Message-ID: <3BC27DFD.4E4E9736@home.com> From: K Barry Reply-To: krtpbarry@home.com X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 (Macintosh; I; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en,pdf MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.out-of-body Subject: White Paper on The Human Experience Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 607 Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2001 04:32:19 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.70.89.60 X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news2.rdc1.ab.home.com 1002601939 24.70.89.60 (Mon, 08 Oct 2001 21:32:19 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 21:32:19 PDT Organization: Excite@Home - The Leader in Broadband http://home.com/faster Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!enews.sgi.com!newshub2.rdc1.sfba.home.com!news.home.com!news2.rdc1.ab.home.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.out-of-body:72388 Hello all! This article will appeal to anyone interested in the OBE. I found it at another NG, which, sadly, was not dedicated to this type of subject (was a WTC bombing discussion group!). There was no attributed source. If there is anything about which we feel sure, it is that the world we experience is real. We can see, touch and hear it. We can lift heavy and solid objects; hurt ourselves, if we're not careful, against their unyielding immobility. It seems undeniable that out there, around us, independent and apart from us, stands a physical world, utterly real, solid and tangible. But all is not what it seems. First, the apparently solid table in front me is, it turns out, far from solid. And second, we assume that we are directly experiencing the world around; that the colours we see and the sounds we hear are there, around us, just as we experience them. But even an elementary study of the processes of perception show that in this, too, we are much mistaken. All that I see, hear, taste, touch, smell and feel has been created from the data fed to me by my sensory organs. All I ever know of the world around are the images produced in the mind. I think I am seeing the tree 'out there,' in the world around me. But all that I am actually experiencing is the image created in the mind. This simple fact is very hard to grasp. It runs totally counter to all our experience. There seems nothing more certain than the fact that I am seeing the world as it is, around me. But however nonsensical it may sound, this is the conclusion we are forced to make. Dreaming the World The world we experience around us is no more 'out there' than are our dreams. However real it may seem, it is, in the final analysis, all in the mind. We never experience the physical world directly; all we ever know is the image of the world generated in our awareness. And that image is no more 'out there' than are the images of our dreams. Illusory Realities We may find it hard to come to terms with the fact that our normal waking experience of reality is a manifestation within the mind, but in many other instances we readily accept that we create our experiences. Virtual Reality The entire concept of virtual reality is founded on the understanding that the brain is a reality generator as much as an information processor. In all these instances of illusory or artificial realities we readily accept that the confusing or abnormal perception stems from the way the brain creates our experience of reality. Yet when it comes to our normal waking experience, the base state in which these so-called 'illusions' occur, we adopt the opposite position. We feel that we are experiencing the world as it is, 'out there' in front of us. But how could the illusory perception be an image in our mind, yet the world in which the illusion occurs be the physical world around us? Seeing what isn't there Many other creations of the mind we dismiss as hallucinations. These are typically experiences which occur under the influence of drugs, and during illness, extreme fatigue or stress. For one reason or another the electro-chemical processes are modified in some way, leading the brain to generate a different image of reality. One may perceive unusual colours or patterns, perceive time and space differently, or experience some other 'non-ordinary' manifestation in consciousness. We call such images 'hallucinations' because they do not concur with our normal experience of reality, or with the reality that other people experience. We say we are seeing things that are not really there. But, surprising as it may at first seem, this is what we are doing all the time. Even in normal, everyday perception, the kind we all agree upon, we are seeing things that are not really there. Colour, sound, smell, and all the other qualities of experience are not qualities of the physical world; they exist only in the mind. The fact that we create our experience of reality does not imply that there is no underlying reality. When a tree falls in the forest, there is a specific event that is happening in the physical world. There is something that gives rise to my perception, and to your perception -- and to the perception of a bird sitting on one of its branches. But we know nothing of that event directly. All we know are the experiences created in our minds. Maya Conversely, it would be wrong to relegate our experience to the world of illusion. It is very real, the only reality we know. If I kick a boulder my foot hurts. The