone — or some group — discovers the answer to the following question: How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness? This is the most important question facing us in the biological sciences, yet it is frequently evaded, and frequently misunderstood when not evaded. In order to clear the way for an understanding of this problem. I am going to begin to answer four questions: 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of consciousness to the brain? 3. What are some of the features that an empirical theory of consciousness should try to explain? 4. What are some common mistakes to avoid?

I. What is consciousness?

Like most words, `consciousness’ does not admit of a definition in terms of genus and differentia or necessary and sufficient conditions. Nonetheless, it is important to say exactly what we are talking about because the phenomenon of consciousness that we are interested in needs to be distinguished from certain other phenomena such as attention, knowledge, and self-consciousness. By `consciousness’ I simply mean those subjective states of sentience or awareness that begin when one awakes in the morning from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until one goes to sleep at night or falls into a coma, or dies, or otherwise becomes, as one would say, `unconscious’.

Above all, consciousness is a biological phenomenon. We should think of consciousness as part of our ordinary biological history, along with digestion, growth, mitosis and meiosis. However, though consciousness is a biological phenomenon, it has some important features that other biological phenomena do not have. The most important of these is what I have called its `subjectivity’. There is a sense in which each person’s consciousness is private to that person, a sense in which he is related to his pains, tickles, itches, thoughts and feelings in a way that is quite unlike the way that others are related to those pains, tickles, itches, thoughts and feelings. This phenomenon can be described in various ways. It is sometimes described as that feature of consciousness by way of which there is something that it’s like or something that it feels like to be in a certain conscious state. If somebody asks me what it feels like to give a lecture in front of a large audience I can answer that question. But if somebody asks what it feels like to be a shingle or a stone, there is no answer to that question because shingles and stones are not conscious. The point is also put by saying that conscious states have a certain qualitative character; the states in question are sometimes described as `qualia’.

In spite of its etymology, consciousness should not be confused with knowledge, it should not be confused with attention, and it should not be confused with self-consciousness. I will consider each of these confusions in turn.

Many states of consciousness have little or nothing to do with knowledge. Conscious states of undirected anxiety or nervousness, for example, have no essential connection with knowledge.

Consciousness should not be confused with attention. Within one’s field of consciousness there are certain elements that are at the focus of one’s attention and certain others that are at the periphery of consciousness. It is important to emphasize this distinction because `to be conscious of’ is sometimes used to mean `to pay attention to’. But the sense of consciousness that we are discussing here allows for the possibility that there are many things on the periphery of one’s consciousness — for example, a slight headache I now feel or the feeling of the shirt collar against my neck — which are not at the centre of one’s attention. I will have more to say about the distinction between the center and the periphery of consciousness in Section III.

Finally, consciousness should not be confused with self-consciousness. There are indeed certain types of animals, such as humans, that are capable of extremely complicated forms of self-referential consciousness which would normally be described as self-consciousness. For example, I think conscious feelings of shame require that the agent be conscious of himself or herself. But seeing an object or hearing a sound, for example, does not require self-consciousness. And it is not generally the case that all conscious states are also self-conscious.

II. What are the relations between consciousness and the brain?

This question is the famous `mind-body problem’. Though it has a long and sordid history in both philosophy and science, I think, in broad outline at least, it has a rather simple solution. Here it is: Conscious states are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain and are themselves higher level features of the brain. The key notions here are those of cause and feature. As far as we know anything about how the world works, variable rates of neuron firings in different neuronal architectures cause all the enormous variety of our conscious life. All the stimuli we receive from the external world are converted by the nervous system into one medium, namely, variable rates of neuron firings at synapses. And equally remarkably, these variable rates of neuron firings cause all of the colour and variety of our conscious life. The smell of the flower, the sound of the symphony, the thoughts of theorems in Euclidian geometry — all are caused by lower level biological processes in the brain; and as far as we know, the crucial functional elements are neurons and synapses.

