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“It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.”
– Malcolm Forbes (an American entrepreneur)You are one of those who have a biphasic sleep pattern. Basically, this means that you sleep around four hours, wake, then sleep again.
There is a substantial body of scientific opinion that this is in fact the natural human sleep pattern. If you research it, one of the things you will find is that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was so widely accepted in Europe that in cities such as Paris and London, shops and tea-houses would open for business for a couple of hours during the night. People would get up, dress, and go out for a walk and to meet others, then go back to bed.
When I reached my sixties, I found my monophasic sleep pattern turning into biphasic. When I wake between three and four a.m., I don't dress, but I get up, make myself a hot drink, perhaps look at the news channels, or go out into the garden in mild weather. After about 45 minutes, I go back to bed, and sleep well for the rest of the night.
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"Many neuroscientists want to do just that. But Vincent and I belong to a minority—nonmaterialist neuroscientists. Most scientists today are materialists who believe that the physical world is the only reality. Absolutely everything else—including thought, feeling, mind, and will—can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena, leaving no room for the possibility that religious and spiritual experiences are anything but illusions. Materialists are like Charles Dickens’s character Ebeneezer Scrooge who dismisses his experience of Marley’s ghost as merely “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”"
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Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells – known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections.
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Whether we think of ourselves as religious or not, lots of people experience moments in life that can be considered spiritual – where we feel a greater sense of meaningfulness, serenity, or connection with the world around us.
NEAREST IS COSMIC AWE - MEDITATIVE EGO DISSOLN
when the spiritual experiences were recalled, participants exhibited similarly reduced patterns of activity in the left inferior parietal lobe (IPL), which is involved in awareness of self and others, as well as reduced activity in the medial thalamus and caudate, regions associated with sensory and emotional processing.
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HPOC
How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?
You can’t look inside someone’s head and see their feelings and experiences. If we were just going off what we can observe from a third-person perspective, we would have no grounds for postulating consciousness at all.
So how can science ever explain it? When we are dealing with the data of observation, we can do experiments to test whether what we observe matches what the theory predicts. But when we are dealing with the unobservable data of consciousness, this methodology breaks down.
GALILEOS ERROR
Before the “father of modern science” Galileo Galilei, scientists believed that the physical world was filled with qualities, such as colours and smells. But Galileo wanted a purely quantitative science of the physical world, and he therefore proposed that these qualities were not really in the physical world but in consciousness, which he stipulated was outside of the domain of science.
This worldview forms the backdrop of science to this day. And so long as we work within it, the best we can do is to establish correlations between the quantitative brain processes we can see and the qualitative experiences that we can’t, with no way of explaining why they go together.
MIND IS MATTER
1920s by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington. Their starting point was that physical science doesn’t really tell us what matter is.
physics is confined to telling us about the behaviour of matter. For example, matter has mass and charge, properties which are entirely characterised in terms of behaviour – attraction, repulsion and resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us nothing about what philosophers like to call “the intrinsic nature of matter”, how matter is in and of itself.
huge hole in our scientific world view – physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.
result is a type of “panpsychism” – an ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. But the “new wave” of panpsychism lacks the mystical connotations of previous forms of the view. There is only matter – nothing spiritual or supernatural – but matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “from the outside”, in terms of its behaviour, but matter “from the inside” is constituted of forms of consciousness.
means that mind is matter, and that even elementary particles exhibit incredibly basic forms of consciousness. Before you write that off, consider this. Consciousness can vary in complexity. We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences of a horse are much less complex than those of a human being, and that the conscious experiences of a rabbit are less sophisticated than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler, there may be a point where consciousness suddenly switches off – but it’s also possible that it just fades but never disappears completely, meaning even an electron has a tiny element of consciousness.
panpsychism is the simplest theory of how consciousness fits in to our scientific story.
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“If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.” ~ Hermes Trismegistus.
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We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance. - Harrison Ford
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What if consciousness is not something special that the brain does but instead is a quality inherent to all matter? It is a theory known as panpsychism
In our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence it exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history. According to panpsychism, 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—have incredibly simple forms of experience, and the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from the experience of the brain’s most basic parts.
clarify that by “consciousness,” I don’t mean self-awareness or the capacity to reflect on one’s own existence. I simply mean “experience”: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience.
BEHAVIOUR NOT INTRINSIC NATURE
Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is in and of itself.
Physical science describes matter from the outside in terms of its behavior. But matter from the “inside”—that is, in terms of its intrinsic nature—is constituted of forms of consciousness.
You can’t look inside an electron to see whether or not it is conscious, just as you can’t look inside someone’s head and see their feelings and experiences. We know that consciousness exists only because we are conscious.
Neuroscientists correlate certain kinds of brain activity with certain kinds of experience. We now know which kinds of brain activity are associated with feelings of hunger, pleasure, pain, and so on. This is really important information, but what we ultimately want from a science of consciousness is an explanation of those correlations. Why is a particular feeling correlated with a particular pattern of brain activity? As soon as you start to answer this question, you move beyond what can be, strictly speaking, tested, simply because consciousness is unobservable. We have to turn to philosophy.
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A very important reason why man should try to realise God is that it is the only way to get out of the miseries of the cycle of birth and death. There is no second solution. Mark it carefully. There is no second solution. There is no alternative to realising God if you want to escape the miseries you are subject to. The alternative to God-realisation is to suffer the miseries of mundane existence. If you choose to suffer that, well, you are free to do so. But if you want to escape that, there is only one way out, and that is the spiritual way, the way of Sadhana, of Tapasya, of Abhyasa and Vairagya.
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