The Secret You

[Hermenutic]

This topic fascinates me. The topic understood by the western mind is understood differently by the eastern mind. Consciousness research is traditionally taboo to the west as it has historically been unable accept anything about consciousness because of it's inability to be measure and turned into data.

This may be changing from what I have understood, but the west is shackled with it's peculiar world view that determines a particular way of investigating. Alan Watts discusses the difference this makes quite well in 'The Book: the taboo against knowing who you are'. A pdf copy of the entire book is here. It's a worthwhile read as it introduces the reader to the eastern mindset. http://www.leary.ru/download/watts/B...0You%20Are.pdf

I tend to understand that consciousness is universal and an ingredient of the quantum field. The link is to an essay on the work of Eric Chaisson "who is an astrophysicist currently on faculty at Tufts University. Previously he served as senior scientist and division head at the Space Telescope Science Institute of Johns Hopkins University and was also affiliated with the Harvard- Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory." http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_so...onscious1.html He meditates on how consciousness emerged from the ingredients of the big bang.

"For Chaisson this emergence of Mind is a central question. He wonders how the "neural network within human beings" has led to the founding of not only societies--but to the development of technologies, of cathedrals, of philosophies. For Chaisson, one has to return to the issue of thermodynamics.

Chaisson believes that the very expansion of the Universe generates *information.* But for information to occur, there has to rise an order out of chaos. In the very earliest moments of the Universe, it seemed chaos reigned. But within a few next moments equilibrium occured, allowing neutral atoms to move into a re-combination phase--a phase of some half-million years that allowed energy and matter to couple.

Earlier the state of disorder, chaos, in the Universe allowed for a maximum entropy and equilibrium was destroyed because of the then de-coupling of energy and matter. But eventually the very expansion of the Universe resulted in a transfer from the Energy Era into the Matter Era, a time when it became manifest in galaxies, stars, planets. Chaisson believes this cosmic evolution into the Matter Era was a result of information that "drives order from chaos."

Chaisson realizes that this information behind manifestation in the Universe has barely begun to be deciphered. But, he states that "we can now identify the essence of the development of natural macroscopic systems--ordered physical structures able to assimilate and maintain information by means of local reductions in entropy--in a Universe that was previously unstructured in the extreme." [Eric Chaisson, THE LIFE ERA: COSMIC SELECTION AND CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION, W.W. Norton Company, 1987, p. 167.]


I have a feeling there are several ways in which consciousness manifests itself. We have work-a-day consciousness, we have quiet time consciousness, we have dreaming consciousness.

I am open to the idea that esp and astral is real and an available part of reality and I refer to the fact that such experiences are considered normal in people who have an eastern metaphysical frame of thought.

I'm actually considering the possibility that consciousness may be an infinitely malleable media that cannot be destroyed and which is the source of life.