Sharing self-forgetting is like a glimpse of heaven

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant, essayist, novelist, poet, and author of an autobiographical account, Born on a Blue Day. The American Library Association in 2008 praised the book about his life with the Asberger syndrome as a "Best Book for Young Adults."

"Many people are surprised when they learn that I am a Christian. They imagine that being autistic makes it difficult or impossible to believe in God or explore spiritual issues. It is certainly true that my Asperger’s makes it harder for me to have empathy or think abstractly, but it hasn’t prevented me from thinking about deeper questions concerning such things as life and death, love and relationships. In fact, many people with autism do find benefits in religious belief or spirituality. Religion’s emphasis on ritual, for example, is helpful for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders, who benefit greatly from stability and consistency. In a chapter of her autobiography entitled “Stairway to Heaven; Religion and Belief,” Temple Grandin, an autistic writer and professor of animal science, describes her view of God as an ordering force in the universe. Her religious beliefs stem from her experience of working in the slaughter industry and the feeling she had that there must be something sacred about dying."

"Like many people with autism, my religious activity is primarily intellectual rather than social or emotional. When I was at secondary school, I had no interest in religious education and was dismissive of the possibility of a god or that religion could be beneficial in people’s lives. This was because God was not something that I could see or hear or feel, and because the religious arguments that I read and heard did not make any sense to me. The turning point came with my discovery of the writings of G. K. Chesterton, an English journalist who wrote extensively about his Christians beliefs in the early part of the twentieth century."

"Chesterton was a remarkable person. At school, his teachers described him as a dreamer and ‘not on the same plane as the rest,’ while as a teenager he set up a debating club with friends, sometimes arguing an idea for hours at a time . . .. He could quote whole chapters of Dickens and other authors from memory and remembered the plots of all the 10,000 novels he had evaluated as a publisher’s reader. His secretaries reported that he would dictate one essay while simultaneously writing another by hand on a different subject. Yet he was always getting lost, so absorbed in his thoughts that he would sometimes have to phone his wife to help him get back home.”

“Reading Chesterton as a teenager helped me to arrive at an intellectual understanding of God and Christianity. The concept of the Trinity, of God as composed of living and loving relationships, was something that I could picture in my head and that made sense to me. I was also fascinated by the idea of the Incarnation, of God revealing Himself to the world in tangible, human form as Jesus Christ. Even so, it was not until I was twenty-three that I decided to participate in a course at a local church . . .. At Christmas in 2002 I became a Christian."

"My autism can sometimes make it difficult for me to understand how other people might think or feel in any given situation. For this reason, my moral values are based more on ideas that are logical, make sense to me and that I have thought through carefully, than on the ability to ‘walk in another person’s shoes.’ I know to treat each person I meet with kindness and respect, because I believe that each person is unique and created in God’s image."

“There are many beautiful and inspiring passages in the Bible, but my favorite is the following from 1 Corinthians: “Love is patient . . .. So faith, hope and love abide these three. But the greatest of these is love.”

With his gay partner Neil, Daniel write with Neil: “All of a sudden I experienced a kind of self-forgetting and in that brief, shining moment all my anxiety and awkwardness seemed to disappear. I turned to Neil and asked him if he had felt the same sensation and he said he had.” Like a “glimpse of heaven.”

Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (Free Press, 2006), 223-226.

Only our selfless characteristics will endure

Astrophysicist David Darling writes: “Those who have come close to death have, as it were, poked their noses into this greater world beyond human life. They have felt, briefly, incompletely, what it is like to be free of self and in contact with the absolute nature of things. No hallucination or fit of delirium could generate such an experience. Rather, it is ordinary life that, by comparison, begins to take on the air of unreality.

“The message is clear: if we can learn to see through the illusion of self now, in this life, then the ‘I’ who can die no longer exists. Death is deprived of its victim, so that the basis for fear and sorrow of death is undermined. We become part of a much larger process―the totality of being―that has no start or end.