solidness of the stone is real in my experience; so is the pain. The illusion comes when we confuse the image in our mind with the thing-in-itself. The Vedantic philosophers of ancient India spoke of this as 'maya.' Often translated as 'illusion,' the word is better understood as 'delusion.' I suffer a delusion when I believe that the manifestations in my mind are the external world. I deceive myself when I think that the tree I see is the tree itself. A Computer Analogy As a contemporary analogy, we might liken the situation to the image created on a computer screen. Within the central processor of the computer are numerous bits of information, encoded as electronic states in the circuitry of the chips. Software in the computer processes this data, putting it into a form that when sent to the monitor causes it to light the screen in particular ways. The image that is created may be derived from the data in the central processor, but it is not the same as the data. The computer is not producing some faithful imitation of an image held in memory. There is only code; microscopic electronic switches that are either 'on'; or 'off.' There is no colour or light in the computer code, and the spatial layout of the data on the chip bears very little resemblance to the layout of the final image. The Two Realities It is important to distinguish between two ways in which we use the word 'reality.' There is the reality we experience, our image of reality; and there is the underlying reality that we never know directly, but which is the source of our experience. In Indian philosophy these two realities are sometimes referred to as the Absolute and the Relative. The Absolute is the underlying reality. It does not change according to whomever is experiencing it. It is, as it is, an independent reality. The Relative is the reality we observe, the reality generated in our minds. There is just one Absolute; but there are numerous relative realities, each relative to a particular person having the experience at a particular point in space and time. Other times they are spoken of as the unmanifest and manifest levels of reality. Species-Specific Realities How we construct our image of the world is determined by our sensory organs and nervous system. Most human beings have very similar sensory organs -- my eye, for example, is virtually identical to yours -- and the neural processing of the sensory data follows very similar pathways. We receive the same data, analyse it in the same way, and so create very similar pictures of reality -- unless, that is, a person is colourblind, near-sighted, or tone deaf, in which case we make allowances for our different perceptions. The fact that we seldom disagree on our experience of reality reinforces our assumption that we are seeing reality as it is. But if we could communicate with other creatures we would find our naive assumption severely shaken. Dogs, for example, hear higher frequencies of sound than we do, and their noses detect a far wider range of molecules. If we could put ourselves in a dog's mind we would find a somewhat different perception of reality. >From Plato The realisation that we do not experience reality as it is, but only a picture of reality constructed in the mind, is not new. In The Republic, Plato argued that the objects we perceive are not the ultimate reality, but more like a shadow of reality. He illustrated this with his analogy of 'The Cave.' Although Plato believed the real world was a world of ideas and eternal perfect forms, his story is still pertinent to our own experience. Most of us assume that the sights and sounds we perceive are the 'real world.' When science inform us that we are not seeing reality as it is, but merely the images that manifests in our minds, we shrug in disbelief. How can that be? How can the world that I experience so clearly as 'out there' be just an image in the mind? To Kant The notion that reality is 'all in the mind' resurfaces repeatedly in modern philosophy. The person who is generally regarded has having made the greatest contributions in this area was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Building on the work of Berkeley and Locke, Kant drew a clear distinction between our perception of reality and the actual object of perception. His key insight was the realisation that all we ever know are the structures generated in our minds; the world that gives rise to this perception, what he termed 'the thing in itself' remains forever unknowable. All we can ever know, proposed Kant, is how reality appears to us -- what he referred to as the phenomenon of our experience, 'that which appears to be.' The underlying reality he called the noumenon, a Greek word meaning 'that which is apprehended,' the thing perceived. Kant's statement that the noumenon is forever unknowable should be interpreted as forever inexperiencable. The mind is forever barred from a direct knowing of the thing-in-itself. This does not imply that we cannot understand it, or form concepts about it, which is what modern science sets out to do. Because all we ever know is the product of the mind operating on the raw sensory data, Kant reasoned that our experience is as much a reflection of the nature of the mind as it is of the physical world. This led him to one of his boldest, and at that time most astonishing, conclusions of all. Time and space, he argued, are not inherent qualities of the physical world; they are a reflection of the way the