Jane Goodall's abiding experience of God

Jane Goodall writes in her autobiography Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey: “Years of war, when those who are loved are dying every day, are filled with powerful psychic experiences, and Vanne [Jane’s mother], who has always been psychic (though she never talks about it), certainly had her share. I have already told of her premonition of danger that saved our lives when the German plan dropped its bombs on our holiday village. The other incident occurred earlier in the war. She was taking a bath. Suddenly she called out, loudly and urgently: ‘Rex!’ Rex was my father’s younger brother. She began to sob bitterly, tears pouring down her face. My father, on leave, rushed in to see that on earth was going on. ‘Whatever is the matter?’ he asked her. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ she sobbed. ‘I only know it’s Rex.’ Later she learned that she had cried out at the time Rex was shot down and killed in combat over Rhodesia. Hugo’s mother [Hugo was Jane’s first husband] had a similar experience when her husband’s boat was torpedoed in the war. She was in England, and the ship sank thousands of miles away. It was at night and she woke up terrified, hearing the engines of a German plane overhead, and the sounds of heavy gunfire. She began to cry, knowing her husband was in danger.” [165-166]

 

“During the first six months or so after [my husband] Derek’s death, I often felt his presence. I had a strong conviction that in his spirit state he could not see or hear—or perhaps it was that he could not feel the things he had loved in earthly life—the sea, the pounding waves, ballet, the graceful hand-over-hand swinging of the young chimpanzees playing in the trees. And I felt very strongly that if I looked and listened with great concentration, and paid attention to every detail, he would be able to enjoy, for a little longer, the things he had loved—through my eyes, through my ears. Perhaps it was fancy, but it comforted me, the thought that he was there, that I could do something for him. And then, after a while, as though he knew that I was all right, that my days had, indeed, brought sufficient strength, I felt his presence less and less often. I knew it was time for him to move on, and I did not try to call him back.” [167]

 

Goodall writes of holocaust survivor Henri Landwirth who in his autobiography, Gift of Life, says that in the death camps “he lost touch with his spiritual side, ‘abandoning God, as I had felt abandoned.’ How did he recover his faith in in God? How has he reconciled the unspeakable cruelties of the death camps and the suffering of innocent children, stricken with some terrible disease, with the existence of a just God, a caring God of love? Henri writes: ‘Where does a heart truly broken, a spirit hopelessly abandoned, find hope? What exists within a human being that allows for survival amidst such devastation? It must be God. . . . Who else could it be?’” [260]

 

At the end of her autobiography, published in 1999, Jane Goodall concludes: “It is hard now, after twenty-five years, to recapture that moment of ecstasy in the Notre Dame cathedral—although the experience has never left me . . .. The impact was so powerful, I suppose, because it came at a time when so much was changing in my life, when I was vulnerable. When I was, without knowing it, needing to be reconnected with the Spirit Power I call God—or perhaps I should say being reminded of my connection. The experience, whatever else it did, put me back on track; it forced me to rethink the meaning of my life on earth.

 

“Only quite recently did I begin to wonder whether there had been some specific message for me, wordlessly conveyed by the powerful music, a message that I absorbed, but was not yet ready or able to interpret. And now, through experience and reflection, I believe that there was indeed, a message. A very simple one: Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other. Together we must reestablish our connections with the natural world and with the Spiritual Power that is around us. And then we can move, triumphantly, joyously, into the final stage of human evolution—spiritual evolution.

 

“Is it arrogant, presumptuous, to think that I might have heard the Voice of God? Not at all. We all do—that ‘still, small voice’ that we speak of, telling us what we ought to do. That, I think, is the Voice of God. Of course, it is usually called the voice of conscience, and if we feel more comfortable with that definition, that’s fine. Whatever we call it, the important thing, I think, is to try to do what the voice tells us. My experience in the cathedral of Notre Dame was dramatic, awakening. It is the still, small voice that I hear now—and it bids me to share. And that is what I try to do. [266-267]

 

Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (1999, Warner Books). Excerpts selected by Robert Traer. 

Experiences of Jane Goodall's deceased husband

Jane Goodall writes in her autobiography, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, of the death of her second husband, Derek Bryceson: “A week later I went to Gombe. It was months since I had been there, and the field staff were really upset at the news about Derek, and understandably concerned for their own future. [Derek raised funds for Jane’s research and handled the necessary government permissions.] I was hoping to find healing and strength in the ancient forest. Hoping that contact with the chimpanzees, so accepting of what life brings them, would ease my grief.