“The scientist within us may rail at this and demand, ‘How can there be any sort of life after death? How can consciousness exist without a brain?’ But we can see now that these questions stem from a failure to grasp the true nature of consciousness and the brain. Better surely to ask, ‘How can there be consciousness with a brain?’

“We see the world as being full of relatively stable objects, such as trees and rocks and ourselves. But there is no stability anywhere, not even for a microsecond. Only our minds create that illusion. There are no trees, only a tree-air-earth-sun-cosmos process that never stands still. There are no people, only a people-air-food-cosmos process that is forever breathing, digesting and growing, breaking down and healing itself. There are no objects or things at all, but just one great interconnected system that is the whole of reality. All the world is a living, dynamic movement—continuous change and impermanence its only genuine characteristics.

“It is no coincidence that behavior which people everywhere consider intrinsically good―generosity to our fellow humans, working for the benefit of others, valuing all forms of life―serves also to lessen our preoccupation with self and to encourage the realization that we are part of an undivided unity. Only when there is no self left, is there no one who can die.

“Only those aspects of us that are selfless―qualities we might put under the unifying heading of ‘love’―will endure.

“Death is to be welcomed, when in due course it draws near, for with it we shall be freed from our terrible isolation. It is the one event that draws us all together again, back into the single true mind of the universe. Death is not a failure or a finality, but a triumph and the start of an experience we can hardly begin to imagine in our present form.

“Proper, spiritual preparation for death involves a dedicated search for the true nature of reality. And that, in turn, calls for a lifelong voyage of discovery into consciousness without self.

“Each to his or her own. There are many ways to break through the illusionary world of the rational mind. Prayer, charity, music, poetry―a million different roads.

“Only by pursuing a life course that diminishes our obsession with self, with material and emotional ‘me-ness,’ can we gain the deeper insights needed to face death with equanimity. A wonderful future lies ahead of us, following the trial of death, but not as individuals. In store is nothing less than a grand reunion with reality, an expansion of consciousness that can only occasionally be glimpsed through the dim portals of our senses and brain.”

David J. Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard, 1995), 168-187.

Consciousness is irreducible; brains build models

“We are brought up in the West today to believe that the brain is a creator of thought, a producer―or at least an agent in the production―of consciousness. We are indoctrinated into the materialist belief that the mental world is merely a superficial, almost superfluous outgrowth of the physical. But now, in the light of NDEs, we must forcefully challenge that view. From those who have skirted death comes this extraordinary new evidence suggesting that cognition may actually broaden and become more profound at exactly the time the brain stops working. How is that possible?

“It is not simply that scientists have failed to explain consciousness, they have failed (in the main) to see that such an explanation is not even possible. Today’s prevailing view that subjective experiences arise spontaneously when certain physical systems (such as brains and, perhaps, computers) get complicated enough is fundamentally misguided. It stems from our habit of seeing the world dualistically―as having separate subjective and objective aspects. But in reality there is no such separation.

“Science starts from the assumption that there is a knowable logic to the universe―which there clearly is. It then strips away all aspects of the world that logic cannot tease apart, calling these subjective. There is nothing wrong with this―science couldn’t progress in any other way. The mistake is to assume that this separation of objective from subjective, which we choose to make, reflects how things really are. It does not. And this misunderstanding is now becoming very clear as scientists go beyond their own remit and try to explain consciousness as a derivative of brain function. Their failure is no surprise.

“Consciousness is not some side-effect, or epiphenomenon, of the objective world. It is an integral, irreducible part of reality. Consciousness is the subjective aspect of all things―the ever-present ‘mind’ of the universe.

“Most, if not all, the major organs of the body are regulators. The lungs don’t manufacture the air our bodies need; the stomach and intestines are not food-producers. So, if we manufacture neither the air we breathe nor the food we eat, why assume that we make, rather than regulate, what we think?

