Is Geology Conscious

In the day the earth became dormant. While she sleeps is she not still alive?

Is there life in stone, or is It is unconscious, without life? Walking over the dry landscape, Death Valley appears barren. As a casual passerby one would assume it a wasteland of worthless desert, but in the cooking soil lay dormant the seeds of a life cycle full of pause.

Death Valley

Wait ten years for the fall rains to drench the landscape—and in spring see the super-blooms, where Death Valley becomes a meadow. As humans we depend on a more frequent cycle, so we move on. Nothing lives here. Be a great place for a mining operation if it wasn’t so damned hot!

Walking over a cracked riverbed—four years now and no sign of life, but underfoot in the hard pan sediment thrives the lungfish. Sealed in a self created pod and breathing air, the lungfish of considerable size patiently waits for rain, estivating.

Now we say we’re unconscious in sleep and self-conscious in the wakeful state. Which is the Reality? Are they not both states of living? As a stone lay dormant, is it unconscious, which in its sleep is a form of consciousness?

Reality is continuous and eternal. Neither the unconsciousness nor the self-consciousness of the present is any more real than the other. Unconscious and conscious are both consciousness. Tread lightly, slow down, and listen.

Earth gives off a relentless hum of countless notes completely imperceptible to the human ear, like a giant, exceptionally quiet symphony—Charles Choi, Live Science. Is there consciousness there?

Death Valley

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Three Cases For a Single Consciousness

The brain as an appendix? Three pounds of useless fat…

Organisms come and go. Brains evolve into minor insignificant blobs—to bilateral synchronization, to the organic state of awareness. Being aware of being aware (the pinnacle of biological evolution) big brains have made humans the “chief mambas” of planet earth. But was this necessary? Is it even true?

In geologic timescale life is but an eye-blink. Upon death one constant remains—consciousness. It is in every thing. It is the background illuminating the foreground. “The entire universe is forever the same as the consciousness that dwells in every atom”—Yoga-Vasistha. When you are gone consciousness remains.

Does consciousness exists without the brain? In recent years that idea has regained traction from some unlikely sources—brain abnormalities and science.

#1. “A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterized by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain”

Split brain is a lay term to describe the result of a corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure first performed in the 1940s to alleviate severe epilepsy among patients. During this procedure, the corpus callosum (a bundle of neural fibres connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres) is severed to prevent the spread of epileptic activity between the two brain halves. While mostly successful in relieving epilepsy, the procedure also virtually eliminates all communication between the cerebral hemispheres, thereby resulting in a ‘split brain’. Ref Article

Yet the patients still have one mind. The idea that consciousness originates in the brain has been sideswiped by evidence—that it’s not so clear as that. There’s more…

#2. More than 20 years ago the campus doctor at Sheffield University was treating a student of mathematics for a minor ailment. The student was bright, having an IQ of 126. The doctor noticed that the student’s head seemed a little larger than normal and he referred him to Dr Lorber for further examination.

Dr Lorber examined the boy’s head by cat scan to discover that the student had virtually no brain. The normal brain consists of two hemispheres that fill the cranial cavity, some 4.5cm deep. This student had a layer of cerebral tissue less than 1mm deep covering the top of his spinal column. Ref Article

#3. When a 44-year-old man from France started experiencing weakness in his leg, he went to the hospital. That’s when doctors told him he was missing most of his brain. The man’s skull was full of liquid, with just a thin layer of brain tissue left. Ref Article

With speech and motor coordination intact, normal societal living, average as well as above average intelligence, the above cases are good cases for consciousness existing outside the brain. Even the split brain is a single consciousness.

Where are his memories stored?

Where does thinking occur?

Where is speech and visual acuity learned and stored?

Where is the moral compass and reasoning developed?

Where does this place evolutions larger brain hypothesis to support greater intelligence?

How do the 12 cranial nerves function without a source organ?

I imagine the big brain has something to do with esthetics. A population of pinheads wouldn’t be a real eye catcher— or would it?

What is Allowed as Evidence?

“I take it for granted that empirical data, which is the data of normal sensory observation and experience, should inform our best guess at what reality is like. But are there any other sources of data that must be taken into account?”—Phillip Goff

“Nothing is more evident than the existence of one’s feelings and experiences”. If a supposedly complete theory of reality can account for all of the data of observation and experiment, but cannot account for the reality of consciousness, it can be falsified.