 

The first two days were desperately sad, especially in the evening when I was all alone in the house where Derek and Grub [her son by a previous marriage] and I had known so much happiness. Which was peopled, now, by ghosts. And then on the third morning something happened. After my lonely cup of coffee, during which I sat in melancholy sadness and watched the changing colors of the lake, I set off to find the chimps. And as I climbed the steep slope to the feeding station, suddenly I found I was smiling. I was on the part of the trail that Derek, with his paralyzed legs, had found so difficult and tiring. [Derek’s airplane was shot down during WWII injuring his legs.] But now it was I, the earthbound one, who was struggling in the heat—he was light and free. He was teasing me so that I laughed out loud.

 

“That night something even more extraordinary happened. I was lying in the bed we had shared, listening to the sound of the waves on the shore, the crickets, all the familiar night sounds. I did not expect to sleep, yet sleep came quickly. And then, sometime during the night, I woke. Did I wake? Anyway, Derek was there. He was smiling and very, very much alive. He spoke to me. It seemed then that he spoke for a long time. He told me important things, things I should know, things I should do. And even as he spoke, my body, all at once, went rigid and the blood rushed and pounded in my ears. Roaring, roaring. Roaring through my rigid body. Slowly I relaxed. ‘Well anyway,’ I said, when I could, perhaps aloud, ‘at least I know you’re really here.’ And almost at once it all came back. My body went rigid again and was filled again with roaring. I remember thinking ‘I must be dying’ but I was not at all frightened. And when it stopped, I remembered nothing all—only that Derek had been there, that he had a message for me, that it was joyful. Nothing more. None of the wisdom. And almost immediately I fell into a deep sleep. [161-162]

 

“I had always believed that there is a state of being-ness that does not end with physical death; I had always known that mind could communicate with mind across distance; what happened after Derek’s death made me suspect that mind can communicate with mind across time. I do not feel the need to prove this to anyone: there are many who feel the same but we are ill-equipped by Western education for the task of convincing unbelievers of the reality of the spirit. Science demands objective factual evidence—proof; spiritual experience is subjective and leads to faith. It is enough, for me, that my faith gives me an inner peace and brings meaning to my own life. Yet I do want to share my experiences with those who want to hear. So let me relate two more incidents, both of which occurred on the night of Derek’s death. Both involve children, my own son, Grub [nickname for Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick], who was in England at the time, and Lulu, a little girl who lived in Dar es Salaam.

 

“At the time of Derek’s illness, Grub, thirteen years old, was a boarder (his choice) at a little preparatory school near Bournemouth. He did not know that Derek was close to death. Well, the night that Derek was dying, Grub was awakened from his sleep by a vivid dream. In his dream Olly [Jane’s aunt living with her mother, Vanne, at their house in Bournemouth] arrived at the school and spoke to him. ‘Grub, I have something very sad to tell you. Derek died last night.’ He went to sleep again, but once more was awakened by the dream, and Olly again repeated her message. When it happened a third time, he became distressed, and could not sleep. He actually went to the school matron to tell her he was having terrible nightmares, though he did not tell her what they were.

 

“In the morning Olly arrived at the school. Vanne was in Germany with me, having arrived the day before after an urgent feeling that she needed to see Derek [receiving treatment for cancer in a German hospital]. Olly took Grub outside into the garden and told him she had some sad news. ’I know,’ he said. ‘Derek is dead, isn’t he.’ Olly was stunned—until he told his dream.

 

“Lulu, the same age as Grub at the time, suffered from Down’s syndrome. Derek and I had been great friends with her parents and visited their house frequently. Indeed, when first I went back to Dar es Salaam after Derek’ death I stayed with them, unable to bear my own empty house. Derek was good with children, and Lulu loved him. The night he died, sometime in the small hours, she woke up and she ran along to where Mary, her nanny, was sleeping.

 

‘Mary,’ she said, urgently. ‘Please wake up. That man has come, and he likes me. He is smiling.’ Mary, have roused, told Lulu she had been dreaming, and to go back to bed. But lulu persisted. ‘Please come, Mary. I want to show you he is smiling.’ In the end Mary sat up, resigned.

 

‘Lulu, tell me who you mean. Who is this man who is smiling at you?’