“Seen as a reducing valve, the brain is a mixed blessing. Without it, human beings would never have evolved. The brain shields us from an awareness of every little thing, letting through only those experiences that are relevant to our survival. On the other hand, the brain prevents us from being directly in touch with reality. It is the barrier that stands between us and the limitless potential of the universe.

“We may be supremely self-conscious, but for this very reason our awareness of reality is surprisingly limited.

“All other living creatures are more conscious than us, if by this we mean they interfere less with the totality of experience available to them. With inanimate objects, the distinction between the individual―the self―and the unity of everything breaks down completely. So, the bewildering paradox emerges that inert matter can be considered more conscious than anything that lives, while human beings are the least conscious creatures of all!

“Such a conclusion seems unreasonable. But that is only because it runs counter to the completely false picture of the world we normally uphold. We are the ones who invent the myth of objects and phenomena, of separation and selfhood. None of this really exists. Everything we experience through our rationalizing minds is an illusion. So what does it mean to say that a rock is more conscious than a person? Simply that what it is like to be a rock is the same as what it is like to be the whole universe, because outside of the human mind there is no differentiation.

“Our brains, far from being prerequisites for conscious thought, reduce the ever-present torrent of total subjective experience to a carefully moderated trickle. They condense the infinite, unbroken cosmos down to an extraordinarily parochial world that seems to revolve around the individual.

“The brain builds models. Then these models are projected outward, creating the appearance of ‘things’ and ‘happenings’ beyond the senses. But these phenomena are not objectively real. We see only our own confabulations― sophisticated falsehoods that include elements of experience as fundamental as our selves, our perceptions of moving time and our anxiety at the prospect of death.

“Brains improve the survival chances of the organic structures that encase them. They assist with the four F’s―fighting, fleeing, feeding and mating. And they do this by restricting and rescripting consciousness to just that paltry form needed to maximize our chances of staying alive.

“If we can readjust to the idea that consciousness exists only outside the mental world of the brain, then death no longer appears as the ultimate tragedy.

“Death is the breaking of a spell, the waking from a dream. In this alternative paradigm, consciousness is there all the time, all around us―in the trees, the earth, the sky, and the emptiness of space. It is there, waiting for us to rejoin it.”

David J. Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard, 1995), 156-167.

We are part of the mystery we are trying to solve

An astrophysicist, a writer of science books for all ages, as well as a musician, David Darling is even more a part of All that is . . . and, he tells us with delight, so are we. Furthermore, he considers what we can learn from NDEs, which has been central to my quest and my thinking over the past several years. So, Darling’s reflections offer an eloquent and challenging conclusion to the thoughts that are shaping who “I am” at the ending of my life.

For Darling, the NDE “poses an enormous problem for the materialist” point of view, because it involves “an extraordinary deepening and broadening of consciousness as ordinary life comes to an end. Coupled with this increase in overall consciousness is a progressive lessening of self-awareness. As the experience unfolds, the subjects, it seems, become more and more conscious of everything except themselves.

“This is the core enigma of the NDE. Why should it be that as the brain dies, consciousness expands? And why should it be that as consciousness expands, self-consciousness disappears?

“Whatever may lie behind the NDE―whether it is evidence of life after death or a mere artifact of the dying brain―makes no difference in one important respect. The NDE is life-transforming. For a while, at least, other worlds appear on an equal footing with our own―as real as the familiar reality we thought unique. The body is seen to be of little consequence, and for some who go through the process all sense of being an individual is lost. Indeed, the NDE reveals something quite astonishing about the human condition. It affords a disturbing peek into the artificial nature of self and the world: neither can seem so substantial again.

“Take stars, for instance. They grow as they form. They ingest whatever falls onto their surface. They excrete stellar winds and flares. They even reproduce in the sense that the stuff of which they’re made is recycled into new stars. So, why isn’t a star alive? Perhaps it is. If we all agreed tomorrow that stars were alive they would be alive. ‘Life’ is our invention, so we can do with it as we please. We only have to make changes in our worldview by global consent for living stars to become part of our invented reality.