Of course, like any causal hypothesis this one is tentative. It might turn out that we have overestimated the importance of the neuron and the synapse. Perhaps the functional unit is a column or a whole array of neurons, but the crucial point I am trying to make now is that we are looking for causal relationships. The first step in the solution of the mind-body problem is: brain processes cause conscious processes.

This leaves us with the question, what is the ontology, what is the form of existence, of these conscious processes? More pointedly, does the claim that there is a causal relation between brain and consciousness commit us to a dualism of `physical’ things and `mental’ things? The answer is a definite no. Brain processes cause consciousness but the consciousness they cause is not some extra substance or entity. It is just a higher level feature of the whole system. The two crucial relationships between consciousness and the brain, then, can be summarized as follows: lower level neuronal processes in the brain cause consciousness and consciousness is simply a higher level feature of the system that is made up of the lower level neuronal elements.

There are many examples in nature where a higher level feature of a system is caused by lower level elements of that system, even though the feature is a feature of the system made up of those elements. Think of the liquidity of water or the transparency of glass or the solidity of a table, for example. Of course, like all analogies these analogies are imperfect and inadequate in various ways. But the important thing that I am trying to get across is this: there is no metaphysical obstacle, no logical obstacle, to claiming that the relationship between brain and consciousness is one of causation and at the same time claiming that consciousness is just a feature of the brain. Lower level elements of a system can cause higher level features of that system, even though those features are features of a system made up of the lower level elements. Notice, for example, that just as one cannot reach into a glass of water and pick out a molecule and say `This one is wet’, so, one cannot point to a single synapse or neuron in the brain and say `This one is thinking about my grandmother’. As far as we know anything about it, thoughts about grandmothers occur at a much higher level than that of the single neuron or synapse, just as liquidity occurs at a much higher level than that of single molecules.

Of all the theses that I am advancing in this article, this one arouses the most opposition. I am puzzled as to why there should be so much opposition, so I want to clarify a bit further what the issues are: First, I want to argue that we simply know as a matter of fact that brain processes cause conscious states. We don’t know the details about how it works and it may well be a long time before we understand the details involved. Furthermore, it seems to me an understanding of how exactly brain processes cause conscious states may require a revolution in neurobiology. Given our present explanatory apparatus, it is not at all obvious how, within that apparatus, we can account for the causal character of the relation between neuron firings and conscious states. But, at present, from the fact that we do not know how it occurs, it does not follow that we do not know that it occurs. Many people who object to my solution (or dissolution) of the mind-body problem, object on the grounds that we have no idea how neurobiological processes could cause conscious phenomena. But that does not seem to me a conceptual or logical problem. That is an empirical/theoretical issue for the biological sciences. The problem is to figure out exactly how the system works to produce consciousness, and since we know that in fact it does produce consciousness, we have good reason to suppose that are specific neurobiological mechanisms by way of which it works.

There are certain philosophical moods we sometimes get into when it seems absolutely astounding that consciousness could be produced by electro-biochemical processes, and it seems almost impossible that we would ever be able to explain it in neurobiological terms. Whenever we get in such moods, however, it is important to remind ourselves that similar mysteries have occurred before in science. A century ago it seemed extremely mysterious, puzzling, and to some people metaphysically impossible that life should be accounted for in terms of mechanical, biological, chemical processes. But now we know that we can give such an account, and the problem of how life arises from biochemistry has been solved to the point that we find it difficult to recover, difficult to understand why it seemed such an impossibility at one time. Earlier still, electromagnetism seemed mysterious. On a Newtonian conception of the universe there seemed to be no place for the phenomenon of electromagnetism. But with the development of the theory of electromagnetism, the metaphysical worry dissolved. I believe that we are having a similar problem about consciousness now. But once we recognize the fact that conscious states are caused by neurobiological processes, we automatically convert the issue into one for theoretical scientific investigation. We have removed it from the realm of philosophical or metaphysical impossibility.

III. Some Features of Consciousness

The next step in our discussion is to list some (not all) of the essential features of consciousness which an empirical theory of the brain should be able to explain.