mind operates, the perceptual framework within which our entire experience of the world is constructed. It seems absolutely obvious to us that time and space are real and fundamental qualities of the physical world, entirely independent of my or your consciousness -- as obvious as it seemed to people five hundred years ago that the sun moves round the earth. This, said Kant, is only because we cannot see the world any other way. The human mind is so constituted that it is forced to impose the framework of space and time on the raw sensory data in order to make any sense of it all. We are forever constrained to construct our experience within these dimensions -- much as a computer is forever constrained to present its data in the two-dimensional format of the monitor. It is law of perception rather than a law of physics. It may have been an astonishing claim at the time -- and probably still undeniable that the world we experience extends out there around us -- but we shall see shortly that it is a realisation that contemporary physics is also coming round to accepting. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Kant's work was that he came to these conclusions without any of our contemporary scientific knowledge of the world, or any understanding of the physiology of perception. Had he known what we know now, his conclusions would have been so obvious as to be totally unremarkable. At the time, Kant's arguments were a watershed in Western thinking. They were, as Kant himself saw, the equivalent of a Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Whereas Copernicus had effectively turned the physical universe inside out, showing that the movements of the stars are determined by the movement of the earth, Kant had turned the epistemological world inside out. We are not passive experiencers of the world; we are the creators of the world we experience. He had put the self firmly at the centre of things. Knowing and Seeing Our tacit assumption that we perceive the world as it is, has become so deeply ingrained that it is very hard indeed to appreciate that our image of reality is a construction within our own mind. Even when we intellectually accept the fact, as eventually we must, it is still extremely difficult not to see the image we have created as 'out there.' In fact, we will probably always see it this way. But that is not to say it is not possible to see it otherwise. It may be that spiritual adepts who have made a deep personal investigation into the nature of the mind, explored the workings of their own consciousness, and witnessed the arising of experience, have come to see it that way. Throughout the mystical and spiritual literature of the world are examples of individuals who have claimed that the whole world is within them rather than around them, as most of us experience. The ardent materialist might assume that these are the ravings of a mind deranged by too much meditation. It is far more likely that they are coming from people who have experienced first-hand that the entire universe -- everything we know from the cells in our bodies to the distant twinkling stars -- exists within the mind, not the other way around. Far from suffering from an illusion, a person in this state is knowing the phenomenal reality for what it is. It is we who are under an illusion when we believe that the world we see around us is 'out there' around us, rather than within us. The Key Even though most of us are probably far from such advanced states of consciousness, it is important that we do not become seduced by our daily experience into false beliefs about the true nature of things. We may still see the sun going down, but we know reality is different, and take this into account in our considerations of the cosmos. The difference with the Kantian Revolution (let's follow tradition and name it after one its founding fathers) is that the shift in super paradigm is not yet complete. All the pieces are in place -- just as all the relevant pieces of the Copernican Revolution were in place by the early seventeenth century -- but they have not yet been put together into a coherent model, and the implications have still to sink in. The foundation stone of the emerging super paradigm is the distinction between the phenomenon, the reality generated in the mind, and the unknowable reality, or noumenon, that underlies it. When this distinction is clear, many anomalies and apparently intractable problems across a broad spectrum of human endeavour either dissolve or take on an entirely different nature. The 'hard problem' of how consciousness arises from matter is turned inside out. So is the question of the location of the self. The distinction throws new light on Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and the wave-particle paradox in quantum mechanics. It also offers a new perspective on many spiritual teachings. Religion and science may not be as antithetically opposed as many believe; the new model suggests an alternative, and far more enlightening, meaning to God. But the ramifications are not just academic or philosophical. They have very practical implications for how we live our lives. The current materialistic world view may have worked fairly well in the physical sciences, but is failing us abysmally in human affairs. The current crises we now face, terrorism, economic instability, and humanitarian aid, boil down to a crisis in world view. Mathematics and Reality The question is sometimes