Consciousness and the Physical World

Table of Contents
Introduction
Interface Theory of Perception
Three Views of Relationship of Physics with Consciousness
Subjective Evidence
Physical and non-physical
Non-dual view of reality

Introduction
Does God exist? This is one of the biggest philosophical questions that
people have debated for thousands of years. However, this question is not well
defined. There is no general agreement on who or what God is. Does he exist
as the creator of the universe? Does he exist as an intervener in the affairs of
humanity? Does he rule the afterlife? These questions have been endlessly
debated and fought over for thousands of years. Some of the world’s major
religions, such as Buddhism, have no need to posit the existence of God.
A more pertinent question is: does consciousness survive physical death?
Equivalently, is our consciousness the product of our brains, or is it channeled
through our brains from somewhere else? This question is well defined, and its
answer has a strong personal implication for each of us. If we subscribe to the
materialist view that consciousness is created by the brain, and that the physical
world is the only world that exists, then from this perspective, consciousness can
not survive physical death.
However, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary, described below under the
heading “subjective phenomena”. If true, then consciousness survives physical
death. This implies many things: 1) consciousness is not created by the brain,
2) consciousness is not a result of quantum phenomena, zero-point energy, or
any other physical system, 3) the brain is more of a transmitter of consciousness
rather than a creator of consciousness, 4) our physical world is not a closed
system, so that 5) our physical world is not predetermined by initial conditions,
and 6) there is a much vaster, richer reality that transcends the physical world.
Inherent in the nature of consciousness itself is awareness, and qualities such as
compassion and love, that can not be reduced to a mathematical equation.
These results have profound implications for our view of the world and
what reality is. To start with, it provides a limitation on physics, neuroscience,
and medicine. Physics can no longer claim to be a “theory of everything”, since
it would be unable to explain consciousness. This is a very bold assertion – that
future advances in physics would never be able to explain how awareness is
created. How can this claim be made?

Interface Theory of Perception

The reality we perceive is not as real as we may think. This becomes more
obvious when we look at the world view of particular animals. For example, in
1981 male Australian jewel beetles were found trying to mate with discarded beer
bottles. These beer bottles were the same color as females, and had dimpled
glass that reflected light the same way as the tiny bumps on the female beetles’
forewings. The males kept trying to mate with the bottles until they were
exhausted, or eaten by ants. This is an example of what’s called an evolutionary
trap - an animal’s perception is confused by an artificial object and so the animal
behaves inappropriately. Another example are baby sea turtles, which when
born follow the lights of nearby hotels instead of following the light of the moon
into the sea. A third example are hummingbirds, which tried to feed on red
electrical insulators, but got electrocuted instead. These examples were fixed
when the beer bottles were made without the dimpled glass, when hotel lights
were turned off while baby turtles were hatching from their eggs, and when the
electrical insulators were manufactured in a different color.
In the interface theory of perception (D. Hoffman, M. Singh, and C. Prakash,
Psychon Bull Rev (2015) 22: 1480, See
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c140/123e67f184e10e1e5cfa95e08d2fee730c50
.pdf), the perceptions of an organism are considered the “user interface” between
that organism and the world. Our human perceptions show separate objects
interacting in a three-dimensional world. These objects include plants, animals,
atoms and galaxies. These perceptions have enabled us to survive and thrive as
a species. What Hoffman et. al. have proven mathematically is that world
perceptions oriented towards fitness are evolutionarily favored over world
perceptions oriented to truth. In the case of the Australian jewel beetle, the male
beetle’s perceptions could not distinguish the difference between a beer bottle
and a female. Before beer bottles entered their world, their perceptions worked
and were fitted for the environment. Unfortunately for them, their perceptions did
not reveal the truth of what they were doing.
An example of an artificial interface is the computer desktop. The reality of a
computer, with its billions of transistors and circuits, would be unintelligible to us.
Instead, the computer shows us a screen with icons that stand for programs or
data, and by manipulating these icons, we can do useful work. A hypothetical
being living on the computer screen would believe the fundamental particles to
be pixels, which come in three colors, red, blue and green. A more realistic view
of the computer would not be accessible to such a being, and would not be
useful to us. So what would a more real version of reality look like to us?
Three views of consciousness
There are many theories of what consciousness is or where it comes from,
and these theories can be divided into three main points of view: the materialist
view, the quantum view, and the non-physical view.
In the Materialist View, sometimes called scientism, or scientific materialism,
consciousness naturally arises from the organization of the brain. This is the
predominant view among scientists and doctors. In this view, the brain
generates consciousness through its complexity, so that consciousness can best
be understood through neuroscience.