 

‘I don’t remember his name,’ said Lulu. ‘But he comes with Jane, and he walks with a stick. And he likes me. He really likes me.’” [163-165]

 

 

Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (1999, Warner Books). Excerpts selected by Robert Traer. 

Jane Goodall's spiritual confirmation

In her autobiography Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Jane Goodall writes:

 

“Many years ago, in the spring of 1974, I visited the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. There were not many people around, and it was quiet and still inside. I gazed in silent awe at the great Rose Window, glowing in the morning sun. All at once the cathedral was filled with a huge volume of sound: an organ playing magnificently for a wedding taking place in a distant corner. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I had always loved the opening theme; but in the cathedral, filling the entire vastness, it seemed to enter and possess my whole self. It was as though the music itself was alive.

 

“That moment, a suddenly captured moment of eternity, was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy of the mystic. How could I believe it was the chance gyrations of bits of primeval dust that led up to that moment in time—the cathedral soaring to the sky; the collective inspiration and faith of those who caused it to be built; the advent of Bach himself; the brain, his brain, that translated truth into music; and the mind that could, as mine did then, comprehend the whole inexorable progression of evolution? Since I cannot believe that this was the result of chance, I have to admit anti-chance. And so, I must believe in a guiding power in the universe—in other worlds, I must believe in God.” [pages xiii-xiv]

 

Through the years I have encountered people and been involved in events that have had huge impact, knocked off rough corners, lifted me to the heights of joy, plunged me into the depth of sorrow and anguish, taught me to laugh, especially at myself—in other words, my life experiences and the people with whom I shared them have been my teachers. At time I have felt like a helpless bit of flotsam, at one moment stranded in a placed backwater that knew not, cared not, that I was there, then swept out to be hurled about in an unfeeling sea. At other times I felt I was being sucked under by strong, unknowing currents toward annihilation. Yet somehow, looking back through my life, with its downs and its ups, its despairs and its joys, I believe that I was following some overall plan. To be sure there were many times when I strayed from the course, but I was never truly lost. It seems to me now that the flotsam speck was being gently nudged or fiercely blown along a very specific route by an unseen, intangible Wind. The flotsam speck that was—that is—me.” [2-3]

 

After World War II Jane began to attend courses on the teachings of Theosophy. She writes: “I was especially drawn to the concepts of karma and reincarnation, because I was still trying very hard to make sense of the horrors of the war. If karma was operating, Hitler and the Nazis would pay for their crimes in some future life, while those who were killed in battle or tortured in the death camps may have been paying for former transgressions. They would then either be reborn to a better life or to some kind of heaven or paradise. I had never been able to believe that God would give us poor frail humans only one chance at making it—that we would be assigned to some kind of hell because we failed during one experience of mortal life.” [32]

 

Jane’s ecstatic experience in Notre Dame occurred in 1974, after she had divorced her first husband and the father of her only child. Later in her autobiography she asks: “Was there a guiding force in the universe, a creator of matter and thus of life itself? Was there a purpose to life on planet earth? And if so, what role were we human supposed to play in the overall picture? In particular, what was my role to be.”

 

She responds to these questions in her next paragraph. “There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on earth. We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a ‘tale told by an idiot,’ a purposeless emergence of life-forms including the clever, greedy, selfish, and unfortunately destructive species that we call Homo sapiens—the ‘evolutionary goof.’ Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, ‘There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.’ In other words, a plan a purpose to it all.

 

“As I thought about these ultimate questions during the trying time of my divorce, I realized that my experience in the forest, my understanding of the chimpanzees, had given me a new perspective. I personally was utterly convinced that there was a great spiritual power that we call God, Allah, or Brahma, although I knew, equally certainly, that my finite mind could never comprehend its form or nature.” [92-95]

Excerpts from Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, (1999, Warner Books), selected by Robert Traer.

Entering the void: Fenwick excerpt #20

Honorable Judges, before you close this case, we would like to call again Dr Peter Fenwick to share evidence from one final witness:

Dr. Fenwick: Alain Forget is a philosopher who lives in Monaco where he teaches a small group of students. He began meditating from the age of 20. He was 21 when he met his first Teacher. During this phase, he would meditate in many of France's cathedrals. His medication method was to observe his mind and to let go of thoughts as they arose.

Alain Forget

His second Teacher is a remarkable man who spent a number of years in his early teens with a Tibetan monk in Tibet. He did not return to France until his late adolescence. Forget talks to him regularly.

