Tag Archives: Theory of the Conscious Universe

If the Universe Is One Consciousness, the Creator Is You

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Created April 19, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The world’s most acclaimed quantum mechanics and relativity physicists including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, John Wheeler, and Stephen Hawking dealt with consciousness in ways that have not, to my knowledge, been looked at by philosophers for their possible implications.

Physicists are a very useful subset of philosophers—especially when physicists deal with things beyond the physical.

Originally, physicists were not willing to deal with the non-physical; they left that to the metaphysicists and metaphysicians. Over time, two things changed:

    1. Energy, which, being invisible, was not considered physical, was reassigned to be covered by physicists.
    2. Metaphysics became lumped with superstition and religion as being outside the field of science.

Then, Einstein came along and included the observer in his thought experiments, allowing consciousness to be included in the mathematics of relativity. Heisenberg showed that the observer influenced the outcome of the experiment.

Einstein was convinced that quantum mechanics was not a complete description of reality, and he attempted to prove it by means of the EPR Paradox, which continues to be debated with a lot of difficult math by many brilliant scientists, without any final resolution. The closest thing to a resolution might be the little-known analysis by Belgian physicist Diederik Aerts which showed that quantum mechanics could not describe two separate physical systems – suggesting that the universe/multiverse cannot be more than one single system.

Einstein wanted a complete description of reality and found it hard to reconcile that with what he called “spooky action at a distance”. All of his early thinking had been based on the classical physics in which action at a distance had been ruled out and replaced by the idea of the exchange of invisible particles/wavicles in the space between objects which accounts for the illusion that they are acting upon one another. This exchange of invisible particles is a simple extension of the colliding billiard balls picture of reality which underpins all of physics all the way back and to this day.

Magnetism and gravity were satisfactorily explained using this concept. However quantum entanglement suggests that either space/distance is an illusion, or that the billiard balls being exchanged between the once-connected-physically-but-now-separated items are allowed to move much faster than the speed of light, in fact, with instantaneity.

Physicists are still debating these things today. The debates disappear if the universe happens to be one single consciousness. One Single Consciousness (OSC) is the one theory (proposed in 1976 by me as The Theory of the Conscious Universe, “TTOTCU”) I know of which explains all of the experimental and observed evidence.

The closest that physicists have come to my TTOTCU theory is Wheeler’s concept of the Participatory Anthropic Principle. This states that consciousness is the factor which converts probability waves into concrete states of physical and energetic reality. I’m pretty sure he thought of TTOTCU and recognized that he would be taking a big chance to embrace it. Instead, his theory was that matter and energy existed before consciousness, but only as probability waves, never frozen into specific forms and events, until the universe somehow evolved life forms with consciousness that now gave the universe the ability to be specific.

I find it easier to swallow TTOTCU than Wheeler’s bootstrap. In my bootstrap, the Nothingness recognizes itself as experiencing the receipt of information (i.e. a consciousness, a self) and then discovers it can imagine and create information for its own consumption. And that it can spin off avatars which can either remember their original identity or not, depending on what the universe’s game might be at the moment.

Nevertheless, since I am only a philosopher and not a physicist (as I had originally intended), I was greatly heartened to read the last book written by Stephen Hawking in which he included Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle in his own summation of reality. This gave me a leg to stand on despite the disparagement of philosophers by some scientists who call us “scientists without laboratories”.

So my Mission in life as I interpret it is to, as best I can, bring into popular awareness two things, TTOTCU and metacognition operational methodologies which have worked for me. Since I am a scientist at heart I do not proclaim that these ideas are facts, but that they are real possibilities. The entire universe/multiverse may be a single consciousness. In which case, you and I are missionaries from that consciousness into this created world which exists within the imagination of the one consciousness, a singularity which exists above time and space.