Subjectivity.

As I mentioned earlier, this is the most important feature. A theory of consciousness needs to explain how a set of neurobiological processes can cause a system to be in a subjective state of sentience or awareness. This phenomenon is unlike anything else in biology, and in a sense it is one of the most amazing features of nature. We resist accepting subjectivity as a ground floor, irreducible phenomenon of nature because, since the seventeenth century, we have come to believe that science must be objective. But this involves a pun on the notion of objectivity. We are confusing the epistemic objectivity of scientific investigation with the ontological objectivity of the typical subject matter in science in disciplines such as physics and chemistry. Since science aims at objectivity in the epistemic sense that we seek truths that are not dependent on the particular point of view of this or that investigator, it has been tempting to conclude that the reality investigated by science must be objective in the sense of existing independently of the experiences in the human individual. But this last feature, ontological objectivity, is not an essential trait of science. If science is supposed to give an account of how the world works and if subjective states of consciousness are part of the world, then we should seek an (epistemically) objective account of an (ontologically) subjective reality, the reality of subjective states of consciousness. What I am arguing here is that we can have an epistemically objective science of a domain that is ontologically subjective.

Unity.

It is important to recognize that in non-pathological forms of consciousness we never just have, for example, a pain in the elbow, a feeling of warmth, or an experience of seeing something red, but we have them all occurring simultaneously as part of one unified conscious experience. Kant called this feature `the transcendental unity of apperception’. Recently, in neurobiology it has been called `the binding problem’. There are at least two aspects to this unity that require special mention. First, at any given instant all of our experiences are unified into a single conscious field. Second, the organization of our consciousness extends over more than simple instants. So, for example, if I begin speaking a sentence, I have to maintain in some sense at least an iconic memory of the beginning of the sentence so that I know what I am saying by the time I get to the end of the sentence.

Intentionality

`Intentionality’ is the name that philosophers and psychologists give to that feature of many of our mental states by which they are directed at, or about states of affairs in the world. If I have a belief or a desire or a fear, there must always be some content to my belief, desire or fear. It must be about something even if the something it is about does not exist or is a hallucination. Even in cases when I am radically mistaken, there must be some mental content which purports to make reference to the world. Not all conscious states have intentionality in this sense. For example, there are states of anxiety or depression where one is not anxious or depressed about anything in particular but just is in a bad mood. That is not an intentional state. But if one is depressed about a forthcoming event, that is an intentional state because it is directed at something beyond itself.

There is a conceptual connection between consciousness and intentionality in the following respect. Though many, indeed most, of our intentional states at any given point are unconscious, nonetheless, in order for an unconscious intentional state to be genuinely an intentional state it must be accessible in principle to consciousness. It must be the sort of thing that could be conscious even if it, in fact, is blocked by repression, brain lesion, or sheer forgetfulness.

The distinction between the center and the periphery of consciousness

At any given moment of non-pathological consciousness I have what might be called a field of consciousness. Within that field I normally pay attention to some things and not to others. So, for example, right now I am paying attention to the problem of describing consciousness but very little attention to the feeling of the shirt on my back or the tightness of my shoes. It is sometimes said that I am unconscious of these. But that is a mistake. The proof that they are a part of my conscious field is that I can at any moment shift my attention to them. But in order for me to shift my attention to them, there must be something there which I was previously not paying attention to which I am now paying attention to.

The gestalt structure of conscious experience.

Within the field of consciousness our experiences are characteristically structured in a way that goes beyond the structure of the actual stimulus. This was one of the most profound discoveries of the Gestalt psychologists. It is most obvious in the case of vision, but the phenomenon is quite general and extends beyond vision. For example, the sketchy lines drawn in Fig. 1 do not physically resemble a human face. If we actually saw someone on the street that looked like that, we would be inclined to call an ambulance. The disposition of the brain to structure degenerate stimuli into certain structured forms is so powerful that we will naturally tend to see this as a human face. Furthermore, not only do we have our conscious experiences in certain structures, but we tend also to have them as figures against backgrounds. Again, this is most obvious in the case of vision. Thus, when I look at the figure I see it against the background of the page. I see the page against the background of the table. I see the table against the background of the floor, and I see the floor against the background of the room, until we eventually reach the horizon of my visual consciousness.