In the Quantum View, consciousness is a fundamental property of the

physical world, and will eventually be explained by a theory of everything, the
goal of physics. Consciousness is often linked to quantum mechanics, because
of its weirdness and non-local nature. In this view, the brain generates
consciousness not from its organization, but from its physical properties. In
particular, the consciousness it generates is non-locally connected to more than
just the physical body, and consciousness can best be understood through
physics.

In the Non-physical View, consciousness is more fundamental than the

physical world, and does not need a brain to exist. This is the view of spiritual
teachers. In this view, the brain is a receiver of consciousness, analogous to
how a radio receives information from outside itself and uses that information to
generate speech and music. In this view, consciousness can best be understood
from an enlightened perspective that requires a change in consciousness itself.

Materialist View
Democritus in ancient Greece (460-370 B.C.) believed that everything could
be explained by natural laws, with no need of a god or supernatural realm. This
point of view is called materialism.

Materialism in the West strengthened as a result of the Catholic Church’s

insistence on its doctrine, persecuting all those who disagreed. This doctrine
applied not only to God and the world of spirit, but also to the physical world. In
February 1616, the notion that the sun was the center of the solar system was
deemed "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it
explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture." In 1633,
Galileo Galilei was found “vehemently suspect of heresy” for holding the view
that the sun is the center of the universe, and that the Earth moves around the
sun. It wasn’t until 1822 that the Catholic Church allowed the printing of
heliocentric books, despite strong evidence for its truth, and it wasn’t until 1979
that the Church officially declared that Galileo was right after all!
 If the church was demonstrably wrong about the material world, could it be
trusted with the world of God and consciousness? Where was the evidence for
the existence of the God of the Bible? As science developed, the need for a God
to run the world became less and less. Today the material world seems to
explain itself. Stephen Hawking, the renowned physicist, came up with a model
on how the universe could come into being spontaneously, without the need of a
creator God (see “The Grand Design”, by S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow, 2010).

As physics developed in the 19th century, what we considered the physical

world was expanded to include electric and magnetic fields. In the 20th century,
matter was shown to consist of quantum fields dancing around according to the
equations of quantum physics. Materialism now includes quantum wave
functions, space-time itself, and poorly-understood phenomena such as dark
matter and dark energy. These are all physical quantities that are subject to the
laws of physics.

In the materialist view, only physical reality exists. Consciousness is

generated by the complexity of the brain, and upon physical death it ceases to
exist. Psychic phenomena, miracles, God, and near death experiences are not
real. Freud in 1907 called religion a “universal obsessional neurosis”.

In this view, consciousness emerges out of the interactions of the billions of

neurons in our brains, and may arise in any similarly complex system. Thus the
possibility exists that consciousness may arise in advanced computers. This
point of view was illustrated in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” which came
out in 1968. In this movie, a computer named Hal was sentient, and eventually
began to disobey commands from the astronauts. Since our computers are
getting more and more complex, eventually they will surpass the complexity of a
human brain, and will at that point become sentient. In our galaxy alone, there
are 100 billion stars, most of which have planets. Some fraction of those planets
will have life, and some fraction of those will develop technological capabilities.
Many of them could exist for millions of years, and would have far superior
technologies. Could we all be simulations in one of their advanced computers?
Elon Musk has said “he thinks there's a "one in billions" chance that we're not
living in a computer simulation right now”. One version of this view are the Matrix
movies, starting in 1999, in which our world is just a virtual reality created by
machines in order to enslave us.

Many scientists believe in both God and materialism, and compartmentalize

these views to avoid confronting the contradictions between them. When at
work, they do their research with the assumption that everything can be
explained by natural processes. When in church, they accept the reality of God
and the doctrines of whatever church they belong to.

