Interface model of consciousness: Cook excerpt #10

Nick Cook writes: Professor of Cognitive Sciences Donald Hoffman likens our experience of reality to the relationship we forge with the ‘graphical user interface’ of a computer, its screen²⁸.

In the classical physics model, everything we perceive involves illusion. What we see is not a direct representation of the objects in our vision; it is a translation formed by our brain’s interpretation of the light reflected off the objects. This is high school physics and well understood. The reality represented by those objects – and the meaning we attach to that reality – will be different depending on who is doing the observing.

In Hoffman’s ‘conscious realism’ model, we don’t need knowledge of the ‘guts of the machine (a laptop, for example) – its hardware and its software – in order to interact with it. Instead, we forge a relationship with the icons (and apps) it displays on- screen. We ourselves create the icons, but the icons themselves, being an on- screen representation, aren’t conscious. At heart, conscious realism states that consciousness is primary and the physical world – our world of matter – emerges from it.

This, Hoffman says, gives rise to the idea of ‘conscious agents’. “The way one agent in a network perceives, depends on the way some other agents act,” he tells us²⁹. In this world, our brains function as ‘reducing valves’ to give us ‘just the reality we need’ for ‘survival’. To take this a step further, we agree on reality, because we’ve all evolved the same reality interface.

It is this interface that, over eons, has allowed us to play the same game. It is also the process that provides us with our perception of consensus, objective reality.

What Hoffman wants to do is develop maths, an algorithm, to allow him to unpick the ‘source code of the game’ – leading, potentially, to technologies by which we can access the ‘greater reality’ in the parts of the machine we don’t normally experience.

Meantime, ‘crude methods’ – methods we might refer to loosely as ‘technologies’, as well, including meditation and psychedelic drugs (even though it might be hard to think of a psychedelic as a technology) – give us a limited capacity to do the same thing.

So, where – and what - is this ‘interface’?

The light that enters our eyes projects upside-down on to the retina, the sensory membrane at the back of the eyeball. There, millions of cells, each adapted to pick out one of three primary colours, send signals to the occipital lobe in the back of the head, where a trillion synapses help forge them into our world of vision. A similar sensor-fusion process takes place inside the brain with inputs from our other senses.

Matter, as we have already seen, is 99.9 per cent empty space. Dr Robert Lanza, whom we met earlier, wants us to be ‘really clear’ on how and where we forge our construed, consensus picture of ‘objective reality’: with and within our minds; and that the world we perceive to be a world of separation – an ‘out there reality’ of trees, houses, tables, rocks, animals, things; and an ‘in here reality’ of us – doesn’t exist. The icons on our user-interface, then – of which, per Hoffman, there are an infinite number and variety – might be said to arise out of the vibrating energy grids we also encountered earlier, informed, as they are, by the quantum magic that permits an infinite range of sub-atomic probabilities to collapse into the particles that make up the things – the material objects we all agree upon – in a format that contributes to our sense of hard, cold reality. Here, Hoffman says, our brains filter out anything not to do with survival.

Here, too, ‘survival’ isn’t just about the physical things – food, water, shelter, warmth etc. – we agree on for the furtherance of our species, but a more tenuous consensus of colour, taste, aesthetics, our sense or right and wrong ... love, even. But you’ll find little discussion of what makes this, or any other definition of our reality in a textbook, because it relies on something science can’t agree on to begin with: consciousness.

The question at the heart of this essay – whether human consciousness can survive permanent bodily death – hinges on the ability of ‘the mind’ to exist outside of the body.

Consciousness, because we are immersed in it and it in us, is, essentially, non- provable. But anomalous aspects of it that manifest as paranormal phenomena are – which is what makes them so important. They are the clues we must examine from the outside in that alert us to a fundamental feature of existence – the idea that there are depths to our everyday reality that we don’t customarily see; and that existence is based on a set of commonly agreed protocols that give us, for the moment, all the reality we can handle – no more, no less – via a panoply of agreed ‘everyday icons’.

But the evidence, too, says there’s some malware in the machine that’s throwing icons we don’t all agree upon on to the user interface – what we might, perhaps, refer to as ‘rogue icons’.

These manifest as ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, angels and demons, miracle cures and any number of ‘anomalies’ that mainstream science wants to tell us aren’t ‘real’.

Except, since they exist as shared experiences for so many, at some level, they have to be.

28 See The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes, Donald D. Hoffman, Allen Lane, 2019.
29 Op.cit. p.184.

 
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. 

Mapping the cosmos: Cook excerpt #9

Nick Cook writes: Science has a long history of compartmentalisation. The chief architect of the revolution that has marked our science paradigm of the last 250 years was the 17th Century French natural philosopher René Descartes, who pronounced that mind and matter were separate. ‘Cartesian dualism’ has coloured our perception of the world ever since and maintained other divisions besides. Thanks to dualism, science has been left to explore the universe with objective detachment, leaving the business of spirit to religion. In this paradigm, it was tacitly agreed that each would stay out of the other’s way.