The aspect of familiarity

It is a characteristic feature of non-pathological states of consciousness that they come to us with what I will call the `aspect of familiarity’. In order for me to see the objects in front of me as, for example, houses, chairs, people, tables, I have to have a prior possession of the categories of houses, chairs, people, tables. But that means that I will assimilate my experiences into a set of categories which are more or less familiar to me. When I am in an extremely strange environment, in a jungle village, for example, and the houses, people and foliage look very exotic to me, I still perceive that as a house, that as a person, that as clothing, that as a tree or a bush. The aspect of familiarity is thus a scalar phenomenon. There can be greater or lesser degrees of familiarity. But it is important to see that non-pathological forms of consciousness come to us under the aspect of familiarity. Again, one way to consider this is to look at the pathological cases. In Capgras’s syndrome, the patients are unable to acknowledge familiar people in their environment as the people they actually are. They think the spouse is not really their spouse but is an imposter, etc. This is a case of a breakdown in one aspect of familiarity. In non-pathological cases it is extremely difficult to break with the aspect of familiarity. Surrealist painters try to do it. But even in the surrealist painting, the three-headed woman is still a woman, and the drooping watch is still a watch.

Mood

Part of every normal conscious experience is the mood that pervades the experience. It need not be a mood that has a particular name to it, like depression or elation; but there is always what one might call a flavour or tone to any normal set of conscious states. So, for example, at present I am not especially depressed and I am not especially ecstatic, nor indeed, am I what one would call simply `blah’. Nonetheless, there is a certain mood to my present experiences. Mood is probably more easily explainable in biochemical terms than several of the features I have mentioned. We may be able to control, for example, pathological forms of depression by mood-altering drugs.

Boundary conditions

All of my non-pathological states of consciousness come to me with a certain sense of what one might call their `situatedness’. Though I am not thinking about it, and though it is not part of the field of my consciousness, I nonetheless know what year it is, what place I am in, what time of day it is, the season of the year it is, and usually even what month it is. All of these are the boundary conditions or the situatedness of nonpathological conscious states. Again, one can become aware of the pervasiveness of this phenomenon when it is absent. So, for example, as one gets older there is a certain feeling of vertigo that comes over one when one loses a sense of what time of year it is or what month it is. The point I am making now is that conscious states are situated and they are experienced as situated even though the details of the situation need not be part of the content of the conscious states.

IV. Some Common Mistakes about Consciousness

I would like to think that everything I have said so far is just a form of common sense. However, I have to report, from the battlefronts as it were, that the approach I am advocating to the study of consciousness is by no means universally accepted in cognitive science nor even neurobiology. Indeed, until quite recently many workers in cognitive science and neurobiology regarded the study of consciousness as somehow out of bounds for their disciplines. They thought that it was beyond the reach of science to explain why warm things feel warm to us or why red things look red to us. I think, on the contrary, that it is precisely the task of neurobiology to explain these and other questions about consciousness. Why would anyone think otherwise? Well, there are complex historical reasons, going back at least to the seventeenth century, why people thought that consciousness was not part of the material world. A kind of residual dualism prevented people from treating consciousness as a biological phenomenon like any other. However, I am not now going to attempt to trace this history. Instead I am going to point out some common mistakes that occur when people refuse to address consciousness on its own terms.