Quantum View
 Another form of materialism developed into what I call the Quantum View.
John von Neumann in 1932, and Eugene Wigner in 1967, suggested that
consciousness could collapse the wave functions of quantum mechanics - the
Von Neumann – Wigner Interpretation. In 1975, Fritjof Capra published “The Tao
of Physics”, which laid out numerous parallels between quantum mechanics and
Eastern spirituality. Roger Penrose, in his book “The Emperor’s New Mind”,
1989, proposed a model in which consciousness results from the collapse of
wave functions in the microtubules of the brain. In his model, wave functions
collapse due to the effects of quantum gravity. Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who
walked on the moon in Apollo 14, wrote that “The basis of subjective experience
is rooted in the quantum attribute of nature called non-locality. … telepathy,
clairvoyance seem to be easily explained by means of the nonlocal quantum
hologram”. The quantum view posits that either consciousness is the result of
quantum processes in some way, or that both consciousness and the physical
world arise from some fundamental quantum field. Furthermore, the non-locality
of quantum mechanics explains the non-locality of psychic phenomena.
However, the quantum view is still a materialistic view, since quantum processes
are still part of the physical world.

Non-physical view
In the non-physical view, consciousness is more fundamental than the
physical world, which includes quantum mechanics. In this view, our
consciousness exists before birth and after death. Consciousness does not need
a physical brain to exist, but can reside in a reality that is not physical.
Furthermore, only awareness can investigate awareness. Many movies are
based on this view, including “What Dreams May Come”, a 1998 movie starring
Robbin Williams, and “Heaven Can Wait”, a 1978 movie starring Warren Beatty.

Quantum Mechanics
Why have so many authors tried to link consciousness and spirituality with
quantum mechanics? To better understand their arguments, we will digress into
a brief description of quantum mechanics. Feel free to skip this section if it gets
too technical!

In the 17th century, Isaac Newton showed that light consists of waves that can
be diffracted and produce interference patterns. In the 19th century, Maxwell
wrote down the equations of electromagnetism that provided a mathematical
description of the wave nature of light, explaining diffraction and interference
patterns. In 1905, Albert Einstein wrote a paper that showed that light comes in
discrete packages of energy called photons. This paper was based on the
photoelectric effect: when light is shined on a piece of metal, energetic electrons
are ejected, and the energy of these ejected electrons depend on the frequency
or wavelength of the light, but not the intensity of the light. Einstein explained
this by postulating that all light comes in packets of energy called photons, and
the energy of each photon is equal to its frequency times a constant called
Planck’s constant, h = 6x10-34 erg-sec. Thus light could behave both as a wave
and a particle.
DeBroglie postulated in 1924 that not only does light act as both a wave and a
particle, but even particles such as electrons can also act as both waves and
particles. The waves of electrons, called DeBroglie waves, have a wavelength
given by  = h/mv, where h is Planck’s constant, as before, and mv is the mass
times the velocity of the particle – its momentum. In 1925, Erwin Schrödinger
discovered the equation, now called the Schrödinger equation, that describes
these matter waves. When the Schrödinger equation was solved for the
hydrogen atom, it explained in great detail the observed spectrum of light emitted
by hydrogen – a triumph for quantum theory. To date, quantum mechanics is an
incredibly successful theory – it has been verified again and again, and no
experiment has ever contradicted quantum theory’s predictions.
In quantum mechanics, the wave nature of an electron, or any particle, is
described by what’s called a wave function, which basically describes the
probability of where the particle may be, or how fast it’s moving. For example, in
a hydrogen atom, the wave function of the electron that orbits the nucleus is
spherically symmetric, and has its highest value closest to the nucleus and gets
smaller the further it gets from the nucleus. Schrodinger’s equation gives a way
to compute what that wave function is, and how it changes in time. If the electron
is in an excited state, with more energy, then its wave function is different. When
the electron falls from a high-energy state to a lower energy state, its wave
function changes in a discrete way, and it emits a photon whose energy equals
the energy difference between the two states. The wave function of the photon
then expands through space until it gets absorbed.
For example, when an atom at the surface of the sun emits a photon, the
wave function of that photon expands as it travels through space at the speed of
light, and by the time the photon reaches the earth, its wave function is millions of
miles wide. The photon can appear anywhere within that millions-of-miles wide
window. However, when the photon is detected on earth, say by someone
seeing a flash of light as it enters their eye, the wave function of that photon
collapses instantaneously to a point on that person’s retina. This collapse of the
wave function does not obey the Schrödinger equation, but instead happens in a
probabilistic way. The photon randomly appears at some point, and the
probability of the photon appearing at that point is proportional to the square of
the value of the wave function at that point. This introduces an element of
randomness within quantum mechanics. In general, quantum mechanics can
only predict probabilities of what may happen.