“What to us seem like certain facts are merely agreements between ourselves within a framework of interpretation. Change, impermanence and undividedness are the true qualities of the universe.

“On the face of it, a microbe’s ‘consciousness’ isn’t much. At best it seems to encompass a low sensitivity and inclination to react to what happens in the environment. But doesn’t an electron also ‘sense’ and ‘react’ when struck by another particle? Couldn’t we therefore say that an electron―one of the smallest particles in nature―was also vaguely conscious? And if so, doesn’t this imply that every single bit of the universe is somehow aware?

“A very different picture of reality begins to emerge, then, as we challenge some of the categorizations of orthodox science. In fact there is a deeper truth beyond science, beyond any form of rationalization, that has been known to the human race for a very long time. It is an intuitive, direct form of knowledge and not one that can or needs to be proved. As Max Planck said: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery in Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.’”

David J. Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife (Villard, 1995), 66-73.

Why free will is necessary and love is evolving

Tom Campbell writes: "Love is the result of successful consciousness evolution. Love is what grows within consciousness in the absence of fear. Love is your purpose; it defines the positive direction of your growth. Spirituality and love must be personal achievements of personal consciousness―they cannot be organizational achievements. A poor quality of life is the inevitable result of a poor quality of consciousness. Your ego makes your fears come true.

“You do not have the ability to improve anyone else. All you can do for others is to provide opportunity for them to do for themselves. What we do with the opportunity to evolve our consciousness is entirely up to us.

“Given that consciousness exists, it must be enabled by memory, information processing capability (intelligence), the interactive sharing of data, and free-will choice-making in the service of profitable evolution. Thus, the question of free will reduces to the question of are you conscious, and, if so, is your consciousness part of a complex interactive system of consciousness?

“If these are answered in the affirmative then your consciousness, and the system of which it is a part, must be evolving against some measure of value because that is a requirement of all self-modifying interactive systems. Such a system cannot evolve toward greater value without free will to make the required choices.

“Consciousness cannot exist without the ability to make self-determined, self-modifying choices. Without free will, there is no consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no free will. Consciousness and free will cannot be separated―they are simply different aspects of the same thing.

“A free will needs only to be free enough to make choices within its own local logical system and decision space. Functional free will, at whatever level of application, requires no more than the practical ability to make intent based choices where the intent is a function of the quality of the consciousness making the choice. If such a mechanism for making value choices at the local level (perhaps based on an evaluation of past choices) can be arranged, consciousness can provide the instrument for its own evolution.

“An evolving consciousness system like ours cannot be supported by either a wholly random or a wholly deterministic system because there can be no cumulative profitability in either. Our existence and human nature exhibit clear universal patterns that contain much more consistency and direction than randomness―a fact that must have a holistic, comprehensible explanation at its core. Because our existence is about us, about who, what, and why we are, surely the explanation lies accessible within us.

“Free will is simply the result of consciousness energy and evolutionary process slipping into bed together for a joyous moment of creation that has not yet ended. From that union, all reality and existence flows.”

Thomas Campbell, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything): A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics (Lightning Strikes, 2003), 311-423.

Consciousness, free will, intent

What is creating evolutionary pressure if we are no longer preoccupied with the traditional issues of survival and species propagation? We have become aware enough and capable enough that self-improvement is now our main goal. Most importantly, that means spiritual evolution, or equivalently, the improvement of the quality of our consciousness.

The central nervous system hosts our consciousness as a computer hosts an operating system and applications. It serves as a transducer, a data port and bi-directional translator between the virtual experience of the physical body and the individuated nonphysical consciousness that defines your existence and motivates your intent within the larger reality.

“Consciousness is The One, while the many, the great diversity of realities and the entities that populate those realities, are specialized subsets of consciousness within their own thought-space or dimension. Once a complex system is capable of directly programming itself (developing or modifying its original source code―which includes genetic engineering), the pace of evolution dramatically accelerates. Space-time, in this context, is a construct of consciousness. It is not a physical substance or a thing―it is not a physical construct―it is created by imposing a set of constraints upon a subset of the larger reality.