The cosmos as mapped by the classical mechanics of Descartes’ contemporary, the English natural philosopher (as he also referred to himself) Sir Isaac Newton, was – and still is – a cold, detached place that operates much as a giant clock. Until the emergence of quantum mechanics at the beginning of the 20th Century, we, the observer, had no capacity to affect it. Even now, officially, that capacity is limited to the micro-world of particles and atoms. Consciousness, if it had any role at all in this universe, was deemed to have somehow arisen from the matter made up of these atoms and particles, even though matter itself could be seen to occupy a fraction of its endless expanse.

The cold hand of Cartesian dualism still predominates – especially in the laboratory, where its unwritten rules state that objective data are the only data that count and only then if the experiments that derive them are repeatable. If Ingo’s hypothesis is true, however, it would make the alternative landscape emerging out of my science exploration of Phase 2, where next to nothing is straightforward – and science is far more squirrelly, actually, than a lot of scientists would want us to believe – much more understandable. Because in Ingo’s ‘non-immediate realm’, the precise opposite of the Cartesian world held true – everything was a little bit (or, at times, a lot) weird; and next to nothing was repeatable; the paranormal operates on what seems to be its own terms, but its impacts in our 3D/4D space can unquestionably be physical.

If we extend its range to a wider set of phenomena beyond those associated (rightly or wrongly) with the dead - to ESP, the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), the study of cryptozoology (mythological creatures such as werewolves, bigfoot, the yeti, etc that are said to roam parts of the planet as ‘cryptids’) and discarnate entities characterised as angels and demons – then these phenomena, too, can be said to ‘leak’ into our realm, just as the information pertaining to the Titanic tragedy did.

Except, per Ingo’s hypothesis, the interconnection between the two worlds meant we had to stop looking on them as two but as one – no more ‘normal’ and ‘paranormal’. In this model of the universe, we needed to consider an aspect of it in which the reality we customarily experience gets ‘bent out of shape’ in the presence of certain kinds of anomalous phenomena. In this small, but quirky corner of the ‘reality envelope’ – populated as it had become by my Phase 2 research data – reality is both ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ (ghosts that come and go), distorted by odd time effects (the missing time reported by UFO abductees), populated by ‘miracle cures’ (examples of spontaneous healing) and benign and malign ‘intelligences’ (good and bad spirits).

As I grappled to come to terms with the features of this bizarre and slippery corner of existence, I wrestled, too, with what to call it. One term I had encountered in my literature trawl was a ‘metaphorical reality’, another was a ‘non-literal reality’. But neither of these seemed to do total justice to what the data indicated were three sets of conditions that appeared both to underpin the phenomena and to influence them: location, environment and culture.

Eric W. Davis

Jacques Vallée

This corner of the reality envelope had been deeply explored by two researchers whose pioneering work I had come across frequently in my research: that of Jacques Vallée and Eric W, Davis, who had charted the hinterland of this place in a paper on the ‘physics of high strangeness’, a model whose core features are found in six layers²⁷:

Layer 1: Physical: the encounter (usually, but not always with a UFO) exhibits physical effects and leaves physical traces in the environment.

Layer 2: Anti-physical: Effects that manifest in our 3D/4D space but conflict with Layer 1, e.g. instantaneous appearance/vanishing and producing missing time.

Layer 3: Psychological: The tendency of witnesses to rationalise an unreal encounter in rational terms – until faced with the inescapable conclusion that the object/phenomenon is unknown.

Layer 4: Physiological: The phenomenon is reported to cause effects perceived or felt by humans as: sounds (e.g. buzzing, rushing), burns, paralysis, extreme heat or cold, metallic taste, loss of volition, severe headache etc.

Layer 5: Psychic: Involves a class of phenomena with the encounter e.g. impressions of communication without a direct sensory channel, poltergeist type, levitation, premonitions, healing etc.

Layer 6: Cultural: Concerns the way society reacts to such encounters, including secondary effects, such as hoaxes, absorption into books/films, scientific theories, leading to a gradual consciousness shift in the way humans perceive ‘fantastical events’.

While this model charted the in/out, on/off, real/non-real weirdness (which is all it had ever intended to do) of what I now referred to as a ‘conditional reality set’, it hadn’t accounted for why it existed. Still needed was a model providing a cogent explanation for the interconnected, ‘as-one’ worldview Ingo had called for – one that would stop the paranormal from being treated as something separate from science.

27 Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness: A 6-layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena by Jacques F. Vallée and Eric W. Davis. 

 

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. 

