This is the question that sparked this whole exploration in my life and the creation of this web site. The word “consciousness” is being thrown around in the world in very disturbing ways…conscious capitalism…isn’t that an oxymoron? conscious marketing…I get better at convincing you to buy something you don’t really need? Or the one that took the prize, at a conference as I browsed through their store, someone was selling conscious socks…does putting them on make me enlightened?
What this sparked in me has been an inquiry, asking other people “What does the word consciousness mean to you?” I travel in a pretty wide circle, from the mainstream world of everyday life to the magical thinking world of new age communities. It’s funny how many people had never really thought about the meaning of the word and the spectrum of answers I got. Some think of it as a state of being. Those with a scientific bent think of it as an emergent property of the brain. Those who are more new age thinkers described it a set of qualities, most of them subjective. Many hadn’t given it any thought at all. What I discovered, it seems to be something everyone thinks they understand, yet there is no agreement on what it means.
From a philosophical perspective there are three predominate theories, materialism, dualism and panpsychism. Each has something to offer and I want to start from a clean slate. This is what Spirence is about, a cosmology which places consciousness as fundamental. Some of the current traditions hold this perspective, yet don’t start with it being fundamental. They don’t include our current scientific understanding and cosmology. I often hear it mentioned with reference to Quantum Mechanics, and the collapse of the wave function. What about The Big Bang? Where does it fit within the greater cosmos? Remember, much of what is described as The Big Bang Theory is just that, a theory. What I want to is develop a topology which encompasses mathematics, physics, psychology and spirituality, with consciousness at its root.
A Universe of Purpose
Before we can even start I want to offer clarity about what I even mean by this statement. Let’s dissect it, what is the Universe? Some think of it strictly from an astronomical perspective. Others think of it as the totality of everything, from the smallest (quantum) to the largest (cosmological), from the living to the inanimate. Further, it includes the tangible and conceptual. Some might even call it God. As I build this topology I’m going to use the idea that it includes everything and avoid using the highly charged word God.
What do I mean by purpose? One of the great struggles for many people in the 21st century is this exact question, what is my purpose? It is the lack of an answer to this question which has created what many call the crisis of meaning. In his book The Reflexive Universe, Arthur M Young, asked this exact question, what is purpose of the universe? Let’s start with something simple, pick any everyday object and ask if it has a purpose. For example, a spoon, does it have purpose? I’m sure I would get a variety of answers, yet all of them would involve some kind of process of scooping up a material and moving it to another location. If someone said it has no purpose I would question their reasoning. Arthur argued, if you attribute purpose to anything, you must attribute purpose to everything. If you don’t, you are being subjective. We may not fully understand the purpose of something and it might server multiple purposes. Our lack of understanding doesn’t me it doesn’t exist.
Returning to our spoon, they are created through the action of humans, addressing a specific need. I see it being created with intention. Here we have the first property of consciousness, but I get ahead of myself. Having established that our spoon has purpose we can now ask the question about any object. The answer is easy if it’s a human made object, what about something in nature? Does it serve a purpose? Nature clearly creates as we watch plants grow and produce food. What about the inanimate, does DNA have purpose, what about water or oxygen, how about planets and suns? Again I would argue they are serving a purpose in that they are the foundations on which other things are built or where things exist. This is a principle I’ll talk more about this in a future post.
Now for the big question, what about the Universe, does it have purpose? I will say yes, following the same reasoning I used earlier. Further I offer that the purpose of the universe is the evolution of consciousness. What I mean by evolution is the process we see everywhere, things grow and change. Chemists are always creating new chemicals, DNA changes through the process we call mutation changing lifeforms, biologist are now able to do the same. This leads to a fundamental principle, the process of change to be discussed in my next post.