(NOTE: I wrote most of this blog between July, 2006 and election
day, 2008. Some media references, then, may be outdated or
unavailable.)
It's all about this niggling little thing called Consciousness.
Just considering this one word--this one concept--is almost too much to absorb.
Everything I'm studying is contingent on the unprovable. There are many, many gurus, teachers and so-called avatars who profess to KNOW the truth; to know the unknowable, while the vast majority of human beings will never experience the ineffable, except, perhaps, in their dreams.
Faith, to me, is still too weak an anchor to use for my ground of knowledge. The scientist in me fights for dominance in the battle for my "soul".
If only--I keep saying to myself--if only there was scientific proof of ANY of these ideas that man has pondered for thousands of years. But when the only proof that can be had is anecdotal, it frustrates and angers me.
Are all the oral traditions, philosophical writings, sacred texts and mystical art just products of our three pound mass of gelatinous neurons?
Can creativity alone account for the wonders human beings have been responsible for?
Let's face it. We don't yet have a clue at what even makes up consciousness. Is it just electrical activity? Is it quantum activity? Is it cross-dimensional activity?
I thought about EEG's and how at all levels of consciousness that can be measured, there is electrical activity. Is this activity a cause or effect?
Then I thought about near-death experiences and found that there have been examples of NDE's where all EEG activity ceased AND all blood flow to the brain was stopped. This was a true brain death according to the surgeons who performed the brain operation where this occurred.
Yet the patient, Pam Reynolds, has described how she floated above her body and heard the doctors and nurses discussing her condition as well as other facts that she couldn't have processed in any way while she was in this physical state.
These are the kinds of stories that people like me desire to hear the most. Yet, even in the Wikipedia article linked above, critics have stated that there could be a number of scientific reasons for Pam's memories. So even with this story, there is still nothing for my desire-to-believe to anchor to.
I was given some books by a good friend written by Brian Weiss. He is a psychiatrist who has treated some 3500 patients using what he terms past life regression.
For most of my life I have felt that reincarnation is a wonderful idea. Past life regression is proof of this according to its proponents like Dr. Weiss. But what kind of proof? I guess I will have to read the books to get an idea.
Yet one of the most interesting books on the subject of Reincarnation still fascinates me. The book, The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between, is better known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The version written by Robert Thurman is less ponderous than that of W.Y. Evans-Wentz.
But the questions remain. And perhaps they always will. In fact, there is a branch of philosophy called New Mysterianism which proposes that "certain problems will never be explained or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage".
This is a fairly depressing idea, but could be the operative one insofar as trying to solve the "hard problem of consciousness" is concerned".
One thing to note, however, is that consciousness as a subject of scientific research has not been around very long and the bio-medical tools used in that study have been around for a lot less time.
So while there are still those among us who strive to understand the cosmos--and I am one of these people--it seems that the real frontier exists somewhere within little mass of gelatinous tissue we call our brain.