Forget has experienced what he calls entering the void. He has also written a book titled How to Get Out of this World Alive (Forget, 2008), in which he describes his philosophy. He has developed, he says, a number of methods, which can clear his students’ past mental traumas and allow them to reach what he believes is a higher level of consciousness, an area of no space, no time.

Those who have entered this void, he says, have a continuous core of joy at their center. They have lost their overwhelming sense of ‘I’ and their consciousness is no longer identified with their ego. They seem to be at a different level.

Forget is able to "transmit light" to his students. When he does this, he says he enters a different mental state of no space, no time in which others see him as radiating light, love, and energy. His students perceive light of various colors surrounding him and feel energy running within them (Fenwick, 2019). He describes this state as ‘dying to his ego’. When Forget ‘dies’, which he does on a daily basis, he explores the 'no space no time' dimension of the post-death world, sometimes with his teacher.

Forget has allowed himself to be examined by scientists when he was in this state. They looked at changes in his brain function, via EEG and fMRI, as he gave light. They also researched how his student’s brains were responding as he transmitted it (Fenwick et al., 2018).

The results of these examinations show that Forget’s brain activity changes dramatically when he gives light. Faster brain rhythms, high gamma activity, were seen at a high amplitude, spreading widely across his brain. This is a
distinctive and very unusual picture. Analysis of his brain and of a student’s brain together suggested that during the transfer of light, their brains’ activity became entangled. It was apparent that Forget was driving certain areas of the student’s brain, and that the student was responding with an alteration to Forget’s brain areas. (Fenwick et al 2018).

Since 'entering the void', Forget says that he is no longer afraid of death. When he stands back and enters the void, he becomes multi-dimensional. At times, he explores 'no space no time' with his teacher.

These levels correlate with another state of being which he enters and which he says has a special quality to it. He also states that at his physical death he will permanently enter this 'no space no time' area which he defines as the area into which all humans who have entered the void will go. But, he insists, this area has nothing to do with time and space.

So here is a man, Your Honor, who says he has experienced “death” on many occasions, and who is able to describe no-time-no-space (the afterlife) in detail on his return through the limitations of his current filter [his physical body and mind].

Judge: I see that the Counsel for the skeptics wishes to raise a question.

Counsel for the skeptics: Your Honor, this is all hokum-pokum, woo-woo, all disturbed brain function

Dr. Fenwick: It has all been recorded on EEGs and fMRIs (Fenwick et al., 2018). Forget, like certain other individuals (Martin, 2019), has developed special aptitudes: the light he gives and the experience of a refined mental state which correlates with very unusual brain functioning, the alteration of his filter. This has been shown and verified scientifically. He has the capacity to transfer this light to many people near him and at a distance. That is not hokum.

Judge: What say you to this?

Counsel for the skeptics: These phenomena are not recognized by science.

Dr. Fenwick: Many scientists accept that our present reductionist science is not wrong but incomplete, and that it cannot answer all the anomalies ("Galileo Commission Report", 2019), especially unknown energy level anomalies, which are found and experienced.

Judge: I find the case proved, on the grounds of being beyond reasonable doubt. Actually, it adds momentum to my previous call, for a new science of consciousness, which remains open and valid.

 

Fenwick, P. (2019). Shining Light on Transcendence: The unconventional journey of a Neuroscientist. White Crow Books.

Fenwick, P., Di Bernardi Luft, C., Ioannides, A., & Bhattacharya, J. (2018). Neural Correlates of Induced Light Experience during Meditation: A Pilot Hyperscanning Study. Neuroquantology, 16(12), 76-86. https://doi.org/10.14704/nq.2018.16.12.1318.

Forget, A. (2008). How to get out of this world alive (1st ed.) Lulu.

Galileo Commission Report. “Galileo Commission: Expanding the Scope of Science”. (2019). Retrieved 1 July 2021, from https://galileocommission.org/report/. 

Martin, J. (2019). The Finders. Integration Press.

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern. The complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Summary judgment: Fenwick excerpt #19

Chief Judge: The most difficult and responsible moment for this inquiry has come.

We need to focus on the fact that we are here to demonstrate that there is an afterlife, and therefore focus on the meaning of the words after and life, and above all on maintaining individuality after the body has ceased to have its own physical functions. I remind you that we are looking for evidence and must keep in mind that the concept of evidence has different meanings in different contexts. We listened to the evidence of experts who presented arguments only at first sight conflicting.