raised as to how it is that mathematics, which is a creation of the human mind, without any empirical reference to external reality, should match reality so well. When we make the distinction between the reality we experience and the underlying reality, the correlation between mathematics and reality is not so surprising. Science takes our observations of the external world and seeks to understand how they occur and to discover underlying patterns and principles. In doing so, it inevitably draws upon experience. When atoms were first imagined, they were thought of as small solid balls of matter, a model clearly drawn from everyday experience. Then, as physics realised that atoms were composed of more elementary particles (even the word 'particle' contains an implicit assumption as to their nature), the model shifted to one of a central nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons, again based on experience at the human level. Now, as we try to interpret quantum theory, we inevitably draw upon other concepts derived from our perception of reality. We interpret them as waves or bundles of energy, possessing 'spin' and mass. Yet every model we come up with fails in some way or other to capture the essence of the underlying reality. At first we might find it surprising that the conclusions of modern physics are so far removed from our experience or reality. But it is not actually that surprising at all. All scientific models and theories have their roots in human experience. They are all based on the way the human mind interprets the incoming, which is itself based on our particular, and partial, perception of the world around. What would be far more surprising would be to find that the image of reality created in the human mind was indeed a faithful representation of the thing-in-itself. Mathematics on the other hand is purely a creation of the mind. Mathematics is that body of knowledge that is arrived at by pure reason, and does not rely upon any observations of the phenomenal world. It is free from the limitations imposed by the particular way human minds create their experience of the underlying. As such it is probably the closest the human mind can come to understanding the thing-in-itself. The only thing that pure mathematics depends upon anything is the notion of distinction. If I experience two apples I am experiencing two phenomena that can be distinguished one from the other; I can eat one and keep the other. I can distinguish between the black print and the white background of this page. Even in the underlying reality there is distinction; we may not know what the thing-in-itself is really like, but we can measure its separation in the space-time interval from another thing-in-itself. If there was no distinction in the cosmos, there would be no difference of any kind. No experience whatsoever. The existence of distinction is as undeniable as the existence of experience itself. If there are distinctions, we can count them. The base of the counting may vary. We use ten (probably because we have ten fingers), computers use two, the Babylonians used sixty (which is why we count sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour), other cultures have used five, twelve or twenty as their base. From counting comes the concept of number, and all the integers. We can add numbers together, leading to multiplication of numbers, and the their opposites, subtraction and division. From this simple arithmetic comes the concept of nothing, zero; and beyond zero, the negative numbers, not part of our direct experience, but a concept we readily accept and are quite happy to work with. In between the integers we discover fractional numbers, numbers such as a half, or two thirds, which can be expressed as the ratio of two integers. Hence their name, the rational numbers. Counting all the numbers we arrive at the notion of infinity. And between the rational numbers we discover an infinity of irrational or transcendental numbers that can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers. Numbers such as 'pi,' the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, or 'e,' the base of natural logarithms. They can be defined, but never written down exactly as a number for they go on forever, to an infinite number of decimal places. All this from the notion of distinction. And there is more. Any positive number has a square root, the number that when multiplied by itself produces that number. The square root of one is one; of four it is two; and of eight it is 2.828... (another irrational number that goes on forever). But what, asked mathematicians of negative numbers, what multiplied by itself gives minus one? Nothing in the range so far discovered. Any number, positive or negative when multiplied by itself results in a positive number. So they defined the square root of minus one to be a totally new number, an 'imaginary' number, not part of the range or 'real' numbers, and gave it the symbol 'i.' From this arose a new and even larger set of numbers, the so-called 'complex' numbers, that were a combination of real and imaginary numbers. And these, it turned out were invaluable in helping mathematicians solve equations that had no solution in the realm of real numbers. Moreover the solutions applied to the real world. Out of this panoply of numbers a most remarkable and intriguing relationship appeared. The irrational number 'pi,' the irrational number 'e,' and the imaginary number 