Category Archives: Consciousness

How Do I Escape the Fear that I Am Growing Old?

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Volume 3, Issue 19

By realizing deep down, in a profound moment of inner silence and receptivity so it goes to the ground of your being, that we don’t know diddlysquat about what comes after this life.< /br>

I know that one has not normally spent the moment it takes to realize that the consciousness itself — you — are a jumble of information-processing programs, a biocomputer — implemented in a subtle energy field that human Earth consciousness collectively has yet to discover (gee, science hasn't discovered everything yet?! being the hidden assumption/block). So it is not impossible that consciousness can exist outside of a material body. If consciousness is an energy computer — a computer made out of energy — then why not.

Of course it is reductionist to say that consciousness is just an energy computer. It must be more than that in the sense that it is self-aware. The human race has not come close to understanding what it would really take to cross the great divide between an amazingly smart supercomputer made out of energy — a biocomputer that is alive and able to draw power from its interactions and sustain its life and reproduce, a living computer — to something that experiences self-awareness. The experience of self-awareness cannot be reduced to anything else, neither scientifically nor even philosophically, yet.

So let’s say one has this moment of epiphany that lasts, in which one accepts that the universe may be a sentient thing and that each of us is a little face looking out from it.

If so, the idea of a permanent death caused by a happenstance in this current stage set has no binding effect on the parent consciousness that is playing this role.

This at least opens the door to consider as a real possibility that death may not be the end. How does that change the fear of becoming old? Profoundly. To its roots. Who cares if the setup is that there is incipient slowdown and decay at the end of one of these rides? Small price to pay. One can only hope that not every ride ends with a downslope. In fact, why imagine that a downslope has to be inevitable even in this life? If one is still functioning effectively, why project to oneself the repeated imaginary thought feeling that one is going downhill, getting old. The repetition of any thought feeling draws to oneself the reality that one is imagining. We make it come true by dwelling on it. We expect to start to break down, so we start to break down. We spend more and more time discussing the ills of old age. Given the possibility that my theory is correct and everything is made of consciousness, it is inevitable that the body cell consciousnesses will hear the operating system tell them to get old.

Let’s tell our body cell consciousnesses something else. Let’s vow to ourselves that we will make the effort to keep getting better on the inside every day for as far as the ride lasts, whether or not this body is the last chariot we ride in.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

Where Does Value Reside?

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Volume 2, Issue 23

I had the pleasure recently of attending the Summer Board meeting of MASB, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board created by Meg Blair. Top marketing people from some of the largest advertisers met with world leaders in the business of estimating value of companies and their brands, to discuss the linking of marketing with finance. One of the most fascinating aspects of this unusual gathering was the discovery that accounting people are also by training philosophers, mentally athletic in the analysis of what value means in different contexts. This gave me ample stimulus to think again about what value is, and where it actually exists in the world.

To cut to the chase, value is in the heart (feeling core) of the perceiver. It is not in the perceived object that the perceiver associates with this feeling of value. Value is a perception/feeling cluster in consciousness. Consciousness is where value actually lives.

Why care? Because value is what drives us, what makes the world go ‘round. This is not just true under capitalism but in all cultures and conceivable (and inconceivable) economic systems. All action is driven by motivation and all motivation by value. We would have nothing to do — no action we would feel like taking — unless there is something we value that leads to such movement. Everything we do is driven by value — the value perceptions/feelings in our own selves.

This also answers the question of why we should care what consciousness is. If all action is impelled by value, and value resides in consciousness, then everything that we value and do, who we ourselves are, is all about consciousness. For us to not care what consciousness is, is to admit that all of one’s life is meaningless, based on unquestioned (and even incognizant) assumptions that at their essence say: everybody else is just going along with it, who am I to stop and question it, ok I am being a victim of herd mentality but so what, so is everyone else, I can’t do anything about it, so why not just drift along with the mob?

This line of self-reasoning would make sense to a person who places low value on independence of thought, and high value on belonging. That person is at a certain place in their own evolutionary path and those values and the ignoring of the Observer state — which uses consciousness to observe consciousness — are natural to him or her at the time. My only hope is that environmental stimuli will catalyze a creative spark, waking him or her up to a world of new possibilities, a vista of depths to life that make life new again, ripe with value.

We are closer than ever now as a culture to coming to grips with the foundational questions of existence. We see books flying off the eBook servers and shelves about something beyond current materialist science, some even gravitating to the center of the sea of questions, which is consciousness itself. But the near-miss of all of these books in my view is emblemized in one of the best, by Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. Although evidently deep into the Observer state himself, Dennett is really just still trying to explain what in the material brain is happening that is associated with consciousness. This is typical of the near-miss — itself exciting because it portends that soon we will no longer be missing the point. The point is that what is is this experiential domain — this phenomenological fact that we are consciousness — and matter and energy are merely unproven constructs that we use to label and organize the perceptions we receive within consciousness. Consciousness in fact is the only thing we can empirically prove exists. It is where we perceive and receive value, where our actions begin and perhaps end. To know what consciousness is — is to know what and who we are.

Best to all,

Bill