“In scientific terms, a lower entropy consciousness system has more power―more energy available to do work―a higher, more useful level of organization. In common terms, a lower entropy digital system commands more usable energy (more profitable organization) and, therefore, becomes capable of creating more profitable configurations of itself. Additionally, a lower entropy consciousness eventually develops the ability to use directed conscious intent to reduce its entropy further. Physical experience is generated when the perception of an individual consciousness (sentient being) is constrained to follow the space-time rule-set.

“The fundamental evolutionary process seems to work everywhere ―life or conscious awareness or individuated sub-systems of conscious-ness are merely the result of a purposeful, self-interacting complex system with memory, evolving its way through a large and diverse set of environmentally constrained possibilities.

“Clearly, growing up within a larger reality has much more to do with raising the quality of your consciousness than accumulating information. What matters most is the development of wisdom, understanding, and the capacity to love―which are not primarily intellectual achievements. The love I am referring to here is an attitude, a value, a way of interacting and being, and needs no specific object on which to focus. Love is the result of low entropy consciousness.

“As consciousness develops awareness, intelligence, values and personality, its entropy shrinks as its ability to organize itself effectively and profitably increases. Value based awareness, intelligence, and purpose are created, sustained, driven, animated, and motivated by the evolutionary imperative to improve the functionality of the system through better organization (entropy reduction). Absolute right and wrong (intents, motivations, choices, and actions) are defined and differentiated by the effect they have on the average entropy of the system.

“Because consciousness is an attribute of individuals, all conscious entities are vitally important in their own way: each has its own mission and purpose and is an important contributor to the whole. All are different, all have their own challenges, and none is fundamentally superior or inferior.”

“Free will requires that negative intent be a possibility, and without free will, there can be no experiment.

“Right motivation, intent, and action generally result in a decrease of entropy within your consciousness, whereas wrong motivation, intent, and action generally result in an increase of entropy within your consciousness. This is how absolute right and wrong are defined. The wrong intent or choice is evolutionarily wrong even it if temporarily results in what appears to be a constructive right action in physical-biological space. You do not evolve higher quality consciousness through right action or right result, but only through right motivation and right intent.

“Exercising free will interactions (with self or others) produces an internal result (always) and an external result (usually). The internal result immediately and most potently affects the quality of the consciousness according to the quality of the intent. The external result affects others as well as yourself and generates the appropriate feedback or reaction. Thus, it is not possible to achieve a right result if the intent is wrong. A wrong intent damages its creator despite what else happens.

“If our intent is right, we always derive some benefit, regardless of what we do as a result of that right intent. Right intent almost always drives a resultant right action. Wrong intent usually drives wrong action. For the typical being out there in the larger reality (continually choosing and doing, like you and me), intent lies primarily beneath the surface of one’s awareness. What motivates us is barely visible to our intellect. Motivations and intent are a complex mixture of many, sometimes inconsistent and incompatible, components. The choices you make (the motivations you have) are mostly not completely right or wrong.

“Every being is interested in, aware of, and cares about what it interacts with on its own local level, and in its immediate environment; everything else is invisible or inconsequential because it lies outside the being’s awareness, is hopelessly beyond its knowing (mystical), or appears to be irrelevant to its needs.

“Our local reality and everything in it is a product of consciousness evolution. We operate within our niche on the edge of an enormous consciousness ecosystem.

“Every critter, including you, has its point and its place; diversity is a natural artifact of evolution when there are few constraints. Each type of entity reflects unique potential, capacity, goals, purpose, and responsibility yet all spring from the same source and follow the same processes. One might say that they occupy different niches and habitats within the same consciousness-evolution fractal ecosystem."

Thomas Campbell, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything): A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics (Lightning Strikes, 2003), 223-310.