'i,' come together in one of the simplest equations ever; 'e to the power of (i times pi) = -1.' Many mathematicians have eulogised over the significance and beauty of this equation. Out on the very edge of number theory a relationship is discovered that seems to show it is all in some way preordained. Little wonder that some mathematicians feel that God is to be found in the beauty and perfection of mathematics. That these three seemingly unconnected numbers should be related in such a simple way was startling enough; but even more was in store. This simple equation is the basic equation of any wave motion. Every wave from a wave on water, the air waves coming from a violin string, to light waves, can be expressed as a combination of simple equations of this form. It also expresses the orbits of the planets, the swing of a pendulum and the oscillation of an atom. In fact, every single motion in the cosmos can ultimately be reduced to an equation of this form. The whole of quantum physics depends upon it. If mathematicians had not discovered this most remarkable relationship, the strange story of the quantum would never have been told. And all of this without a single empirical observation. No wonder then, that in the end all science comes down to mathematics. The very fact that it is not based upon phenomena, is why it is probably the best approximation to the underlying reality we have. Space-time When we are under the illusion that my image of the world is the real world, we may assume that many of the qualities of the phenomena we observe are independent realities existing in the noumena. For a long time it was assumed that space and time were fundamental to the underlying reality. Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity came as a great shock to this assumption. He showed that what we observe as space and what we observe as time are but two aspects of a more fundamental space-time continuum. What this continuum is like we never know -- in this respect it sounds very much like Kant's noumena. All we ever know of it are the ways in which it manifests as the two very different qualities of space and time. Moreover, how much of the continuum manifests as space and how much manifests as time varies according to the relative motion of the observer. Space and time have fallen from their absolute status. They are both created through the act of perception, and so belong to the relative world of experience. This is not to imply that they are not fundamental to our experience; they are the dimensional framework within which we structure our mental image of the world. But we deceive ourselves when we assume that they are also fundamental to the underlying reality. The Reality of Light In proposing his theory Einstein postulated that the speed of light was a universal constant. However fast you may be moving relative to a light beam, you will always measure the speed of light to be the same -- 186,000 miles per second. Even if you are moving at 99% the speed of light, a light will still appear to travel past you at 186,000 miles per second. Although this is totally counter-intuitive, experiments show that it does indeed seem to be the case. This raises two difficult questions: How come the speed is always the same? And why is light so special? When we distinguish the image of reality from the underlying reality, the apparent constancy of the speed of light takes on a very different nature. According to Einstein's equations, as an observer's speed increases, time slows down, and space (in the direction of motion) contracts. At the speed of light, time has slowed to a standstill and space contracted to a point. Although no object with mass can ever attain the speed of light (Einstein's equations predict that it would then have an infinite mass), light itself does (by definition) travel at the speed of light. From light's point of view it has travelled no distance, and has taken no time to do so. This reflects a unique property of light. In the space-time continuum there is no separation between the emission of a light ray and its absorption. What Einstein called the 'space-time interval' between the two ends of a light ray is always zero. How should we understand this? The answer is that we probably should not even try to understand it. Any attempt to do so would once again fall into the mistake of applying concepts derived from our image of reality to the underlying reality. All we need to recognise is that from light's perspective it traverses no space-time interval. However, when we perceive the world from our human frame of reference we do indeed observe a separation between the two ends of the light beam -- the exact amount of separation depending upon our speed. We could say the act of perception 'stretches out' the zero interval, and divides it into a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time. Since the total interval remains zero, the amount of space created exactly balances the amount of time created. For every 186,000 miles of space, we create 1 second of time. What we conceive of as the speed of light is actually something completely different. From light's point of view -- and this after all must be the most appropriate perspective from which to consider the nature of light, not our matter-bound mode of experience -- light travels no distance in no time, and therefore has no need of speed. What we take to be the speed of light is actually the ratio in which space and time