The characteristic mistake in the study of consciousness is to ignore its essential subjectivity and to try to treat it as if it were an objective third person phenomenon. Instead of recognizing that consciousness is essentially a subjective, qualitative phenomenon, many people mistakenly suppose that its essence is that of a control mechanism or a certain kind of set of dispositions to behavior or a computer program. The two most common mistakes about consciousness are to suppose that it can be analysed behavioristically or computationally. The Turing test disposes us to make precisely these two mistakes, the mistake of behaviorism and the mistake of computationalism. It leads us to suppose that for a system to be conscious, it is both necessary and sufficient that it has the right computer program or set of programs with the right inputs and outputs. I think you have only to state this position clearly to enable you to see that it must be mistaken. A traditional objection to behaviorism was that behaviorism could not be right because a system could behave as if it were conscious without actually being conscious. There is no logical connection, no necessary connection between inner, subjective, qualitative mental states and external, publicly observable behavior. Of course, in actual fact, conscious states characteristically cause behavior. But the behavior that they cause has to be distinguished from the states themselves. The same mistake is repeated by computational accounts of consciousness. Just as behavior by itself is not sufficient for consciousness, so computational models of consciousness are not sufficient by themselves for consciousness. The computational model of consciousness stands to consciousness in the same way the computational model of anything stands to the domain being modelled. Nobody supposes that the computational model of rainstorms in London will leave us all wet. But they make the mistake of supposing that the computational model of consciousness is somehow conscious. It is the same mistake in both cases.

There is a simple demonstration that the computational model of consciousness is not sufficient for consciousness. I have given it many times before so I will not dwell on it here. Its point is simply this: Computation is defined syntactically. It is defined in terms of the manipulation of symbols. But the syntax by itself can never be sufficient for the sort of contents that characteristically go with conscious thoughts. Just having zeros and ones by themselves is insufficient to guarantee mental content, conscious or unconscious. This argument is sometimes called `the Chinese room argument’ because I originally illustrated the point with the example of the person who goes through the computational steps for answering questions in Chinese but does not thereby acquire any understanding of Chinese.[1] The point of the parable is clear but it is usually neglected. Syntax by itself is not sufficient for semantic content. In all of the attacks on the Chinese room argument, I have never seen anyone come out baldly and say they think that syntax is sufficient for semantic content.

However, I now have to say that I was conceding too much in my earlier statements of this argument. I was conceding that the computational theory of the mind was at least false. But it now seems to me that it does not reach the level of falsity because it does not have a clear sense. Here is why.

The natural sciences describe features of reality that are intrinsic to the world as it exists independently of any observers. Thus, gravitational attraction, photosynthesis, and electromagnetism are all subjects of the natural sciences because they describe intrinsic features of reality. But such features such as being a bathtub, being a nice day for a picnic, being a five dollar bill or being a chair, are not subjects of the natural sciences because they are not intrinsic features of reality. All the phenomena I named — bathtubs, etc. — are physical objects and as physical objects have features that are intrinsic to reality. But the feature of being a bathtub or a five dollar bill exists only relative to observers and users.

Absolutely essential, then, to understanding the nature of the natural sciences is the distinction between those features of reality that are intrinsic and those that are observer-relative. Gravitational attraction is intrinsic. Being a five dollar bill is observer-relative. Now, the really deep objection to computational theories of the mind can be stated quite clearly. Computation does not name an intrinsic feature of reality but is observer-relative and this is because computation is defined in terms of symbol manipulation, but the notion of a `symbol’ is not a notion of physics or chemistry. Something is a symbol only if it is used, treated or regarded as a symbol. The Chinese room argument showed that semantics is not intrinsic to syntax. But what this argument shows is that syntax is not intrinsic to physics. There are no purely physical properties that zeros and ones or symbols in general have that determine that they are symbols. Something is a symbol only relative to some observer, user or agent who assigns a symbolic interpretation to it. So the question, `Is consciousness a computer program?’, lacks a clear sense. If it asks, `Can you assign a computational interpretation to those brain processes which are characteristic of consciousness?’ the answer is: you can assign a computational interpretation to anything. But if the question asks, `Is consciousness intrinsically computational?’ the answer is: nothing is intrinsically computational. Computation exists only relative to some agent or observer who imposes a computational interpretation on some phenomenon. This is an obvious point. I should have seen it ten years ago but I did not.