Just accept for the sake of argument that this could be the true situation. Look at where we are as a species. We have been fooled into thinking that all of this physical stuff around us is what is real, and that it all came about by the collisions of matter and energy bits, accidentally. Therefore, that there is no higher meaning or purpose to life or existence, there is nothing to stand in awe and wonder of.

Naturally, with that as the prevailing worldview (most people act as if this is what they believe, although some of us partition off our faith in a specific religion as something we also believe, but when we come out of the temple we soon begin hating and competing again) it is obvious why we have established authoritarian governments to protect us from criminals, and although seeming to be getting away from that for the past couple of thousand years it is once again flooding back front and center to apparently about half of us even in the most democratic nations.

In other words, if TTOTCU happens to be correct, but almost no one on the planet accepts that in their gut yet, we are all betting on the traditional view of materialism and accidentalism, living in fear, complaining, blaming, and having fun mostly in escapist ways. This seems to us on a subconscious level to be the most rational approach given that there is no way of knowing whether TTOTCU is reality or bunk. Or is there a way of knowing?

I find that by maintaining awareness that TTOTCU might be the reality, I am constantly receiving new information in my mind that surprises, inspires, and delights me. When I fall from this state into one of fear and negativity and attachment to outcomes, I become cut off from that Muse. I detect pragmatic value by keeping my mind open to the TTOTCU possibility. This is where metacognition comes in. You too can experiment with entertaining the TTOTCU possibility in your own lives and seeing if there are any pragmatic benefits you receive as a result.

Cooperation with others becomes the basic operating principle in a world that recognizes the possibility of TTOTCU.

Game theory comes in here as well. In game theory one inspects each alternative one has within some defined “game”, and then imagines what the outcome will be from taking this route or that one. My assertion from decades of self-experimentation is that it causes more “wins” to keep one’s mind open to the very real possibility that we are all a single consciousness. It causes fewer “wins” to rule TTOTCU out as bunk.

Negativity is self-defeating. This is consistent with Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle. We get out what we put in. It is not as simple as “manifesting” whatever we set our minds to, that is an oversimplification that goes much too far and ignores the interaction among all of the different “dinner orders” being requested by all the particles of consciousness – you and me and each of the rest of us. But it is true that Garbage In, Garbage Out – the love you take is equal to the love you make – if you put in negativity you will get back negativity – if you put in constructiveness and well wishes to all, you get back a happier world.

We call the objects we humans create “artifacts” or “artefacts”.

Einstein felt strongly that the universe is a Godifact, but preferred other terms such as Nature, and the intelligence behind Nature, the Creator.

Intention node is another name for avatar. I have also called us attention nodes, particles of consciousness, psions. Quantum theory appears to require that everything is definitely one connected system. Consciousness is something each of us avatars has, and perhaps someday our memory blocks will be released and we will remember our true identity, and even remember the moment we first realized ourself.

Gold In Gold Out

Negative In Negative Out

Positive In Positive Out

Love In Love Out

Opportunities = what we today feel are the insurmountable problems about to destroy us and the planet – our own doing – we understandably (because of not knowing the TTOTCU lens is a real possibility) are down in the dumps about our condition. As long as we continue to be stuck in that old way of looking at things, we will just make things worse. We need to exercise our courage and our free will to open our minds to a new position of clarity and openness to entirely new ideas, and to see us as lucky to be the generations alive today at the turning point in history, where we take ourselves in hand and set up the new system of the world.

Love to All,
Bill

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The Difference Between “Predreaming” and “Manifesting”

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Created March 29, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Predreaming

A recent article in The New York Times by Tara Isabella Burton, a fine writer of both non-fiction and fiction with a doctorate in theology from Oxford’s Trinity College, puts down a specific spiritual belief she refers to as “manifesting”. She writes:

“Today’s culture of wellness — predicted to be an $8.5 trillion industry by 2027 — is suffused with the pseudoscientific language of positive thinking, manifesting, useful and toxic “energy” and, above all things, the power and the potential of the self to create its own reality. If we can dream it, much of contemporary wellness language tells us, we can have it — so long as we focus our energy hard enough.”

