In 2016, I was asked by the family of Ingo Swann, who had died in 2013, whether I would write a retrospective of his life. After a great deal of research, we agreed that there wasn’t much more that could usefully be added that Ingo, a prolific writer, plus others, hadn’t already written. But, meantime, we had discovered amongst his papers two ‘lost manuscripts’ and it was agreed that I would work on these with a view to publishing them as one volume – a work that appeared in August 201918.
The two manuscripts contained
breakdowns, as Ingo saw them, of the ‘psychic systems’ at work in the human
mind and body, as well as a ‘map’ of the ‘Matrix’, as he referred to it, with
which these psychic systems interfaced.
It also went into many of the anomalous
phenomena – phenomena Ingo had studied in depth throughout his life - that
characterised consciousness’s paranormal realms.
This was invaluable, because the
standard questions on consciousness – such as you would find in a reputable
science book on the subject, only went so far. To wit:
What is consciousness?
Does consciousness create reality?
Is the universe conscious?
What is consciousness like in other animals?
Can physics explain consciousness?
How many kinds of consciousness do we have?
Can we know if a machine is conscious?
Can you see consciousness in the brain?
What is consciousness for?
When did consciousness evolve19?
Critical
to a new narrative emerging from my Phase 2 exploration of these questions, via
my interviews with many expert scientific witnesses, were the following themes:
*Consciousness: Of its
many sub-fields, consciousness research can be divided into two broad
categories: the ‘easy problems’ and ‘the hard problem’ as defined by
philosopher David Chalmers of New York University in 1994. The easy categories
are associated with brain-functioning, the integration of sensory information
and different states of consciousness, such as waking, sleeping, dreaming and
‘altered’. The hard problem relates to how and why we have subjective
experiences (such as the feelings that accompany an aesthetic moment) at all.
While the physics of the easy problems can be probed with relative ease, there
is no consensus at all on the hard problem. What’s more, the argument as to
whether consciousness originates in the brain or outside of it morphs into an
even deeper issue concerning the primary ‘state’ of the universe. The ‘accepted
narrative’ – promulgated with great gusto by the hegemony of the science
mainstream – is that it is ‘matter’, although this is not backed up by
definitive scientific evidence, a disconnect epitomised by the ongoing search
for the seat, or seats, of consciousness in the brain, and the mechanisms
responsible for it/them. This leaves open, however counter-intuitive it may
seem, the possibility that consciousness is the primal pre-existent state and
that all else, including matter, emerges from it.
*The
origins of awareness: Why did awareness first manifest in humans?
What happened in the 150,000-year gap between the first ‘anatomically modern
humans’ 200,000 years ago and the first tangible evidence of awareness in the
human species 50,000 years ago, as portrayed, for example, in cave art? While
science has many theories, definitive answers are lacking. This has left scope
for new theories to emerge – as, for example, that posited by Prof. David
Lewis-Williams of the Rock Art Research Institute at South Africa’s
Witwatersrand University. He says that our awareness developed out of a
shamanic culture in which hunter-gatherer societies around the world ingested
natural psychedelics such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and DMT held in
ayahuasca. Bestselling author Graham Hancock takes this further, telling us it
may well have been shamanic explorations of hallucinatory realms during the
Upper Palaeolithic that played the catalytic role in extracting our ancestors
from the five-million-year torpor of the hominid line.21
*‘Quantum consciousness’: One
of the pillars of quantum mechanics is ‘superposition’, the recognition that
particles don’t exist except as a kind of ‘probabilistic entity’ (known as a
‘wave-function’), until an act of observation – by us or in an experiment -
causes them to ‘collapse’ into physical reality. This and many other aspects of
the quantum realm defies logic, but it is verifiably real. If the land of the
very small lies outside our logic system, says Robert Lanza MD, author and
specialist in stem cells and regenerative medicine, why must the meta-universe,
the cosmos as a whole, be ‘any more obliging’ as far as our thought-systems
operate? “Rather, we should face up to something that’s rarely if ever voiced
in modern cosmology: the possibility that the true nature of the universe as a
whole has nothing (his emphasis) to do with the way its parts work.”22 Since
‘quantum weirdness’ is an accepted facet of physics, why should aspects of
physics at scale (my emphasis) be any different?
*Biological
unknowns: It isn’t just the dark energy/dark matter conundrum that
confounds our relationship to/with reality and our environment. Holes of
ignorance, too, for example, dog our understanding of DNA. The ‘molecule of
life’, and ‘epigenetics’ (its relationship to/with the environment).
Breakthroughs in epigenetics portend better mental health, deeper knowledge of the
mechanisms that make us ‘us’, disease control and perhaps, even, why humans
have psi abilities such as ESP. There may be mechanisms within DNA that
permit depth-level communication with realms of reality beyond the reach of our
five senses. These and other putative roles of DNA include its capacity to
store vast amounts of data, its capacity to act as a distributed processor –
and as a distributed antenna (akin to a phased array) with transmit/receive
modes to/from a universe that is beginning to be seen as far more dynamic than
the cosmos as it is portrayed by Newtonian physics and general relativity.