An evolving and spiritual consciousness

The About page of Thomas Campbell’s web site begins as follows: “Tom Campbell began researching altered states of consciousness with Bob Monroe (Journeys Out Of The Body, Far Journeys, and The Ultimate Journey) at Monroe Laboratories in the early 1970s where he and a few others were instrumental in getting Monroe’s laboratory for the study of consciousness up and running. These early drug-free consciousness pioneers helped design experiments, developed the technology for creating specific altered states, and were the main subjects of study (guinea pigs) all at the same time. Campbell has been experimenting with, and exploring the subjective and objective mind ever since.

Trained as a physicist, Campbell worked for twenty years on developing US missile defense systems before devoting his time to writing and speaking on consciousness. Campbell has not had an NDE, but his perspective on consciousness is based on his out-of-body experiences, which began as he worked with Bob Monroe. My Big TOE is an awesome book, which I found rich in compelling insights.

Campbell writes: “Any credible conception of reality must include subjective experience that can consistently and universally lead to a useful (measurable by anyone) functionality. The biggest picture must cover everything―everything objective, everything subjective, everything normal, and everything paranormal.

“The logic of causality can say nothing about the beginnings of its own system because those beginnings lie outside that system―beyond the reach of its own causal logic. Once we realize the causal logic that gives us science also limits our understanding of the larger reality (and its beginning), we are free to begin exploring the larger truth. Each dimension of reality has its own rules that define its objective science. Additionally, each dimension of reality experiences the next higher (less limited) dimension as subjective and mystical.

“You cannot access understanding and wisdom that is beyond what the quality of your consciousness can naturally support. Every individual unit of consciousness must develop in its own unique way, powered by the free will that drives its intent.

“The one thing most modern physicists agree on these days is that what we generally take for our local 3D time ordered causal reality is merely a perceptual illusion. Some sixty years after quantum physics destroyed the widely accepted material foundation of physical reality, what lies behind this persistent perceptual illusion remains as mysterious as ever to a traditional science trapped in the little picture by limiting beliefs.

“Real personal science requires real, verifiable, measurable, objective results. Here, the word ‘results,’ at the most basic level, refers to significant, continuing verifiable progress toward the improvement of the quality of your conscious being, the evolution of mind, the growing-up and maturing of spirit. Why? Because that is the nature of the reality we live in. You will see that the physical nature as well as the spiritual nature of our reality is straightforwardly derived from the natural process of consciousness evolution.

“Truth is absolute, but how to discover it, and express it within your being, must be personal. Spiritual growth, improving the quality of your consciousness, is about changing your attitude, expanding your awareness, outgrowing your fears, reducing your ego, and improving your capacity to love. To succeed, you must change your intent and modify your motivation.

“One method of accomplishing an assessment of subjective inner space is through meditation. Meditation lets us experience the invisible background of consciousness. Each individual will naturally extract from their meditation what they need for their next step.

“Individual consciousness is a subset of absolute consciousness. Pay careful attention to the choices you make throughout your day. Examine your motivations and intent relative to those choices. By an act of your will, modify your intents to be more giving, caring, loving, and to be less self-serving. Shift the focus from you, from what you want, need and desire, to what you can give to, and do for, others. In the same manner, change where and how you invest the energy that follows your intent in your relationships and interactions with other people.

“This is not about what I believe about reality. This is about a model of reality based upon my experience and research. If it makes you feel better, I don’t believe any of this stuff either. I either know it as fact (knowledge), or regard it as the most likely possibility or best hypothesis thus far (based on the scientific data available to me as of this writing).

“The actual differences between descriptions of the same absolute truth are―after differing language, cultural, and religious modes of expression are removed―much smaller than you would likely imagine. This is because all spiritual paths converge on the same absolute truths by means of reducing ego and fear, which are the primary generators of confusion and divisiveness.

“The most important question is: can these two assumptions (the existence of consciousness and the process of evolution) deliver the goods? Can they provide a logical foundation broad enough and solid enough to support a comprehensive model of reality?”

 

Thomas Campbell, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything): A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics (Lightning Strikes, 2003).

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