She also associates “manifesting” with some other huge things, including besides the wellness culture: spirituality, capitalist individualism, positive thinking, denying aid to the poor on the grounds that they are not using their God-given powers of manifesting, and even Trumpism. She cites Google evidence that searching for the word “manifesting” spiked 6X when the pandemic began.

Burton traces how a faith healer’s book in the late 19th Century triggered a spate of similar books which became so powerful that they inspired Mary Baker Eddy to found the Christian Scientist movement, and transformed Capitalism into a religion:

“In this way, the capitalist pursuit of profit was swiftly recast as a religion whose only tenet was desire… New Thought offered a convenient economic theodicy: a way of explaining and justifying wealth inequality as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, with the wealthy at the top and the suffering at the bottom. And it’s notable that manifesting, New Thought’s modern descendant, should rise to prominence at a moment when economic inequality is once again at an all-time high.”

In her description of “manifesting” she consistently communicates the idea that it is simply wanting X (generally, money) and focusing all our energies on it.

I rarely use the term “manifesting” but until now have never thought of it in a bad light, so I’m grateful for Burton’s very readable and intelligent article. I see now that “manifesting” has taken on a more narrow meaning that I thought it had.

I have always used my own term, Predreaming, which came to me in a moment of inspiration, as if from “upstairs”.

My definition of Predreaming is rather lengthy but I will quote it here from Chapter Seventeen of You Are The Universe:

Chapter 17
Predreaming

Just a reminder: all of this is theory, largely based on my own experiences. For readability the scenario is described as I imagine the details, and is intended to be the most parsimonious, plausible explanation that accounts for all phenomena.

Whatever repeatedly appears on the screen of your mind will eventually appear in your external experience on the Universal Computer Screen we call material reality.

You are tuning in these material experiences, ordering them, attracting them to you, by dwelling on them.

It makes no difference if your dwelling on them consists of prayer to get them (your desires), or dread of getting them (your fears).

The “dwelling-on” places the order, in either case.

Oblivious to our inherited “ordering power”, almost all of us are using it against ourselves.

One of the ways we have been (under-)using our “ordering power” in a constructive way is called “prayer”.

Prayer tends to be a heightened (i.e. more effective) form of predreaming to the extent that all four aspects of consciousness tend to be involved: thinking, feeling, perception (in this case, vivid visualization of the target situation), and intuition.

Intuition will tend to be present in prayer to the extent that the evolving mini-personality who is praying feels the target situation being prayed for would be good for other attention nodes, not just for him or her. Then the praying node has the intuition that “God has no reason not to answer the prayer”.

Now this is not synonymous with the Butler definition of “manifesting” where all you need is desire and focusing. There are a few differences.

    1. Scientific support – it has been proven that previsualization improves performance.
    2. A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and "God" by Bill HarveyTheoretical support – as documented in A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God” , John Wheeler, Einstein and Hawking are the Newtons of our day, and they have left the doors open for consciousness to be a far more important component in reality than most present-day scientists – with Wheeler creating the Participatory Anthropic Concept which comes very close to supporting “manifesting” but especially “predreaming”.
    3. With predreaming comes the concept of considering not just oneself, but how the desired state is a win/win from an enlightened point of view to a reality which is a single Consciousness.
    4. The other vital side of predreaming is to avoid projecting negative situations, which appears from her argument that is not a component of “manifesting” under her definition. This comes with a battery of methods for truncating negativity at all times. Expressing woe, past a certain point, extends woe into the future, with an accelerating curve as you dwell on it.
    5. The connections Butler draws between “manifesting” in social media and religious groups that have embraced Trumpism is another difference. The students of predreaming that I know are not affiliated with any of that.
    6. Predreaming is only one aspect of adopting a lens of the world as a single Consciousness. Another is Noia, the science and art of looking for helpful clues from the Universe – The One Self. There are many aspects helpful to Observer state and Flow state.