are created in our image of reality. It is this ratio that is fixed -- and this is why in the phenomenal world the apparent 'speed' of light is fixed. Wave-Particle Duality When we recognise that in the real world light does not travel across space or time a difficult conundrum in quantum physics becomes much easier to understand. In our image of reality we observe energy travelling from one end of a light ray to the other. It is only natural to ask how the energy travels: Is it a wave? Or is it a particle? (Two models both drawn from our image of reality.) The answer, it appears, is both. In some situations light behaves as a continuous wave spreading out in space -- but a wave without a medium. In other situations it behaves as a particle travelling through space -- but a particle without mass. Physicists have accommodated these two strange and seemingly paradoxical conclusions by deciding that light is a 'wave-particle.' In certain circumstances it appears as a wave; in others as a particle. But if we look at things from light's point of view, it is neither. Since it did not travel through space and time, it needed no vehicle or mechanism of travel -- it has no need to be either a wave or a particle. As far as light itself is concerned, there is no duality, no paradox. The physicists' conundrum appears only when we mistake our image of reality with the 'thing in itself,' and try to visualise light in concepts and terms appropriate to our image of reality -- i.e., waves and particles. The Material World A second conclusion of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is that matter and energy are related to each other in a similar way as are space and time. Atomic physics had already shown that solid matter did not really exist, our experience of solid substance being an appearance generated in the mind. Einstein's work went further, showing that matter does not exist in the real world as an independent substance. What appears to us as matter and energy are bound together in his famous equation e=mc2. More fundamental than both matter and energy is action. Planck laid the foundations of quantum physics with his realisation that the indivisible unit in the physical world, the 'quantum' as he called it, was action. When we speak of the material world we usually think we are referring to the underlying reality -- the world that we are perceiving 'out there.' In fact we are only describing our image of reality. The materiality we experience, the solidness we feel, the whole of the 'real world' that we know are all aspects of the image created in the mind; they are part of our interpretation of reality. Paradoxical as it may sound, matter is something created in the mind. When we realise that everything we know, including the whole material world that we experience 'out there' is part of the phenomenon, the image constructed in consciousness, we find the truth is a complete reversal of our everyday view. Matter, as we know it, is a creation of consciousness. Not the other way around as contemporary science presumes. Thus the ultimate nature of reality -- the reality we experience that is, not the reality of the noumena, of whose nature we have no knowledge -- is consciousness. Space, time, matter, energy -- the whole substantial world built up from our sense perceptions -- is created within consciousness. The essence of this whole phenomenal world is not matter but consciousness. The Fabric of Reality Everything we know is part of the picture of reality arising in consciousness. This is true not only of the objects we experience in the world around; thoughts, feelings and ideas are likewise manifestations within consciousness, and so are the theories we construct about the nature of the world around. Everything we know is structured in consciousness. Consciousness is the fabric of reality. It is the medium from which every aspect of our experience manifests. Colour, sound, taste, smell, space, time, matter -- every quality we ever experience in the world is a form or quality within consciousness. Our entire image of reality is generated in and from consciousness. Similar claims have sometimes been made by spiritual teachings -- probably most coherently by the Vedantic philosophy of ancient India. The Western scientific mind has usually dismissed such suggestions, since they seem to make no sense whatsoever. But they are only nonsensical if we confuse the two realities and think these ancient philosophers were speaking of the underlying reality (of which we cannot, of necessity, know or speak). If we consider the reality we experience, then we have to accept that in the final analysis they are correct: Consciousness is the essence of everything -- everything in the known universe. The Hard Question When we look at the world, we do not see consciousness 'out there.' All we see are the various forms and qualities that consciousness has taken on. To us the 'material world' appears to be devoid of consciousness. The reason we do not find consciousness in the world we observe is because consciousness is not part of the picture generated in our minds. It is the canvas on which the picture is painted. But when we mistakenly assume that the picture of reality painted in our mind is the underlying reality, we find ourselves presented with a very difficult question regarding consciousness: How does conscious experience arise or emerge from matter? This is the so-called 'hard question' to which many scientists