Uncertainty principle and zero-point energy

Everything we could ever know about a particular particle is given by its wave
function. The wave function will give the probability of finding it at a given point,
and also will give the probability of finding it moving at a certain speed. It turns
out that the amount of uncertainty of its position, times the amount of uncertainty
of its momentum (its speed times its mass), must be greater than or equal to
Planck’s constant divided by 2 pi. This is called the uncertainty principle. The
more accurately we know where an electron is, the less we know how fast it’s
moving. Any particle confined to a small region, such as an electron inside an
atom, must have some momentum given by the uncertainty principle. Thus in
quantum mechanics, particles can never be at rest. In the lowest energy state, a
particle still moves around, and this motion is called zero-point energy. Because
the three quarks inside a proton are confined to a small volume, they must move
around at speeds close to the speed of light.
There is a similar uncertainty principle for electric and magnetic fields. The
laws of quantum mechanics require that electric and magnetic fields can never
both be zero everywhere inside any volume. Thus what we call a vacuum must
contain electric and magnetic fields that fluctuate all the time. These fluctuations
of the electric and magnetic fields are called the zero-point energy, and it
pervades all space.
In the relativistic version of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle also
applies to the number of particles inside a given volume. Pairs of electrons and
their anti-particles, positrons, appear and disappear all the time. These are
called virtual particles, since they appear briefly and then disappear, and they are
also part of the zero-point energy that pervades all space.
This zero-point energy is very real. If two parallel conducting plates are
brought together with a small gap between them, then the electric fields of the
zero-point energy between the plates are constrained to go to zero at each of the
plates. This constraint reduces the total zero-point field allowed to be there, so
on average there is less energy between the plates than outside them. This
results in a force that pulls the plates together: the Casmir effect.
The zero-point energy can also be thought of as a source of spontaneous
motion and randomness. For example, each electron feels the random tugs of
the zero-point energy, so its position and motion fluctuate in random ways.

Subjective phenomena
Modern science is silent about consciousness and how it’s produced. Most
scientists believe that it’s produced somehow by the brain, and that as we
understand the functioning of the brain better, we will eventually understand how
it produces awareness. However, there are several lines of subjective
phenomena that strongly suggest that consciousness is not produced by the
brain – that the brain is more like a radio receiver that can tune into a pre-existing
awareness, rather than producing that awareness directly. Here I will present
several lines of evidence: remote viewing, reincarnation, near-death experiences,
the experiences of professional ghost hunters, and stories of intervening spirits.
These will each be explored in turn.
Remote Viewing
In a typical remote viewing session, the experimenter choses two people, a
sender and a receiver. The receiver sits in a room with no outside view, and is
shielded from all outside electromagnetic signals such as radio waves. The
sender opens a sealed envelope which contains a destination, and drives to that
designated place. He/she gazes at what’s there, mentally trying to send an
impression to the receiver. The receiver then chooses one of four pictures
provided that best matches any impression received. From chance alone, we
would expect a 25% success rate. Many labs across the world have done this,
and the success rate is closer to 33%. Four examples: the Psychophysical
Research Lab in Princeton, New Jersey, had a success rate of 32% in 329
sessions. The University of Amsterdam had a success rate of 37% in 124
sessions. The University of Edinburgh had a success rate of 33% in 97
sessions, and the Institute for Parapsychology in North Carolina had a success
rate of 33% in 100 sessions (see
http://www.academia.edu/9540484/Through_Time_and_Space_The_Evidence_f
or_Remote_Viewing).
The remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute, from 1973 to 1988,
and at Science Applications International Corporation, from 1990 – 1995,
together had 26,000 trials in 154 experiments over the years. The results were
very significant, with a chance result of only 1 in 1020. Jessica Utts, a professor
of statistics at U.C. Davis, in “An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic
Functioning” (1995), wrote “It is clear to this author that anomalous cognition is
possible and has been demonstrated. This conclusion is not based on belief, but
rather on commonly accepted scientific criteria. The phenomena has been
replicated in a number of forms across laboratories and cultures.” (see
http://www.academia.edu/9540484/Through_Time_and_Space_The_Evidence_f
or_Remote_Viewing)
The U.S. Government operated a remote viewing program in the Stargate
program, with Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, Christopher Green, Pat Price and
others. They found a downed Russian aircraft in North Africa, located a
kidnapped American general in Northern Italy, discovered a hidden Soviet
weapons factory in Siberia, described the construction of a top-secret Soviet
submarine, and predicted the failure of a Chinese atomic bomb test three days
before the test. (A fascinating account of all this is in “ESP Wars East & West” by
E. May, V. Rubel and L. Auerbach, 2014)
Can this be explained by the correlations of quantum mechanics? Even
though the correlations of entangled particles appear instantaneously, these
correlations can’t be used to send Information faster than the speed of light.
Because there’s no acceptable physical model for psychic phenomena, most
scientists don’t believe that psychic phenomena is possible.