*New
physics: What used to be seen as empty space isn’t empty at all, even in a
vacuum chilled to absolute zero (-237.15 degrees Celsius). Instead, science
shows23, it is
teeming with ‘vacuum fluctuations’ composed of particles that blink in and out
of existence around their ‘zero-point baselines’. This view of the universe,
considered heretical as recently as half a century ago, is increasingly
accepted as fact. Instead of the ‘many worlds’ hypothesis within quantum theory
which imagines that a new universe splits off with every collapse of the
wavefunction, the emergence and disappearance of these ‘virtual particles’
points to a dimension of the cosmos that is beyond the reach of observation and
measurement. This version of the ‘quantum vacuum’ creates space-time and ‘in-forms’
the physical universe (including, at its most basic level, the four fundamental
forces of nature24). Is
‘organised matter’ (versus the energy created in the ‘Big Bang’) ‘extruded’
from this non-physical realm via the zero-point energy field into our physical
universe as ‘reality’?
*Objective paranormality: It
is false for science to hold that ‘the paranormal’ exists purely in the realm
of subjectively experienced events – or that it doesn’t ‘imprint’ on our
three-/four-dimensional reality. ‘Psychokinetics’ – whether in the form of
poltergeist-type activity (of the ‘lamp kind’ witnessed by my father and
grandfather) or as phenomena manifested by psychics – has an incontrovertible
energy signature. ‘Hotspots’ of paranormal activity exist (for example, at
numerous ranches across the US Southwest), where a multiplicity of highly
unusual phenomena observed (and, in many cases, filmed) by multiple witnesses
may be counted as veridical, and therefore objective evidence that ‘our
world’ is not defined purely by the science that comes to us from our
text-books. Not only are these phenomena seen, they leave real, physical
traces.
In one of Ingo’s two manuscripts there
is a chapter about a fictional account of a gigantic ship called the Titan that
hits an iceberg mid-Atlantic with the loss of many lives25.
The story, published in 1898, presages
the sinking of the Titanic fourteen years later. Ingo points us to the
story – and to a list of verified premonitions by many people leading up to the
Titanic event – as evidence of linkage to a realm in which the events
that manifested as the physical Titanic disaster were already forming
ahead of their appearance in the material realm.
Ingo
never took his ‘psychicness’ for granted – one of his mantras was that his
abilities were latent in us all. In pursuit of the facts he felt supported
this, he spent a great deal of his life looking for the links and nodes that
bind us to each other – and to the ‘Matrix’ his research and experience told
him existed beyond our five senses.
This view, as we have seen, has been
endorsed on many levels by the military- intelligence community, which has, for
several decades, as we have also seen, been far less reticent about studying
the paranormal than its physics academia counterpart.
The passage about the Titan
and the Titanic
held profound clues
for Ingo to the true nature of reality – clues he bound into a hypothesis that
speaks of a ‘virtual realm’ that disobeys our concepts of linear time and
defies our present psychological logic – very much as, for me, the ‘new
narrative’ emerging from my Phase 2 study had.
A short section of the book that
crystallises Ingo’s theory is worth quoting in full26:
‘If
our hypothesis be true, then there is ‘another’ non-immediate existing realm
congruent to our material, physical realm. It is ‘governed’ by laws that are
different, as far as time is concerned at least, than time as we experience it
on a moment-to- moment basis.
‘In
our immediate, physical realm, only the now is here and real: the past has
‘vanished’ and the future doesn’t exist as a tangible entity. In the other realm,
however, either the ‘present’ is longer, extending deeply into the past and
future, or time doesn’t exist at all as we know it. The laws that govern both
realms are not mutually exclusive, but both realms interpenetrate and interact
with each other.
‘Advance
information ‘leaks’ from the other realm into the material realm through
dreams, visions, artistic renderings and direct prophecy from ‘gifted’
psychics. Rather, we might say that there is some sort of information exchange
between the two.
‘But
the clearest point is that the two are interconnected, and because of this we
should no longer consider them to be two, but rather, since they are
interconnected, as one.’
18 Resurrecting The Mysterious by Ingo Swann, published by
Swann-Ryder Productions LLC.
19 The standard questions on consciousness are well known. I have taken these
from a recent issue of New Scientist: Special Issue: ‘What is
Consciousness? The 10 Biggest Questions About the Greatest Mystery in the
Universe’, 10th July 2021.
20 New Scientist, 1st February 2020, Special Issue: What Is Reality?
21 See Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of
Mankind, Graham Hancock, Century Books, 2005.
22 Beyond Biocentrism, p.164, Robert Lanza, MD (with Bob Berman),
Benbella Books, 2017.
23 As demonstrated by the Casimir Effect, when two plates are pressed together
by the fluctuations arising from the ZPE field.
24 Gravity, electromagnetism, the
strong and the weak nuclear forces.
25 The chapter is ‘Fate & Destiny: Being with the Future’ from Resurrecting
The Mysterious by Ingo Swann, Swann-Ryder Productions, 2020. The fictional
account Ingo refers to is a novella, The Wreck of the Titan, by Morgan
Robertson.
26 Op.cit, p. 207.
Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles
in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his
ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point.
He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries
for the History and Discovery channels. In
2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay
competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
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