and philosophers are currently devoting considerable time and attention. The hard question that these people think they are asking is: "How does the noumena give rise to consciousness?" But knowing very little of the noumena, we are not really in any position even to ask this question. The question these people are actually asking has more to do with our image of reality than the fundamental reality. They are asking how it is that a complex network of neurons can give rise to conscious experience. How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as the material world? Is it a result of the complex patterning of data across the neural net? Is it due to quantum coherence effects in microtubules within the neurons? Or is it something else? What all these approaches have in common is that they are trying to explain consciousness in terms of phenomena that belong to our image of reality, which is itself a manifestation within consciousness. The so-called 'hard question' is actually a mistaken question. When we distinguish between the two realities, the question disappears to be replaced by its opposite: How is it that matter, space, time, colour, sound, form, and all the other qualities we experience emerge in consciousness? What is the process of manifestation within the mind? Locating Consciousness Another recurrent question concerns the seat of consciousness. Where is the self, our sense of 'I-ness,' located? Is it in the brain? If so, where? Despite much thought and discussion, no one has yet come up with clear answers to such questions. As with some of the other problematic issues we have looked at, this one too stems from confusing the two realities. The question that is actually being asked is "Where is consciousness located in our image of reality?" There are two answers to this question. On the one hand, consciousness is not located anywhere within the world; the whole world -- our entire image of reality, including our bodies and brains -- is itself a manifestation within consciousness. Consciousness is the container of our world; it is not contained within it. On the other hand, we do clearly experience ourselves to be located somewhere within that image. We have created this image of reality and have quite naturally put ourselves at the centre of this image. Our whole world is constructed around a central point, the centre of our perception. The central point of most of our sensory experience is somewhere in the middle of the head. We see ourselves to be somewhere behind the eyes, and hear ourselves to be somewhere between the ears. This is where we quite naturally place ourselves within our image of reality. Since the brain is also located in the middle of the head, it is easy to assume that consciousness is somehow located in the brain. But this need not necessarily be so at all. Imagine your brain being located in your pelvis. This would not change your experience of being somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears. In short, consciousness is not located anywhere within the world, it is that within which the world is located. But we create a sense of location for ourselves within our image of the world by placing ourselves at the centre of our perceived world. God We are now in a better position to understand two recurrent themes in spiritual experience. Throughout human history there have been mystics of one kind or another who have proclaimed that 'I am God,' or words to that effect. To the ears of established religion this has often sounded like heresy; 'How can this lowly individual claim that he (or sometimes she) is the almighty, eternal creator?' Heresy enough to get one imprisoned, tortured, or even burned at the stake. Such people are not necessarily deluded zealots; they are usually people who have spent considerable time exploring the depths of human consciousness, and their realisations are not to be lightly dismissed. If we look more closely at their statements, what they seem to be saying is that the 'I,' that innermost essence of ourselves, that pure consciousness that lies at our core, is a universal essence. Whatever we may be conscious of, the faculty of consciousness is something we all share. This consciousness is the one Truth we cannot deny. It is the absolute certainty of our existence. It is eternal in that it is always there whatever the contents of our experience. It is the essence of everything we know. It is the creator of our world. This is the 'God' that we intuitively know existed, but never quite found. Unity A second recurrent theme in mystical literature is the knowledge of being one with all things, the realisation that 'I am the Universe,' that all is me, and all is in me. As before, these are not necessarily the ravings of a deranged mind. In most spiritual traditions they signify a high state of consciousness, and generally come from adepts with many years of inner exploration. It is far more likely that they represent people who have experienced first-hand that the entire universe -- everything we know from the cells in our bodies to the distant twinkling stars -- exists within the mind, not the other way around. Far from suffering from an illusion, a person in this state is knowing the phenomenal reality for what it is. It is we who are under an illusion when we believe that the world we see around us is actually around us, not within us. These inner explorers have discovered that it truly is 'all in the mind.' Regards, Kevin