What I took on in this life is nothing short of a curse of generations I seem to have decided to cleanse or something. All “woowoo shit”, I’m aware that most will respond like this. Woowoo?
Yes and no. We can’t really know how consciousness works from the merely neurobiological perspective. Before you gush deliberate opinionating, hold it and notice how I said “can’t” instead of “don’t“. And I choose every single word I use for a bunch of reasons. I’m #neurodiverse, my thinking is different from yours and I only – I repeat exclusively! – speak out, when I’m fairly certain from plenty of personal research that I’m decently familiar with the matter I address in public. Remember that! So again: While in our day-to-day mode of thinking, we simply can’t explore all of our consciousness for a phenomenon that’s known from public lore as “not seeing the forest for the trees”. It’s due to that phenomenon that we can’t know, because the very “hard- and software” that we’re using to do so is both the object of investigation as well as the tools needed to investigate. See better now, how we can’t ever arrive at satisfying answers?
A similar thing is known in Quantum Physics and it’s known as “the measurement paradox or problem”: So long as the very apparatus we’re using to make the measurement is involved, it will inadvertently affect the outcome of the measurement, because it’s part of the experiment setup. You could also liken it to trying to swim without getting wet (and no, you’re not allowed to use a swimsuit, smarty pants 😜).
So again: We won’t know consciousness until we’ve shed our body for good, i.e. died. It’s from those many hundreds of thousands of accounts over the course of millenia and throughout all ages and cultures that we were given a glimpse beyond the obvious and gathered the body of literature that’s known as all the sanctimonious scriptures the world’s spiritual traditions have recorded and handed down over many generations.
In the West we made a decision following the French Revolution and heralding in the “Age of Enlightenment” that the Human Spirit should be henceforth regarded as the only required as well as legitimate source of insight and exploration. Scholars acted from an understanding that no higher divinity was needed to arrive at the “Eureka!” moment of intellectual exploration and empiricism.
Today, more than ever, this understanding sees a lot of additional information coming in from people having experienced situations close to death, survivors of all kinds, “astral travelers”, even the much ridiculed “UFO abductees”, i.e. information they “brought back” which questions this paradigm of exploration into realms that go beyond the mere physical.
While I’m far from peddling pseudo–science or esoterics or any other annoying mind-crap, I have to make myself understand that this other kind of information is so abundant, so consistent, so plausible and coherent across cultures and time that rejecting it as “woowoo” is a stark abomination and couldn’t be further from an open-minded truly scientific approach.
This posting as a post-mortem dedication to our late friend Benjie Bernadas, who also enjoyed dwelling on matters of the mind here and there. May he have travelled on safely and merrily, friend from across the continents!
Late.Shift 