In the law of non-contradiction (LNC), it states that there aren’t, and cannot be any contradictory states of affairs. This law is known with a kind of certainty, similar to that with which I know my own feelings exist. One can perhaps debate whether our knowledge of LNC is more or less certain than our knowledge of the reality of consciousness, but it is clear that both are known with much greater justification than anything known on the basis of the senses—Phillip Goff

So if feelings and experiences are real and empirical evidence is real, how can a lack of empirical evidence for those feelings be dismissed by science? Or, is it consciousness that’s not real, but an illusion? Logic tells us one, or the other, is not real if they appear in a contradictory state—but both seem to exist. Which is it? Maybe it’s matter (the seemingly obvious) that is not the underlying reality of the universe…

Complete Paper HERE

Metaphysics—a division of philosophy that is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being

Panpsychism—a theory that all nature is psychical or has a psychic aspect and that every physical happening participates in the mental

Where the Evidence Leads

If we draw conclusions by simply following evidence that developed naturally from the vast variety of sources (not just our select cultural few) maybe there is something rather than nothing. Let me give you an example.

Is the entire world crazy, or is it reasonable to accept that billions of humans have spiritual needs, unique perceptions, meditations, visions, dreams, and complex neurologies? Then, add the possibility of the data stream, akashic record, or 3D computer simulation, to those skilled in the meditative arts, or the paranormal tendencies of certain neurologies, the worldwide congruent teachings and vision quests of the shaman, the voodoo acolytes, those historically rich in the metaphysical oneness of reality and non-ordinary reality (non ordinary today) they do not even remotely resemble the god of Abraham or any form of omnipotence. Nor does it even remotely resemble Jesus, unless you want to discount every other human experience by creating your own evidence and forcing a lesser way through power.

Perhaps there is more to the story than the judeo-christo-muslim interpretation of the monarchial boss that has NEVER produced the desired results except—add more faith and fight it out. Even physics can merge with spiritual energy and matters of matter, which appears to be just energy anyway.

Viewing all the evidence with a blank slate I could safely say, that if independent research of all these experiences and possibilities were laid on the table, comparing it all without the coercive bias and threat of hell, it does not equal the god of the Bible or Quran (take your pick) and the nearest thing encapsulating science with all the other available information we would find panpsychism—the closest, non-contradictory reality to every idea but one.

“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us“—Black Elk, Oglala Lakota

“Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that one“—Black Elk

Christianity is not a naturally occurring religion. It is a foreigner to a strange enough land.

What Evidence Would Be Enough?

Which came first, the belief or the believer? Evidence for god would be some universal truth, however, the closest proximities to that are the core shamanistic principles and practices common throughout all corners of the world, developed over the millennia by their utility. Nobody had ever heard of Yahweh outside the near east, which begs a question.

Did your belief in god lead you to accept nature as evidence, or did nature lead you to conclude there is a god? If you believed first in god, you’ve fallen victim to the explainers. How many of you as a child, took a walk in the forest and thought, wow, this pinecone is evidence for god, without first being influenced that direction?

“In our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history. According to panpsychism, in contrast, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. This doesn’t mean that literally everything is conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality—perhaps electrons and quarks[hence earth]have incredibly simple forms of experience”—Scientific American

Most likely consciousness is not a fundamental feature of the universe, but universe is a fundamental feature of consciousness, not the other way around. It is such a fundamental part of the whole, you can’t separately identify matter from consciousness.

The Compromise—Panpsychism /panˈsīˌkizəm/

Life—amalgamating with matter which “was without form and void“—Genesis 1:2. Void of what? Simply without form and without the void. Containing no defined area imbued by life to perpetuate, but animation itself (energy) creates a void between the nucleus and the shell when it permeates matter, enlarging it by millions with a seemingly empty space—expansion, and all kinetic energy wrapped up in galactic collision.

When life happened upon this pale blue dot, or collided with this insignificant speck in a deluge of massive energy, the globe that we know today was without space for life. Without the consciousness of energy, it sat billions of years since last contact—about the size of a basketball in truly space-less matter—containing no life, but by perfect cataclysm aligned with a star. With energy, wave functions, invisible quantum fields, quarks and gluons, fantastically create, then occupy what we perceive as space, expanding them a million times their inert, lifeless size.

