The consciousness function: Cook excerpt #7

Nick Cook writes: As part of my own efforts to create language that bridged the world of science with terms that described the paranormal, therefore, ‘Gateway’ could serve a purpose by establishing precedence and authority: this was the military endorsing as science – a science pooh-poohed by virtually all mainstream science communities – techniques, per the report, that might confer intelligence advantage over the US’s military rivals.

Early on, the paper promised to explain ‘the mechanics by which the mind exercises the consciousness function’. This, of course, in the context of something as elusive as ‘mind’ versus ‘brain’, is an assertion that cannot confidently be sustained, but what Gateway does do is alert the neophyte consciousness researcher to terms and concepts that will dog his/her efforts to get to grips with the ‘consciousness function’.

Amongst these, I extracted the following:

Frequency and resonance: Frequencies that bring the brain’s left and right hemispheres into coherence set up a resonance that turns the body into a ‘tuning fork’ of sorts that allows for a transfer of energy, the report states, in a range between 6.8 and 7.8 Hertz into the Earth’s ionosphere, which resonates at about 7.5 Hertz¹¹. Its associated wavelength, of around 40,000 km, ‘knows no obstacles’, and hardly attenuates over large distances, making it the ‘ideal medium for conveying a telepathic signal’¹². This coherence between Earth and human, the report tells us, can produce an out-of-body experience that shifts the seat of consciousness into the surrounding environment, where the mind can ‘communicate with other minds similarly attuned’. ‘Data’ from the universe (what it has, perhaps, become fashionable amongst Millennials to refer to as ‘downloads’) – also become obtainable at appropriate resonances.

Matter and energy: Although enshrined in Einstein’s E=mc2 equivalence formula, the idea for most of us that matter is energy in another form and vice versa is certainly not intuitive. The report prepares us for this by setting up a discussion about these two different states: ‘If the term matter is taken to mean solid substance as opposed to energy which is understood to mean a force of some sort, then the use of the former is entirely misleading’. Solid matter, it says – as represented by the atom, its neutron and electrons – is made up of nothing more than oscillating energy grids – thus, solid matter, strictly speaking, ‘does not exist’¹³. The appearance of solidity, it tells us – and what appears to us as the separation of things - is explained by different vibration rates in the oscillations¹⁴.

The cosmos as a hologram: The universe, being composed of interacting energy fields, some at rest, some in motion, is ‘one gigantic hologram of unbelievable complexity’, the report goes on to tell us¹⁵. The mind is also a hologram that attunes to the ‘cosmic hologram’ to provide us with consciousness. Perception is derived by filtering the holographic information entering the right hemisphere of the brain and processing it via the left, where it compares the imagery with the part of its hologram that constitutes memory. This process, in essence, converts the nonlinear, nonverbal information of the universe into the linear, ‘2-dimensional data’ that provides us with the ‘raw stuff’ of reality¹⁶.

Whilst the science of Gateway could in no way be taken as gospel, it did serve – in part through its blend of science and mysticism - to remind its readers that we lived in a miraculously fine-tuned universe, in which fractional deviations in the values of the fundamental forces post-Big Bang would have created an entirely different universe – or, more likely, one that would have killed it at birth.

Gateway also could be taken as evidence of the military-intelligence community’s ongoing interest - albeit from 1983 and in discrete corners – in the paranormal; an interest that has extended far beyond psychic surveillance.

In Section 18, it enters into a lengthy discussion of ‘unconfined energy’ or energy in a state of ‘inactive infinity’, aka ‘energy in an absolute state’ that it condenses simply as ‘the Absolute’. ‘Between the Absolute and the ‘material’ universe in which we experience our physical existence are various intervening dimensions to which human consciousness in altered states of being may gain access’¹⁷.

The timeless consciousness my wife had experienced at her mother’s death appeared to reside somewhere on this spectrum. If consciousness had the capacity to do this as an out-of-body, shared- or near-death experience, by extension it seemed permissible to look for clues to its existence after our actual, physical death too.

11 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf, p.6.
12 Tests before and since have demonstrated, persuasively, that radio waves (alone) are unlikely to act as a/the carrier-wave for ESP phenomena.
13 Op.cit., p.7.
14 McDonnell quotes Itzhak Bentov on various different vibration rates of matter: The energy grid that composes the nucleus of the atom vibrates at approximately 1022 Hertz; at 70 degrees Farenheit, an atom oscillates at the rate 1015 Hertz; a molecule in the range of 109 Hertz; and a live human cell at 103 Hertz.
15 Op.cit., p.8.
16 Op.cit., p.9.
17 Op.cit., p,11.

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.