Footnotes

* An earlier version of this article has appeared in the publications of the CIBA Foundation. The theses advanced in this paper are presented in more detail and with more supporting argument in Searle, J.R. The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992.

1. Searle, J.R., ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (1980) 3, 417-457.

The conscious experience was one of the first topics studied by early psychologists. Structuralists used a process known as introspection to analyze and report conscious sensations, thoughts, and experiences. American psychologist William James¹ compared consciousness to a stream; unbroken and continuous despite constant shifts and changes. While the focus of much of the research in psychology shifted to purely observable behaviors during the first half of the twentieth century, research on human consciousness has grown tremendously since the 1950s.

What aspects of consciousness do researchers study? Topics such as sleep, dreams, hypnosis, and the affects of psychoactive drugs are just a few of the major topics studied by psychologists.
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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

Natural healing bringing out life force

Mechanical View of Nutrition

(Healingtalks) If  life force is not even something real but all that occurs is reducible to a chemical/mechanical  reaction,  then we might not need anything more than the burning of calories. Our bodies are then like machines that just burn fuel. Our food elements are then all chemically defined – just carbs, sugars, fats, and proteins defined by mathematical descriptions (as chemicals).

Life Force Is Not Something Mechanical

But suppose there is such a thing as “life” and our life force and that this involves our consciousness.

Life’s foundation is rooted in this consciousness. Watch the video Planet Earth that shows the countless and awesome faces or species of life on Earth. They are all sentient. Every living being – from the tiniest nano-bacteria to the largest dinosaurs – exhibits awareness. They all act differently than what is mechanical – like telephone answering machine that have no recognition of the difference between a ferociously angry and a happy voice.

What is Consciousness

I have long advocated that consciousness is not an exclusively human attribute. It is rather represents a trans-personal, trans-human principle in nature – and forms the root universal relationship of connection in nature. Consciousness forms what connects everything. When concentrated, consciousness self-organizes life.

Focus on Bringing Out Life and Consciousness

If not naturally supported and elicited, we see but barren and dead landscapes.  Suppose we want to bring out more, not less, of this life and consciousness in and at the core of nature.  How do we go about it? Let us not turn to the chemical/mechanical model  that brings out the opposite and ends up polluting and causing extinctions. That view actually misdirects our consciousness. Why? This is a long discussion. Without explaining why, we still can see simple the aftereffects – as with our modern, drug-based, allopathic medical approach that is wholesale failing to heal chronic ailments.

Bring Out Life and Consciousness With Raw Food Diet

One way to really bring out aliveness and healing is by eating life-enhancing foods. This refers to raw and living foods, especially greens. What exactly is in those foods that carry more life force? This turns out of be something akin to the sap of a tree and the blood of our vessels. It is the alkaline juices of fruits and vegetables. But why one might ask?

Why Add Juices?

A plausible answer is that if life is grounded in the presence of consciousness, and consciousness forms this awesome universal relationship of connection. What is most connective in our bodies, and in all of nature, should then contain that consciousness and life force. What is most connective turns out to be liquid rather than solid (solid separation). You can see this when you let go of a drop of water into a vast ocean. It reconnects with the whole. The separate identity of each drop disappears. If you bump two solid balls together (studying what is mechanical motion ) the two remain fully separate and do not  connect except superficially by bumping surfaces together and against each other. This is why we use   juice and green blended diets in therapeutic, life-enhancing ways.

Why Green Juices and Blends?

Green is the exact  middle color of the rainbow, generally the most neutralizing, alkalizing and connective. We can see this in the laws of radiant light, or where the opposite colors of red and blue-indigo of the rainbow are pointed together with the middle color green, and whereupon the green pulls the two farthest color separations or far opposites together to remake white, color-separation-less or unified light. This is akin to what happens with drops of water, and water brings out the rainbow.

A Life-Centered Worldview

Such is part of the real, not a mystically imagined, order of nature – focusing on what is connective, conscious, and life-enhancing. This picture of a universe re-understood using life- rather than death- centered principles represents a revolutionary and rescuing global mind change.

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