Reincarnation
 There are many accounts of children who apparently recall previous lives. Ian
Stevenson of the University of Virginia has documented and published many of
these accounts (see https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/who-we-are/dr-
ian-stevenson/). Typically, a young child 3 to 5 years old will start talking about a
previous lifetime, naming his former self and close relatives, stating where he
lived and how he died. One of the most famous cases is that of Shanti Devi,
1926-1987 (see https://www.carolbowman.com/dr-ian-stevenson/case-shanti-
devi/). As soon as she could talk, she talked about a previous lifetime as Lugdi
Bai, who was born in a nearby village in 1902. Lugdi married Kedernath Chaube,
and died 10 days after her child was born in 1925. Shanti remembered many
details of Lugdi’s life, such as who had affairs with whom and where the money
was buried. When she was nine years old, Shanti finally met her previous
husband Kedernath, and he became convinced she was the reincarnation of
Lugdi. What convinced him was that Lugdi had arthritis, and this nine-year-old
girl described in detail how their sexual relations were modified to accommodate
Lugdi’s arthritis. No one else could possibly have known about this. Mahatma
Ghandi put together a commission of 15 people who took Shanti to Lugdi’s
village, and verified that Shanti knew many details of Lugdi’s life there, including
words of the local dialect and many family secrets.
Another account is that of Titu Singh (1983-), who remembered being shot
in the head as Suresh Verma. Titu met his wife from that former life, and
convinced her that he was Suresh when he remembered giving her sweets on a
particular outing. Titu identified the man who killed him in his previous life, and
the man confessed his crime to the police when they questioned him.
Amazingly, Titu’s head has two birthmarks that correspond to the entrance and
exit bullet wounds to Suresh’s head! (see
http://www.iisis.net/index.php?page=suresh-verma-titu-singh-reincarnation-past-
life-physical-resemblance-birthmarks&hl=en_US)