What convinced me of the words of Dr Fenwick is that phenomena such as remote viewing and precognition have now been proven to be verifiable and repeatable even when they are approached with scientific method and rigor. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to explain them with a model that is unanimously recognized or based on currently known laws of physics. Moreover, precognition and remote viewing do not prove that there is an existence after death.

On the other hand, the descriptions of near-death experiences and reincarnation are interesting. These tell us without a doubt that some individuals have experienced a reality different from the one we know, and that others seem to have inherited an identity lived by individuals other than themselves. These experiences are told by people from different ages, cultures, and education.

Although I am convinced that what was reported can constitute evidence for life beyond death beyond reasonable doubt, Dr Moretti has pointed out to us that, when we describe the experiences of facing death (NDE, ADE, or reincarnation), they are based on human stories. We humans are limited in describing what could exist in another reality. However, Dr Moretti has proposed a model that can offer an explanation.

The proposed model suggests three main aspects to reflect on:

a) the concept of individuality as a localization in space and time,

b) access to a dimension without space and time through the removal of sensory interaction,

c) the condition of humans as a filter for that dimension.

Our individuality is associated with a form of energy that represents the design of one's existence, or rather the functions that the body and mind can express. This energy realizes an existence which, in the interaction with the material world, is localized in space and time. When body and mind reduce their interaction with the outside world, the probability of accessing a dimension without time and space increases, and therefore so does access to information of the past, of the future, and of the whole universe. Dying therefore means accessing information embedded in a reality present everywhere and anytime.

When you access this reality without space and time, you acquire that information, but when you return to the material reality, this information is filtered by the human capacity to understand it.

What we heard made me reflect on two things:

Remote viewing and precognition have many aspects in common with NDE and reincarnation. These aspects can be nicely framed in the proposed model. That is, if we insert the stories and experiments in the model that provides access to a dimension without time and space, the different aspects can be explained through presently accepted scientific laws. The important thing is to accept the assumption that the human condition, when interacting with matter located in time and space, acts as a filter to, let us say, a wider reality.

The approaches we heard from the two experts, one based on physical laws and the other based on witness statements, are indeed compatible. The first implies that after death an individual loses identity and localization, joining a whole that exists anytime and everywhere. Identity has meaning only when localized and therefore filtered by a material condition. Reincarnation can be explained as a partial projection of the global dimension, or the life of a deceased, through the filter of the living individual that can interact in the present. The difference between reincarnation and NDE is the different coherence levels between the global information and the space-time localization of the filter.

Having said that, as a judge of this court, I declare that:

1) When we adopt a scientific method based on the measurement and verification of events, the evidence based on the stories is not sufficient to prove that an individual's consciousness continues beyond death. But it does suggest it.

2) Phenomena such as remote viewing and precognition have been shown to have a scientifically accepted validity, even if difficult to frame them into models unanimously recognized as valid.

3) The proposed model based on the concept of identity localized in space and time, and on access to a dimension without space and time, provides an excellent scientific context to reconcile interpretations from different communities and cultures.

Therefore, while not scientifically proven, I declare that we have evidence that supports the existence of an afterlife beyond reasonable doubt.

But the discussion is unfinished, and I call for action in the future.

We need to focus on aspects of the model in order to design experiments that can guide us to a deeper understanding of the links between the material and immaterial world. We need to put our efforts into reconciling the prejudices from the different scientific communities and open our minds to new discoveries.

Ideas and paradigms can be both useful and a hindrance, that is why it is very important to remember and reflect on their assumptions and suppositions. Reality in today’s physics cannot be contained in space-time and matter only. Old dualities integrate more and more to a complementary, synthetic, organic view. Emphasis is now on the interrelations of part and whole rather than parts only. More importantly a new kind of science emerges where the study of nature ought to be complemented by the very nature of our study, bringing self-reflectivity and consciousness back to its fundamental role in nature.

Adding a non-local dimension to the local one in consciousness studies will prove essential for eventually establishing a Science of Consciousness that will consider reference to wholeness as its most fundamental activity. This non-local dimension will have the same significance for the proposed new science as understanding quantum nonlocal reality had for physics today.

Dear friends, what I have learned in this trial is that maybe I am you, and you are me. We probably were the same thing in the past and probably we will be in the future. And that we see ourselves as different only because we are located now and in this place. Last but not least, I thank you all.

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern. The complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Nonlocality wholeness: Fenwick excerpt #18

 Chief Judge: I need more evidence and call for a second opinion.

