Consciousness is a cosmic principle

In an essay entitled “Science, Soul, and Death” Marilyn Schlitz and John H. Spencer assert: “There are many other contemporary scientists” who argue for a postmaterialist paradigm of science, “such as Lothar Schäfer, a retired professor from the University of Arkansas, where he taught physical chemistry for forty-three years. One of the harbingers of this new worldview, Schafer is optimistic that science is reaching a new way of understanding consciousness.

“Like Tanzi and other postmaterialist scientists, he speaks about wholeness as the core of reality, countering the materialist and reductionist worldview that reduces the world to its parts while pretending there is no whole. While he made his career in physical chemistry, measuring, manipulating, and explaining the microscopic world, he sees the basis of matter as nonmaterial and the universe as interconnected.

“’All things are connected,’ Schäfer explains. ‘Not in the empirical world, but in their nonempirical roots. The argument is this: if the universe is wholeness, everything comes out of it, everything belongs to it, including our consciousness. In that case, consciousness is a cosmic principle. The only chance you have that your consciousness survives when you die is that there is some consciousness outside. What may be in us is perhaps not our consciousness, but a cosmic consciousness’ (Schäfer, quoted in Schlitz, 2015)

“In discussing his own cosmology, Schäfer acknowledges that a personal transformation linked his views of death with his scientific worldview. When he was younger, he was frightened about death. Today he finds nothing frightening about it. Not that he has any clear opinion on what happens after; still, he believes that ‘there is a cosmic mind with which we are connected. If there is a cosmic mind, it would be strange if it wasn’t connected with ours’ (Quoted in Schlitz, 2015).”

Marilyn Schlitz and John H Spencer, “Science, Soul, and Death” in Beauregard, Mario; Dyer, Natalie; Woollacott, Marjorie, editors. Expanding Science: Visions of a Postmaterialist Science 2020 (p. 409). AAPS. Kindle Edition.

Schlitz, M. (2015). Death Makes Life Possible. Sounds True: Boulder.