Near Death Experiences

A near death experience is defined as when someone, near death or in a
coma, experiences visiting a non-physical place, often calling it the place that the
soul travels to after death. One of the most famous near death experiences
occurred to Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, who was in a meningitis coma for
a week in November 2008 (see http://ebenalexander.com/). His cortex was flat-
lined. Nevertheless, he recalled being escorted around a world of extraordinary
beauty by a woman he didn’t recognize. He met an all-loving, all-powerful deity
that we could call God. He was told “you are loved, deeply cherished, forever.
There is nothing you have to fear.” Some years later, he made contact with his
biological family – he had been adopted when he was a few weeks old. He
found he had a biological sister who had died years before, and when he saw a
picture of her, he realized she was the woman who escorted him around heaven!
Before his near death experience, he was a strict materialist who didn’t believe in
God. Afterwards, he believes in God and the eternity of our souls – “it’s the only
thing that makes sense”.
Ghost stories
There are many stories of ghosts that haunt specific locations. One famous
account is of Lois of Livermore (see “Hauntings and Poltergeists: A Ghost
Hunter’s Guide” by L. Auerbach, 2005). A family moved into a recently purchase
house, and everyone in the family saw a ghost who would walk through the
house, wave, and then disappear. The 12-year old son, Chris, was able to talk
with her, and she told him her name was Lois, and she used to live in that house.
The family contacted Loyd Auerbach, a ghost hunter, who drove down to
Livermore to visit them. On the way, he had trouble with his car, and talked with
his assistants about buying a new car. When he got to the house, Chris was
able to translate Lois’s words to Loyd. Lois told Loyd that she knew he would be
getting a new car. When asked how she knew that, she replied that she knew he
was coming, and was afraid he would be bringing machines like those used in
the movie “Ghostbusters”, so she travelled to him and listened in as he drove.
Lois described how she lived in that house, and one day went to the hospital and
died there. She then came back to the house. One question was why Chris
would see her in so many ages and outfits. She replied, “I’m just a ball of
energy, like those aliens on Star Trek!” Her story was verified by a living relative
who had never spoken with Chris or his family. Since then, Chris’s children see
and talk with Lois when they visit their grandparents.

Intervening spirits
William Bird (1891-1984) was a journalist whose life was saved by his dead
brother during World War I. He belonged to the 42nd Battalion of the Canadian
Black Watch, stationed near Vimy Ridge. One night he was awakened by two
hands on his back. He looked up to see his brother Steve, who had been killed
two years before. Steve never talked, but motioned for William to follow. He led
William out of the trench, onto no man’s land, and into a crater. The spirit
disappeared, and William fell asleep in that crater. When he woke up, he
returned to the bunker he had been in before, only to find that a shell had killed
everyone in the bunker after he had left. Had he not been woken up by his
brother Steve, he would have been killed as well (see “Ghosts Have Warm
Hands” by W. Bird, 1997).
My own grandfather was an electrician. A few days after he died in 1972, my
grandmother heard a noise. The chain on a lamp that hadn’t been working was
moving around. After awhile, the lamp started working again. When our family
heard this, we looked at each other and acknowledged that our grandfather had
come back to fix that lamp.
When I give talks about these intervening spirits and ask the audience for
their own stories, about one third have similar stories to tell.

Non-physical view
 These subjective phenomena strongly support the non-physical view, that our
consciousness is not based on physical reality. The materialist view can’t
acknowledge the reality of psychic phenomena, reincarnation, near-death
experiences, ghosts, or intervening spirits. If any of these exist, then the
materialist view can’t be correct. The quantum view can accommodate
reincarnation if we posit that memories can be stored somehow in quantum
fields, such as the zero-point energy that pervades all space, and that we can
sometimes pick up these stored memories. However, both the materialist and
quantum views have trouble explaining how disembodied spirits can exist. In the
case of near-death experiences, ghosts, and intervening spirits, there is
communication with disembodied spirits - conscious beings that have no physical
bodies. Only the non-physical view can accommodate communication with
discarnate spirits. The non-physical view can also help explain the teachings of
spiritual schools, mediums, channeling of spirits, and indigenous practices such
as ancestral worship and shamanism.

The distinction between physical and non-physical

This is a good place to emphasize the distinction between physical and non-
physical. By physical, I mean anything that is part of our physical reality. It can
be measured quantitatively and obeys the laws of physics. Examples of what is
physical includes our physical bodies, electricity, magnetism, light, gravity,
quarks, the extra dimensions of string theory, dark matter, dark energy, black
holes, quantum wave functions, and zero-point energy.
Non-physical means beyond space and time, not quantifiable, and does not
obey the laws of physics. Examples of what is non-physical includes
consciousness, ghosts and spirits, the Being of Light often seen in near-death
experiences, the upper and lower worlds of shamanism, subtle energies like chi,
prana, and Reiki, and boundless presence.
Our body’s fear response, which includes adrenaline and the activation of the
sympathetic nervous system, is physical. Our experience of the fear is non-
physical.