Two entangled physicists, Dr Chaoticus and Herr Dr Dr Prof Quantiger along with Professor Lumina of the mathematical neuroscience department. Hoping to discuss the state of the art of their sciences on the topic they discover their need for a new kind of science altogether, if they want progress with a science of consciousness.

Chief Judge: Welcome, please take a seat and let us start without any ado, my question to you is does consciousness survive physical death?

(Drs Chaoticus and Quantidger miraculously occupy the same seat in superposition and start talking in a confusingly simultaneous way.)

Chief Judge: Please end your entangled state and let’s do things as classically as possible. I cannot follow a discourse based on quantum logic.

Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Sorry, sorry, your honor, it is an occupational habit. ... Now, concerning your question, according to prevailing standards of materialistic orthodoxy, the brain is the seat of consciousness and the self, so if we write down the governing equations of the Hamiltonian for information and quantum entropy in a ...

Chief Judge: Please hold, I call Prof. Lumina for her testimony. I see her objection.

Prof. Lumina: Yes, your honor, in my field things are not so naively easy (Satel & Lilienfeld, 2015). No one has an equation for the brain. Moreover, the mainstream idea that the brain is the seat of consciousness or that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, an emergent property of neural activity, has been challenged from the early days of neuroscience. Severe brain injuries, brain deformations and more importantly veridical experiences that defy space and time as we know it (out of body experiences “OBEs”, cognition during coma, Near Death Experiences “NDEs”, "ADEs" and End of Life Experiences) point towards a more holistic view of consciousness. As we saw earlier, and the brain as the seat of consciousness has been challenged as a “mereological fallacy” recently (Bennett et al., 2009).

Chief Judge: By mereological fallacy, you mean? ...

Prof. Lumina: This fallacy is to assume that a whole is a mere addition of its constituting parts and that studying a part in detail can tell us all about the whole. In neuroscience, in the case of the brain/consciousness debate, this is an implicitly assumed hidden assumption that has been uncovered and highlighted by Bennett, Hacker and others (Bennett et al., 2009).

Chief Judge: So, you say that to ascribe thinking or consciousness to the brain when it applies to the whole animal is committing a form of the so-called “mereological fallacy”.

Prof. Lumina: Exactly, a holistic approach, on the contrary, would attribute consciousness not to an organ or behavior but to the animal as a whole.

Chief Judge: Then the question arises as to where to draw the line in the animal kingdom. Are our pets conscious? The lower mammals?

Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Your honor, you cannot stop there. How about the animals without a brain or even nervous system, like Physarum and Amoebas? Some colleagues of ours have demonstrated problem solving and decision making, a clear sign of intelligence, in such complex systems (Schumann, 2020; Trewavas, 2015). So would it not be legitimate to attribute consciousness or pre-consciousness to all physical entities in the universe, as the many schools of panpsychism (Skrbina, 2005; Tarnas, 1993) try to? If so, do non-physical entities qualify too? If consciousness is nonlocalized where is it? Is it localized in a wider space, the whole animal? Is it spread out in a vast environmental and social container or its interactions? In the cosmos? Or is it really beyond space and time?

Chief Judge: Order, order, the task at hand is not to solve the consciousness conundrum but to access whether self, human-self, survives after death!

Prof. Lumina: Well, your honor, they do have a point. What they suggest can be a working hypothesis leading us to ask what the necessary conditions are for a localized consciousness such as ourselves, that ensure survival after physical death and disintegration.

Chief Judge: For that you need to elaborate on localization and locality - things that I was taking for granted seem elusive now.- ..Please go on. What does physics tells us about this?

Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Yes, we know all about it! The nonlocal nature of quantum reality is the hottest topic these days (Bell & Gao, 2016; Bohm & Peat, 2010; Nadeau & Kafatos, 2001; Penrose, 1994). In order to address this problem, we need to discriminate between the different qualities of the meaning of nonlocal and nonlocality. First by locality we mean interaction and relation of spatial proximity. A step further we consider the global as distinct from the local, i.e. a whole consisting of parts that occupies a larger space than its parts. By classical nonlocality we mean that there exist correlations and relations that connect parts to the whole in larger space and time scales. But also we have quantum nonlocality where events and relations are not contained in space-time at all, they too are nonlocal but in addition they are non-spatial or non-temporal or both.

