At Last! A Tenable Theory about How Consciousness Creates the Mind and Brain
In this blog post, I’m going to indulge myself and totally geek out. I’m excited because I have found a plausible answer to a question I’ve had for years. You see, I have never believed the current neuroscience dogma that the brain is primary and creates everything else by its activity. Neuroscientists believe that neuronal activity in the brain creates mind and consciousness. Yet when I look at their data, so many of their experiments make so much more sense if you think about it the other way around: that consciousness creates mind and brain.
Neuroscientists have yet to figure out how the neuronal activity in your brain creates your mind and I believe they never will because it doesn’t happen that way. For many years I have believed that the thought happened first and somehow created the neuronal activity in the brain that was then able to translate that thought into action by the body. The brain is then just an information relay station, which, by the way, is how it is constructed: much like the old telephone switch boards. But I was really no better off than the neuroscientists because I couldn’t figure out how thoughts created that physical response in the brain. But then Amit Goswami PhD (http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Doctor-Physicist-Explains-Integral/dp/1571746552/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426985231&sr=1-1&keywords=quantum+doctor+amit+goswami) gave me the answer. At least a very plausible one.
It has to do with quantum weirdness. A little background. Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of matter, energy and information at very small scales, such as the size of atoms and smaller. At these micro scales, the Universe is very different from what we’re used to at our macro scales. For example, matter and energy can act like both a particle and a wave. Particles are discrete little bundles like billiard balls. The can smack into things, like x-rays hitting the silver particles in a piece of film. While waves can diffract and constructively and destructively interfere with each other like the ripples on a pond when you drop two pebbles at the same time a few feet apart, or like when sound waves wobble as you’re tuning your instrument. It is hard for us to imagine how something can be a wave and a particle at the same time.
How physicists resolved this duality is by realizing that what quality the quantum world reveals of itself depends upon what the scientist is looking for. If you set your experiment up to look for particle-like properties, that is what you see. If you set your experiment up to look for wave-like properties, that is what you see. The observer, by exercising conscious choice, determines what the quantum world serves up. This, by the way, is the same way that Spinoza resolved the mind/body duality a couple of hundred years ago. Goswami maintains that quantum mechanics requires the existence of consciousness: the same consciousness that is the missing piece in medicine.
So once the photon is emitted and before it is detected, it exists as a probability function with many possible outcomes. The very act of measuring the photon collapses the probability function down into the one manifest reality that is measured. Once the function collapses, the other possibilities are lost for that particular event. Now what is curious is that even though quantum weirdnesses only show up at very small scales, since the 1930’s observers have noticed an uncanny correlation between the quantum world and the workings of the human psyche. Fritjof Capra talks about this (http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Physics-Exploration-Parallels-Mysticism/dp/1590308352/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427219753&sr=1-1&keywords=the+tao+of+physics.)
So imagine that you, as pure consciousness, exists as a quantum potential function. As each moment of your life’s experience gets “measured” as your conscious experience, that potential function collapses and becomes you in this very moment. And just as the potential function of a photon can collapse as either a particle or a wave, Goswami does a great job explaining how the human potential function collapses simultaneously into several “structures” in time and space. One is your physical body, another is your energy, another your mind, and another is what Gaswami calls the “supramental”. I see this supramental functioning inside you as your Inner Wisdom, your Buddha Nature, your Christ Consciousness, your Anandamayakosha or whatever you want to call it. The potential function that describes you simultaneously creates, when it collapses instant by instant, all the koshas in the Vedic model of a human being.
So the thought in your mind doesn’t create the electrical activity in your brain any more than the electrical activity in your brain creates your thought. They are both created simultaneously as your potential function collapses into what you experience, or measure, as this present moment. An un-collapsed potential function exists within consciousness and, until it collapses, is outside of time and space. This fits our observations of mind/body/energy interactions where they each seem to be a correlate of the others, changes appearing simultaneously in all three aspects rather than one causing changes in the others. This explains how therapies acting on the energetic can change the body’s biochemistry or therapies acting on the mind can change the body’s biochemistry and vice versa. So this model fits a lot of what I see in my office every day as well as what the ancient Vedic sages observed over thousands of years.
And this idea of human potential consciousness simultaneously collapsing into these aspects explains yet another observation, that being that what you believe seems to play a very central role in both how you perceive and interpret your world and in what you are able to bring forth and manifest in your life. This central role of beliefs can now be explained if you theorize that what you believe influences how your potential function collapses. Just like whether or not you set up one slot or two slots for the photon to pass through determines whether or not you see particle or wave behavior, your own potential function collapses to be in harmony with, to be congruent with, what you already believe. Your beliefs are like the slots. The beliefs that you hold right now set up the experiment of your life, so to speak, to determine what the next moment of your life “measures” as the experience of your conscious self. So changing your beliefs changes how your potential function collapses and allows it to create different moment by moment experiences for you. The Seven Tools of Healing shows you how to find and change any limiting beliefs you may hold that are creating the things in your life you want to change.
I love it when something so simple can explain so many different things and be internally consistent across so many disciplines at the same time.