Non-dual awareness unites the physical and non-physical

The materialist view tries to include consciousness as an epiphenomenon.
But it ignores all conscious phenomena except for ego activity.
The quantum view sees consciousness as co-emerging with the physical
world. Many people are hopeful that new discoveries in science will unify
consciousness and the spiritual world with the physical world. However, I don’t
believe this is possible, as science only deals with the physical world.
The non-physical view sees the physical world as emerging out of
consciousness. However, ordinary consciousness does not perceive the unity of
the physical with the non-physical. The experience of this unity requires a
change of consciousness to non-dual awareness. Non-dual awareness is the
awareness of this unity, and subjectively feels very different than ordinary
awareness. So how can we change our consciousness to non-dual awareness?

Technology of consciousness
Traditionally, there are many ways to achieve non-dual awareness. These
include meditation, inquiry, drumming, dancing, entheogens, breathwork, prayer,
fasting, lucid dreaming, and shamanism.

Meditation
Perhaps the simplest technology of consciousness is meditation. One of the
most important effects of meditation is the quieting of the mind. This allows the
dissolving of the ego, with all of its defense mechanisms. Then more subtle
realms of awareness become visible, like the stars becoming visible as the sun
sets.

Inquiry
Another technology of consciousness is the technique of inquiry. Here inquiry
is not a mental process of following ideas, it’s the following the thread of a feeling
or sensation. For example, if we notice we’re angry at someone, or at some
situation, we allow ourselves to fully feel the anger, to the point where it’s a
strong sensation in our body. If we dis-identify from the trigger, we may notice
that the anger has a sense of expansion and strength in it. This sensation of
expansion and strength is a deeper layer than the anger itself, and represents
the transformation of anger into an aspect of awareness called the Red Essence.
Drumming
A third technology of consciousness is the use of drumming to stop the mind,
and to carry the consciousness to other realms. This is a common shamanic
technique used around the world. In Scandinavia, the church made drumming
illegal in an attempt to disrupt shamanic practices.
Dancing
Some cultures use dancing as a way to cultivate non-dual awareness. Two
examples of this are the whirling dervishes in the Sufi tradition, and the Ghost
dance of the American Lakota.

Entheogens
Many indigenous cultures use entheogens: psychoactive plants that change
the quality of our awareness. In the Amazon basin, native tribes use Ayahuasca,
which combines MAO inhibitors from the ayahuasca vine with DMT from the
chacruna plant to produce a potent brew. In the Mexican desert, the indigenous
people eat psilocybin mushrooms to attain altered states. In the Peruvian
highlands, they use San Pedro cactus, which contains mescaline. In the
southwest part of the United States, the native Americans use peyote, which also
contains mescaline.

Non-dual view
What is the non-dual view? It is the realization that we are not our physical
bodies, or our emotions, or our thoughts. We are conscious awareness itself.
This conscious awareness does not feel separate, but feels part of an infinite
consciousness that transcends space and time. This may be experienced as an
oceanic feeling of oneness that embraces both the physical and the non-
physical. This may also be experienced as a vast emptiness that is the source of
all being. Everything, including our awareness, is an expression of this source.
The direct experience that “I” am this emptiness is called self-realization, and we
can talk and act as an expression of this source.
In this non-dual view, consciousness is inherently non-local. We are all part
of a Cosmic Unity, which brings all space and all time together. This provides a
natural way to allow for psychic phenomena.
What can we gain from a non-dual perspective? It shows us the true reality
beneath our perceptual world, what’s underlying our “user interface”. It leads to
self-discovery and wholeness – Who am I? What am I? It has the potential to
heal our emotional wounds, allowing us to experience joy and bliss. It allows us
to connect with our internal guidance, and to connect to nature in a profound
way.

Explore the Great Mystery

Our Earth is an insignificant speck in a vast universe, with around 1023
inhabitable planets within our cosmic horizon, about 13.8 billion light years away.
Nevertheless, in the infinitely larger non-physical reality, as conscious beings we
are very special: we are all part of the Divine Reality. Ultimately, we can only
explore these worlds through our own subjective experience. Follow your heart!