Chief Judge: Let’s see how to understand that. Say, I live far from my brother’s family and while I am asleep my niece is born which makes me an uncle instantaneously although I am not aware of the reality of this connection. Is this relation nonlocal in the classical or in the quantum sense?

Dr. Chaoticus: Classical! Dr. Quantidger: Quantum! (looking at each other intensely and nodding at once)

Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Sorry your honour, we got far too disentangled for a moment. Well, actually this is not a physical relation, it is more legal or conceptual. But we know now that concepts are behaving more like quantum entities under the laws of quantum probabilities rather than classical entities that follow the Aristotelian, Boolean, logic (Fuchs & Khrennikov, 2021; Aerts et al., 2018).

Prof. Lumina: This is the new and fast developing field of ‘Quantum Cognition’, not to be confused with theories of ‘quantum mind’ or ‘quantum consciousness’. In addition to the meta-modern reality of quantum theories, new experimental facts of how concepts are constructed and interact reveal a striking similarity with quantum entities.

Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Yes, exactly, we deal with a whole that is different from its parts, and which cannot uniquely or fully be deconstructed into independent parts. Both realms – quantum cognition and quantum physics – share the same mathematical and probabilistic structure and underlying logic. A non-Boolean, non-Aristotelian, logic where complementarity (“none-and-both”) rather than binary (“either-neither”) is the rule. Quantum Cognition provides a novel understanding of the roots of decision making, i.e. the role of hidden assumptions, and the context-based bias of otherwise unobserved, or sub-conscious, conditioning (Basios & Gunji, 2017). We see that clearly if we consider an orthocomplimentary lattice endowed with an associative ring algebra of ...

Chief Judge: Order! Order! Stop! No equations are allowed in my court. Argue with your ideas not your published results! Give me an idea of classical and quantum nonlocality.

Prof. Lumina: If I may, your honor, The global relations within a whole are the domain of investigations of complex systems and complexity science (Nicolis & Nicolis, 2012). We have established by now that the whole - classical or quantum - is more and different than its parts. We understand that there are emergent properties that can only be ascribed to the whole and not to the parts. Most statistical properties, like the temperature, are like that. Classical systems’ patterns that emerge during self-organization are another (Prigogine & Stengers, 2018). Nonlocal classical correlations are also the kind of relationship that two classical objects share when at a distance. The classical fields (electromagnetic, gravity etc) are such nonlocal entities. But also, for example, a pair of gloves, where one of them was forgotten at home and another taken on a trip, still share parity connection (one is still left-handed the other is still right-handed).

In the quantum world though, we experience another kind of nonlocality that does not depend on the spatial distance at all. In quantum reality the observed phenomenon and the act of its observation are intrinsically linked. The fact of quantum nonlocality is exemplified best in the phenomenon of entanglement (Gilder, 2008). Entangled pairs of quantum entities share observable qualities independently of their spacial relationship. But here, in contradistinction to the classical pair of gloves, their parity, left-right handedness, will be created instantaneously for both when either one of them is observed. Here we have a whole (the entangled pair) that is not only more and different than its parts but also indifferent to its spatial extension. John Bell has mathematically analyzed the statistics of entanglement and has proposed tests, the ‘Bell tests’ (or ‘Bell inequalities’) which quantify precisely the effects of nonlocal interactions (Bell & Gao, 2016; Gilder, 2008). So far they have been verified again and again. Entanglement constitutes a very well documented phenomenon and is a paradox for the other great contemporary theory of physics, that of General Relativity.

Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: And recently leading physicists suggest that entanglement is related to black-holes communicating via their singularities, like wormholes (Adam R. Brown & Susskind, 2018)

Chief Judge: Stop or you will be fined for contempt of court. We are talking about the Self here!

Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Apologies your honor... Anyway, what we want to point out is that the real Self might not be located in space-time; it might be a pure state that coordinates its localized “avatar” the ever-changing but coherent spatial-temporal pattern of physico-biological entities that we comprehend as our localized self from ‘somewhere’, where there is no here or there.

Chief Judge: It seems to me that you either want to throw equations on my face or talk in an esoteric and apocryphally obscure language that only you understand.

Prof. Lumina: If I may your honor. Actually there are manifestations of nonlocal Consciousness. The novelist Aldous Huxley called nonlocal Mind “Mind at Large”. In often quoted “Doors of Perception” he writes:

“Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle [...] of consciousness” (Huxley, 1954).