My experiential learning in testing and developing predreaming, the way I do it, has led to the strong conviction that it is working.

Seemingly being challenged sparks new thinking, it is wonderful to be challenged politely!

Butler has convinced me that the misunderstanding and misuse of one’s ability to “contribute mentally and physically to the happenings of reality, with positive emotion and functioning intuition” (shorter definition of predreaming), lead to unfortunate outcomes that spill over onto the rest of us evolving mini-personalities. Ego is the main reason this occurs, which is exacerbated by  Acceleritis. Too many “manifesters” are focused on money and act exclusionary, and justify this on religious grounds so they feel righteous and unable to waver or consider any polite logical challenges, because no one is better or smarter than God, and “God is in my hand.”

In reality, God – The Original Consciousness that acts though each of us and everything – wants us all to enjoy learning how to find our way back inside his POV. “Manifesters” will not get the results they want no matter how much they focus, because it would harm more of us than help. God doesn’t use free will that way, and doesn’t want us to, either. God has no reason not to love us, God IS us.

Wheeler et al explain the mechanics, by which these Consciousness-driven actions manifest.

Manifesters beware of “using the dark side of the Force”. Make sure the types of simplified thinking*  Dr. Butler describes don’t describe you. You will appreciate how much your manifestation rate increases.

I’ll close with this superb closer of Tara Isabella Burton’s article:

“After all, if reality is only ever what we make it, then those who possess the fewest scruples about conforming to the truth are the ones who will have the most power to shape the future.”

There is “a Darth Vader”. That’s the powerful people hypnotizing those follower folks, who deserve better, who have put themselves into magical superstitious thinking they think is spiritually driven, but it’s drawing down upon their spirituality account, to fool them like the metaphorical Devil, the ego.

Try predreaming and let me know if it works. Make sure to hold down the ego. Thanks!

*I refer to it as Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). Here’s how my AI [https://app.soopra.ai/bill/chat] explains it:
“Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) is a term I coined to describe a state of mind where, due to sensory overload or stress, we simplify our thinking process. In EOP, we tend to see things in black and white, make immediate decisions based on precedent, and have little foresight. It’s like an emergency mode our minds go into when overwhelmed, but the challenge is that it can limit our ability to fully process information and make optimal decisions. It’s a state we want to avoid or minimize for more effective thinking and decision making.”

Love to all,
Bill

 

The Door to Enlightenment Is Always an Inch Away Part 1

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Originally posted as part of February 9, 2012 blog post

A friend sent me Kant’s definition of “Enlightenment”:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. “Have courage to use your own understanding!” — that is the motto of enlightenment.

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the pull-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.

Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts. Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity. Whoever threw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over the smallest ditch, since he is unaccustomed to this kind of free movement. Consequently, only a few have succeeded, by cultivating their own minds, in freeing themselves from immaturity and pursuing a secure course.

The idea of a social conspiracy was so prevalent at the time Kant was writing ideas like these, he spoke of the “guardians” who consciously and with specific effort kept the human livestock in ignorance. This Age of Enlightenment was above all political, and only scientific as a side effect; Kings were the principal bad guys in the drama. Capitalists and usurers too. The idea of a social compact was created to replace the social conspiracy that had been ultimately exposed.

Today we need not posit a conspiracy to understand how self enslavement has occurred, and continues apace long after Kant wisely explained our true situation. It was not that those benefitting had to keep us down with active effort and malice aforethought — it was easy enough to just depend on the green monkey effect.

Ghastly experiment that it was, someone once painted a monkey green and observed the effect on the monkey in context of its tribe — it was shunned, attacked, driven away. Nauseatingly, they replicated the experiment to make sure of the results. This is what keeps us from stepping outside of the sheep herd. We sense that we will be attacked and isolated defenselessly if we move too far away from the central tendency of our group. This is why Belongers are such a large segment of the population according to SRI VALS I&II, and why Belonging as a human value is prominent across all segments. All VALS segments describe the human condition prior to Enlightenment — the smallest of all segments today as always throughout history — standing above even Self-Actualization (see prior post).

