It’s featured in the current Scientific American. So it’s finally mainstream, at least scientifically.
We first raised the universal consciousness topic on this page 50 years ago, in the mid-70s. It’s a familiar subplot in Eastern metaphysics. After all, beyond humans and our cat and dog buddies manifesting awareness, we suspect simpler forms of life like caterpillars are conscious too. Mightn’t plants perceive the Sun’s warmth? Why should consciousness stop anywhere?
No one knows. But those who think it must be limited to complex brains might be reminded that the origin of consciousness is mysterious. No material or energy, including brain tissue and electricity, appears causally linked with the subjective feeling of experience. We find neurons to be associated with consciousness but not with its origination. Maybe brains receive, manipulate and guide awareness in a way optimally suited to each organism — but with an overarching consciousness being a fundamental property of the universe.
What made such ideas first reach the science community were the quantum theory (QT) discoveries of the 1920’s. QT’s equations and experimental confirmations establish non-logical effects such as EPR correlations, where an object like an electron or photon assumes specific properties upon being observed, and a sister particle simultaneously knows this is happening even if it’s far away. Such “communications and responses” occurring instantaneously prove non-locality, a newly recognized physics reality that defies common sense. No wonder Einstein hated the whole thing.
After all, if the town hall flag starts waving, we can assume the wind’s acting on it. It will not flutter simply because some aliens are throwing a wild party in Sagittarius. An object must be touched in order to be influenced. Or at least jostled by some force field such as magnetism, or hit by some signal such as light. Yet the 1920’s experiments showed that an electron would “respond” to the configuration of a distant electron even when they were so greatly separated that not even light-speed particles could arrive to make contact. This is called non-locality. It violates classical physics and contradicts logic.
We now know that nonlocality is a fact of nature. So to make peace with this new and unexpected aspect of the universe, we must accept that the cosmos is somehow a single essence, an interconnected Being or Entity rather than the sum of its parts.
After that first logical All-is-One takeaway, it’s no great leap that our consciousness is basic to reality. And not just “our” consciousness, since we now know that we and everything else manifests a mind/nature correlativeness, since many experiments show tiny physical objects changing their properties solely according to what we know in our minds. Anyway, though we have no scientific proof, nor can any exist, it’s not a huge stretch to suspect that the Whole Thing manifests awareness.
Might electrons, those tiny concentrations of energy that each seethes with 500,000 electron volts, dimly perceive stuff? Might awareness be as universally fundamental as electromagnetism?
Here’s where we leave science to say that an “all-pervading consciousness whose eternal oneness can be experienced by anyone” lies at the very core of Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism. That allegedly ecstatic experience, variously called “awakening,” “enlightenment,” “Satori,” and “cosmic consciousness,” is said to fully reveal the nature of existence. Heck, why be coy? One of my family members once spontaneously experienced this without using psychedelic substances, and the purportedly ecstatic revelation was later supported by their former professor, who said that their demeanor radically altered overnight, and they were serenely blissful for three weeks.
Okay, this is a science page so we’ll stick with the quantum support, which, while not proving the cosmos to be conscious, implies it. Or, at minimum, gives a looser leash to those who embrace an Eastern All-Is-One outlook. And even perhaps accommodates the possibility of a universal Intelligence at least as a formless, non-anthropomorphic principle, with beyond-time universal connectivity now inarguably established.
See the current Scientific American for countless interpretations of this, as offered by researchers during last month’s Marist college conference in Poughkeepsie.
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