Russell Targ

It is exactly this 'Mind at Large', that is a non-temporal and nonlocal wholeness (Targ et al., 2002). Introducing –self– reflexivity we can approach consciousness research on a nonlocal level, in addition to the local one (Radin, 2009). Nonlocality of Mind then will complement our findings of which specific groups of neurons fire when we are in love, or when we solve equations. These firings don’t tell us much about why these neurons get aroused in the first place, or why they often fire in synchrony. Meaning, correlations and understanding are not fully inside space-time.

As Emilios Bouratinos puts it: “Mind then understands because it is able to stand under the things it is preoccupied with, while actually observing them from above. The non-local components of reality illumine their local manifestations” (Bouratinos, 2018).

From the perspective of local interactions we tend to be astonished how nonlocal connections arise in a world of separate entities and how such evidence can even be possible. We can change perspective and along with quantum theorist David Bohm (the one who inspired John Bell to come up with his tests) we can ask “since everything in the world is interconnected, how come everything looks so separate?” Bohm’s theory accounts for many conceived anomalies such as the influence of mind over matter (Bohm & Peat, 2010). Evidence on that and the possibility of a nonlocal consciousness operating, remotely, in the physical world has been accumulating ever since Bohm asked such questions.

Chief Judge: You say it has been accumulated but I see very little of this evidence reported in the mainstream literature. I can sense that you are using an argument that would ascribe the separate self as a local instance of some cosmic nonlocal higher Self. Is that so?

Prof. Lumina: Indeed, your honor, but first let me answer your hesitation with an analogy. You probably know about the origin of the “Whorfian hypothesis” (Hunt & Agnoli, 1991). You see in Liberia , the aborigine tribe of ‘the Bassa’ have only two words for their ‘colors’, they comprehend and categorize all objects as, say, light or dark. These people cannot recognize any other color; although physiologically they do not suffer from color blindness! The physical filter is the same as ours yet their mental filter is not. And modern anthropology testifies to this with a plethora of other examples. Is their reality different?

Like the Bassa tribe we cannot see what is beyond our conceptual radar although evidence is shining clear. It took almost half a century for the quantum physicists’ tribe to accept nonlocality as a working hypothesis and test it. Maybe, hopefully, it will take less to observe the nonlocality of consciousness.

Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Yes! To put it in another way in defense of our esteemed colleague: The relation between symbolic language and the dynamics of thinking is still problematic and at this stage the need to consider context, meaning, attention, focus, and the role of emotions and feelings is becoming obvious. A materialistic-reductionist perspective tries to abolish all such complex interplay as mere illusion, trickery, and/or fallacies of judgement. But the bilateral feedback between reality and the construction of reality takes a central place in our ‘meta-modern’ contemporary physics. This relation cannot be dismissed simply attributing it to the idols of group-thinking, needing to conform to the norm, sensory illusion or cognitive bias. It is a fundamental interplay between the subjective and objective that calls for an expanded view of both

Looking at data with the wrong paradigm we arrive at paradoxes yet we can never separate data from context construction, and we can never observe raw, unconceptualized, content. As Isabelle Stengers observes, and quoted in (Bouratinos, 2018):

“for finite knowledge, there will always be a gap between what comes into existence and what can be defined.”

It might seem contradictory but it follows that reality is on a par with Leibniz’s “Principle of Sufficient Reason” which stipulates that the Universe embodies the necessary and sufficient conditions for anything to be as it is, including its logic. That’s why pushing ahead with a Self-Reflective Interdisciplinary Science of Consciousness needn’t wait for the full working out of its theoretical tenets, justifications, and specific implications ("Galileo Commission Report", 2019). It’s 100% OK if we still struggle with an uncertain emerging picture of reality. This is preferable to an illusory certainty.

Chief Judge: Hmm we are reaching the end of this session and your evidence points to deeper ontological and epistemological considerations. You made a crack to my reality filter for sure. Let’s see if light will shine through on our case.

Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger: Right! That’s the key here Light! The possibility that Self is a coherent indestructible quantum-like Monad, something like a superposition of pure states of light-like q-bits, (Kauffman & Radin, 2021; D’Ariano & Faggin, 2020) can be traced if we could launch a project that would just probe the random event field anomalous cross-correlations (Nelson, 1998; Nelson, 2019) in a framework of ...

Chief Judge: Order! Order! Session closed! Session closed! Go back to your entangled state, Dr. Dr. Chaoticus and Quantidger!

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern. The complete essay with footnotes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.