It is fear of non-belonging that keeps us from risking loss of social position, riches and fame, from maturely seeing that there is something more to Life than those objectives. Fear of losing those things, an immature fear, keeps us immature.

And yet the potentiality is there to cross the great divide into Enlightenment in any instant.

This is uncommon. More common is getting there for a few instants but then slipping back. Both are good things and worth being open-minded to the possibilities.

You initially slip back because although you may have broken from the attachments to finite, immature things — fame, riches, many lovers, self-esteem — in your intellect, but this has not yet permeated all of your cells and processes. Before you know it, an habitual feeling within you has once again tripped a cascade of bodily and other responses that you can only realize later was the moment you slipped back into entrapment. Major parts of you have not yet given up what your intellect thought it gave up, your intellect apparently imagining that it actually controls all parts of you.

Even though you may slip back millions of times before you no longer slip back, every time you become infinite if only for a moment, you pile up neuronal probability of establishing yourself permanently being there sooner rather than later. Therefore it makes sense to consider activation of techniques for slipping across the wave front into infinity, even though they may initially yield merely momentary glimpses. More on such techniques later.

Digressing here to chord-resolve an incomplete thought train in last post. Commenting on the last outpost of finitude, the life of a world saver, I now see we left the impression that once Enlightened, a being would not spend a lifetime serving humanity, as the Buddha, Jesus, Saint Teresa and many other saints did. Huston Smith points out that in India the one who returns to help others, although already freed, is called a bodhisattva. Worldwide this being is also known as a saint. My reliable editor Yana Lambert of course tried to point that out to me, and in a moment of Acceleritis™ I missed the point the universe was making to me through her. Synchronistically a few days later Huston reminded me in The World’s Religions, as the Universe is kind in making needed points any way it can.

Noia is my word for the suspicion that the universe is secretly out to help you and is always sending you clues if you can but be sharp enough to notice and decode them. The opposite of paranoia.

In the context of my Theory of the Conscious Universe (TOTCU)*, we are like neurons carrying messages across the universe by the passing on of information (memes) to other places in the cosmic brain where, from the Universe’s point of view, that information should go — keeping the whole universe moving toward greater perfection of understanding at all levels, in a sense upgrading the health of the whole. Each neuron also benefits in the process by getting information it is grateful for (if it is awake enough to notice and/or helped by the technique of Noia). By visualizing the universe as a biomachine, the cost in language is a step away from accuracy since “what is” awesomely exceeds the reductionism to any sort of machine. Yet this is the price we pay to be able to convey the theory to the present age where logical positivism would otherwise dismiss TOTCU as meaningless.

Acceleritis is notorious for banana-peeling you out of Flow and way out of its highest manifestation, Enlightenment.

What I had meant to say was that the bodhisattva/saint is not attached to saving the world. He or she will still do it with the same degree of eager zeal knowing that he or she will never get credit for it. Not even doing it specifically to please God. Even that takes one out of infinity. More on that and techniques in next week’s post in part 2.

Best to all,

Bill

*The Theory of the Conscious Universe was the working title of my book, “You Are the Universe: Imagine That”, released in 2014.

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Upon Enlightenment, One Stays Infinite All of the Time

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Originally posted February 2, 2012

Growing up in a Western culture, one hears and reads the phrases, “seeking Enlightenment” and “the path of Enlightenment”, sees movies like Lost Horizon and The Razor’s Edge, and eventually questions whether maybe there is something real going on.

What is this Enlightenment they speak of so often and so seriously in the East, and which comes up in Western discourse more humorously and as part of entertainment fiction? Is it something real that we in the West ought to wake up and discover?

