Volume 4, Issue 3
As science releases its restrictive thinking clamps, what then remains if anything of the supposed war between science and religion?
In our last conversation here, I explained that I see the “spiritual” as being historically the same domain as all inner experience, the same as consciousness. In my view our race began with this identity in mind across psyche, soul, personality, nous, and all the other terms that today we have separated into:
- a grouping that is recently again accepted by science (the conscious mind) plus
- a grouping that is largely ignored (the experiential dimension, which does not care how the underlying brain mechanics work but focuses on what it feels like from the inside and what options the conscious mind has in order to do something about its experiences), plus
- a grouping that science has sniped at for centuries, which is the connection/relationship between the individual and divinity.
Of course it’s the divinity part that reductionist science has objected to. Occam’s Razor being itself only a heuristic hypothesis for reducing complexity to its minimum, is of course reflective in the end of a mere aesthetic preference for “elegance” over “complexity”. The Universe might not have the same aesthetic.
However, once science accepts the first grouping — consciousness as an actual reality phenomenon — where is the ground for science saying that the overall Universe might not itself be conscious the way we are? It is illogical to assume that consciousness exists but that it is somehow impossible for it to reside in places where some of us might not suspect.
Once you allow that proposition, then it is a very small further step to my Theory of the Conscious Universe, which is set forth in my upcoming book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That. All you have to add are the following premises:
- Attention is one of the pivotal dimensions of consciousness.
- Each of us present day Earth humans is living at a time of overwhelming information overload, maximizing the challenge to our newly-developed brains to pay attention to what is most important and not be distracted by mere distractions (Acceleritis).
- Our minds operate by processing information.
- The substrate hardware on which this information processing runs is the brain and nervous system in the matter realm, which corresponds to the operations and functions we sense through our experiential layer — our consciousness or spirit.
- As with computers, our minds have certain processing power based on the underlying hardware and also on the degree of self-referential organizing we have done from within the experiential layer.
- It is not only possible but likely that minds with far more processing power than present day Earth humans exist in the multiverse.
- One can conceive of a mind with so much processing power that it can pay even more attention that an Earth human possesses, to each of more than one humanoid.
- Amping up the latter point to virtual infinity there could be One Mind with enough processing power to be the sense of self within each of us, i.e. living through all of us simultaneously, with enough attention allocated to each of us to handle our experiences on Earth.
The spiritual methodologies from Yoga to Christian meditation to Sufism to the Jewish laying of tefellin and so on are all aimed at the cleansing and purification of automaticities we’ve purposely or accidentally set up as programs within us (brain and mind). Free of such programs, the awareness of our identity with the One Divinity becomes palpable.
Once this is understood, there is no reason for there to be any war between the spiritual and science. Hallelujah!
To be continued!
My best to you all,
Bill
Watch for my new book, You Are the Universe: Imagine That, coming soon.
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