Dinosaurs, once tiny specimens of slightly larger flecks of dust before the earth enlarged its area thorough never-ending chains of cosmic collisions, emerged again in their re-birth as expanded fossil-forms to thousands of times their prior size as the power came on for this generation of conscious energy, expanding to life in the void, for life makes space—and a lot of it (by comparison sake) creating a void between the nucleus and shell, massless electrons fill the space by being everywhere simultaneously as pure energy. Prior to this moment, all the fossil fuels on earth would contain in a thimble.

By removing the empty space, the atoms that make a complete human are the size of a small, minute dust particle, with all of current humanity fitting into an area of a common sugar cube.

The rapid expansion and evolution of species when life infiltrates non-life, gradually stabilizes. Environments peak and yaw, decline and drive evolution and migration. During times of calm these changes are slow and hard to see, but what might happen in a lifetime years ago, now takes millennia.

Earlier, un-eradicated men knew of these energies that infiltrate organic and inorganic life, including the rivers and mountains, considered themselves part of the system we have been forged to forget. By being “civilized” we have lost intuition with the connective forces that sustain us.

Is it a coincidence that the sun encompasses 99.86% of all the visible matter in the solar system, while we (and the other planets) get a trickle that amounts to the matter we possess? That the tiny ray that dissipates this direction contains and maintains the energy that is life and sustains it, earth, and that our very bodies thrive because of shared elements of the stars? We capture a mere fraction (1/billionth) of her emissions.

The atoms that make us, from the calcium in our bones to the iron in our blood, brewed in the heart of an exploding star billions of years ago, and now nurtured by her distant cousin with a mere trickle of energy. Just enough to be, and to simultaneously maintain.

The Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, when asked how they knew which varieties of plants to use for what purposes, answered simply, “the plants speak to us“. This exchange of informations takes place at a primitive level. Attuned simply to the frequencies and vibrations of the earth and its secrets—secrets that are now considered quackery, sorcery, witchcraft, and second class to modern medicine, shamanism.

These deeply connected people knew “to be“, was to be in touch with their natural environment, sharing electrons and transferring data with every thing that came in their path. The secrets of life are found in our bare skin and the souls of our tightly bound feet. But we now live in a world of barriers.

pan·psy·chism

/panˈsīˌkizəm = pan/all, psychism/consciousness—all is conscious

1. the doctrine of evidence that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.

We are vastly made of empty space (filled with energy) 99.999% of the human body is a relative illusion of shared energy—same as the rocks, the rivers, and the trees. All as alive in their own element as the next. Finding your roots in the asphalt, concrete, and barriers to nature is a modern challenge—finding those roots is to find the meaning.

It may not be very sophisticated in this day and age to reverence the sun or the earth—but try life without them. Panpsychism is 99.999% more likely to be accurate, than to postulate a god we have no evidence of.

While apologists continue the debate over the word “was” in Genesis 1:2, again we see that science and the shaman produce the answers to their void, which is truly empty of reason or evidence.

“Was” in the Hebrew is a great attempt at hairsplitting scripture to try and align with scientific evidence that the earth is very old.

HERE is an example of the past 3000 years (really) of trying to determine what “was”, was.

Aluna—The Conscious Earth…And Us

The Kogi of Columbia eluded the spaniard invasion, hid in the mountains and for over 500 years have been caretakers of the earth. They understand the Earth to be a living being and see humanity as its “children.” They say that our actions of exploitation, devastation, and plundering resources is weakening “The Great Mother” and leading to our destruction.

The film, Aluna, takes us into the world of the Kogi. At the heart of the tribe’s belief system is “Aluna”—a kind of cosmic consciousness that is the source of all life and intelligence and the mind inside nature too. “Aluna is something that is thinking and has self-knowledge. It’s self-aware and alive. All indigenous people believe this, historically. It’s absolutely universal.”(1)

Coincidence? Consciousness and our self awareness is in the mind of all nature. Self awareness, according to the Kogi is inherited from the self awareness of the earth. The deep, human neural processing ability seems to be the one, over-evolved specimen willing to kill the very thing that insures its ability to thrive, all along with the awareness that we are doing it.

The modern disconnect with nature is problematic. Can we at least try to feel what the Kogi see as plain as the nose on our faces? With all the attempted research on consciousness, maybe we should be looking backward instead of forward.