Enlightenment is a stage in a process. Sages in antiquity observed human beings going through a progression during their lives. Enlightenment is the stage most rarely reached, and self-evidently to those reaching that stage, the final stage in the process.

In other words, the idea of Enlightenment is derived from observation, just like the observation of modern science.

All of the earlier stages in the progression end in dissatisfaction, and are characterized by chasing after a different something in each stage. In this final stage of human personal evolution, Enlightenment, there is no longer any chasing and no longer any dissatisfaction.

Modern Western science in fact has rediscovered the progression. Maslow was the first to crystallize thinking in the West about this built-in human pattern, which he expressed as “The Hierarchy of Needs”. One born in extreme poverty for example seeks satisfaction of his/her physiological needs all of the time, until somehow working oneself out of that extreme poverty. When this happens the physiological needs start to get taken care of easily and the individual begins striving for the next needed thing which is safety and security according to Maslow’s model. Stage three is belonging/social/love needs, then self-esteem, and finally self-actualization. As each need becomes more automatically satisfied in a person’s life, the person expands the sphere of wants to include these new areas, in these various stages.

Maslow was aware of the ancient sources, and his five-stage model was his own intuitive and observation-based attempt at a more scientific reintegration of the seven-stage chakra system of ancient India. Yet it is possible the latter original system could be the more precise. We shall come to it in a moment.

More recently than Maslow, SRI International (originally founded by Stanford University as Stanford Research Institute) used a survey and statistical clustering techniques to discern 23 underlying factors driving human behavior, i.e. values. (The study of human values is called axiology.) From further reclustering they developed a scale similar to Maslow’s but with more levels and two ways to get to self-actualization — a Westernized reduction of Enlightenment — at the top.

One recent interpretation of Maslow’s description of self-actualization lists these words: Vitality, Creativity, Self-Sufficiency, Authenticity, Playfulness, Meaningfulness. These are some of the characteristics that in the East would be attached to Enlightenment, but they are not the essence of it.

The essence of Enlightenment is that one no longer strives for anything. It is no longer necessary. One no longer sees any lack, therefore no need for desire. Love is strongly present, and the intuition is working at such a level as to cause ESP/Psi researchers to note statistically significant above-average accuracy rates. The Enlightened being brings a sense of peace wherever he or she goes, affecting others as iron filings around a magnet. Such a being appears to be continuously in great joy, and this is also infectious to those around. These observations have been replicated time and again by scientific/journalistic/scholarly Westerners who have traveled to the East and have seen and met such Enlightened human beings, some of whom are now in America. Some of us have experienced those states but the condition has not become permanent. That is not yet Enlightenment.

The first known system for reaching Enlightenment, embedded in Hinduism — one of the earliest institutionalized schools of thought — has four stages through which an individual passes as he/she evolves personally. Huston Smith in his classic The World’s Religions  describes these four stages as Pleasure, Success, Duty, and the pursuit of Enlightenment. The latter stages may not be reached in a lifetime, and Hinduism allows for the self to come back again and again to complete this course. Huston significantly describes the fourth stage as the attempt to make oneself “superhuman”. Indeed the Enlightenment stage that is sought appears to be a stage above the human both when one is experiencing it — even if for impermanent flashes — and when one is observing it in someone else.

Flow State as we have described here before has its own sub-stages within it, the highest of which corresponds to Enlightenment. All stages of Flow State appear to be super-human when one is experiencing them. In martial arts, one appears to have become invulnerable. In performing arts as well as martial and athletic arts, everything seems to be happening perfectly without any effort on one’s own part. During Flow State, the Universe appears to be favoring you. More than luck, it feels like the fix is in. This has a supernatural, numinous feel to it.

At the highest stage of Flow State, i.e. Enlightenment, one is no longer seeking Enlightenment, service/duty, success, pleasure, or anything else. All of those are finite and would require stepping down from the infinite, from the sense of letting go, having let go, long past trying to control, stopping oneself from the endless flowing with the Universe in a love relationship, that is Enlightenment. And in fact there is no going back, because by definition Enlightenment is when the world can no longer suck you back down into dissatisfaction with some element of it and re-attach you egoistically to striving to save the world, reduce suffering, one of the last of the finite attachments from which one reaches through to the permanent state of Enlightenment.

Back in the day, I had my own interpretation of the natural stages of personal evolution, which I had based on the seven major chakras. This Sanskrit word meaning “wheel” and “turning” refers to seven intuitively perceived organs of a subtle nonphysical body within each of us. Perhaps the Enlightened sages/saints of ancient India, Tibet, China and the rest of the Far East were actually able to see something that really exists, a body of consciousness within our body of matter, and perceive its organs — and perhaps not. In any case, inspired by this model, I conjectured a progression of personal evolution in, naturally, seven stages.

Those seven steps along the way being: Security (physical safety as well as money), Pleasure (including sex), Power (including consensual validation), Love, Creativity, Self-Knowledge, and Service. When I conceived this model I was not thinking clearly about Enlightenment actually being the eighth stage, and I confabulated it with the seventh or Service stage. But as I’ve since found, trying to be of service to the world is not yet Enlightenment. One still gets caught in EOP while in the seventh stage. The ego still brings you down out of Flow State while you are caught up in the drama of trying to make a positive difference in the world.

There are other esoteric traditions in which I perceive ideas similar to those of Hinduism, Maslow, and SRI, i.e. the idea of there being a characteristic sequential pattern of development for human motivations. Although I’ve not read any other student of Kabbalah as making this same interpretation, in studying the Tree Of Life I see a progression as follows:

  1. Until one gets one’s love and work in balance, one does not rise from the mask/persona/personality/projected image to others (“Yesod”) into one’s essence/truth with oneself (“Tif’eret”).
  2. Until one balances severity and mercy, one is not enabled to have flashes of insight/intuition/inspiration coming as if from above or from some hidden wellspring of wisdom (“Da’at”).
  3. Until one balances wisdom (knowing what’s right) with understanding (forgiveness), one’s consciousness will not be able to rise to transparency with the One Consciousness (“Keter”) — aka Enlightenment.

Recall that these ideas going back thousands of years — and still being reinterpreted and reinvented by new minds today — have also been validated by SRI’s field research: surveys reveal the same underlying axiological structures as predicted by Hinduism and Maslow, and possibly by the Jews in Kabbalah. There are people just motivated to survive physically from one day to the next (“Survivors”), and there are Belongers, Achievers, and Self-Actualizers. This is no longer just theory. In the last century science has rediscovered some ancient principles and validated them. Or perhaps re-validated them, since wise people long ago were convinced by the ability to make good verifiable predictions (“science”) regarding the innate progressive nature of human motivation.

As Huston Smith says, for all the harm religions have done, there is also all the good. And he refers to the wisdom wealth of the world that is stored up in religions. In fact, one does not have to be religious to reach Enlightenment, but it may help, if only by gaining contact with good ideas that are more practical and psychological/philosophical than theological.

We may look back and say that Hinduism for example was not a religion after all, but an observation-based science focused on the life of the self. Hinduism also postulates that the Infinite is within each of us, a statement Logical Positivism declared meaningless gibberish but which The Theory of The Conscious Universe re-words in terms of information theory so as to thwart dismissal by Logical Positivism. We may look back and say that Abraham was in an Enlightened flash of Flow State when he heard the One Self and made a covenant with It. In other words, it may all be true. What all religions believe may actually be real, in a way that denies none of the essentials of any religion, but which reflects the simple fact that there is only One Consciousness, and the rest is detail.

When the One Consciousness fully realizes Itself as The One Consciousness, within the life of one of us, that is what Enlightenment is. It is real, and yes, we ought to wake up and discover it.

Wishing you Stay Infinite,

Bill

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