 

Consciousness questions: Cook excerpt #8

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:

*Reality: By the middle of the 20th Century, physicists thought they had cracked the fundamentals of existence, but the Standard Model governing the quantum realm at its microscopic end is woefully incomplete, as is space- time/general relativity theory – how the game plays out at vast, cosmological scales. To quote the theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli: “If you want a theory of everything where it all fits, I see no hint we’re even close – zero.”²⁰ 

*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.

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.

Military paranormal research: Cook excerpt #6

Nick COok writes: In laying the foundations of a modest research effort that would include subjective evidence I was able to tap a professional body that had attached great value to subjective data: the military-intelligence community. In particular, through some connections that had arisen out of my earlier writings⁶, I had been put in touch with – and subsequently came to know – Ingo Swann, who had been one of the original founders of the US military-intelligence community’s remote viewing programme. 

 

Ingo Swann

Remote viewing was a methodology that had permitted the US to conduct intelligence-gathering via the use of techniques that might perhaps be described as ‘clairvoyant’. I considered the experience of remote viewers to be timely and relevant, because, knowing the military, a strong case could be made to say that it would not have thrown good money year-on-year at a technique that didn’t work.

Remote viewing, in one guise or another, had been funded since the early 1970s and had patently worked, because it had remained in existence – fully funded by the US government – for the best part of two decades.

And lest an accusation were proffered that RV had been a particular whim or foible of the US intelligence community, it could be demonstrably proven that the Soviet Union had been engaged in remote viewing – and other paranormal activity deemed to have some kind of military purpose – for even longer. As part of anyone’s due diligence on this, a book called ‘ESP Wars: East and West’ ought to be required reading⁷. In it, several of the individuals who had, at one time or other, led these programmes in their respective countries were brought together during a narrow time window in geopolitical history – the 1990s - when thawed relations between the two sides had allowed for discussions on particular aspects of the Cold War standoff.

6 The Hunt for Zero Point, Nick Cook, published by Century, 2001.

7  ESP Wars East & West: An Account of the Military Use of Psychic Espionage as Narrated by the Key Russian and American Players by Edwin C. May, PhD; Victor Rubel, PhD; Joseph McMoneagle, PhD; and Loyd Auerbach, MS, Panta Rei, an imprint of Crossroad Press, 2015.

On the Russian side, parapsychological military activity culminated in the late 1980s with the formulation of a special unit – Military Unit 10003 led by Lt. Gen. Alexei Savin – tasked with exploiting the capabilities of what Savin described as ‘extraordinarily gifted psychic individuals’ for military purposes.

Under the direction of Army General Mikhail Moiseyev, the Chief of the General Staff (the Soviet equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Savin was ordered to hone Military Unit 10003 into the Soviet military-intelligence community’s ‘centre of excellence’ for the development of ‘extraordinary human potential’, including what is known as ‘psi functioning’, the so-called psychic aspects of our nature. Unit 10003 employed an equivalent number of personnel as the US remote viewing programme had at its height.

A very high level of secrecy was established for Savin’s department from the outset. All of the information was reported only to the Chief of the General Staff and was compartmentalised amidst deep secrecy. “We were so successful at disappearing that almost a decade went by before the first vague rumours about our work filtered through to the press,” Savin told his US counterparts⁸.

Even after the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991, this led to remote viewers being forward deployed with Russian military units during the Second Chechen War of 1995. “In Chechnya, I would test the work of my most talented psychics and instructors,” Savin explained. “After the Chechen War, we can now boldly assert that on the whole ESP is a proven and effective tool in the arsenal, not only of strategic military means, but of tactical and operational ones.”⁹

8 Op.cit., p.264.
9 Op.cit., p.288.

As part of my continued due diligence in this area, I was led to a declassified 1983 US Department of the Army study entitled ‘Analysis and Assessment of (the) Gateway Process’¹⁰.

The report was written by US Army Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell in an apparent bid to ‘sell’ the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, INSCOM, on the ‘Gateway Experience’ developed by the Virginia-based Monroe Institute (along with a technique the institute had developed to bring the brain’s two hemispheres to a state of coherence allegedly permitting altered states of consciousness) – this as a tool to acquaint the service with the mechanics of what it paraphrased as ‘astral projection’.

As McDonnell explained, the 25 pages of the Gateway Report (although one page, to the chagrin of conspiracy theorists, had been missing from the copy held in the CIA’s files until recently) was designed, at a high level of overview, to provide a ‘lucid model’ of how consciousness functions so as to put out-of-body states into the ‘language of physical science’ – this to ‘remove the stigma of its occult connotations.’

10 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf

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.

 

Questions and purposes: Cook excerpt #5

Nick Cook writes: My informal research to this point had furnished me with the following observations and questions: 

 

*Science doesn’t know what consciousness is – nobody knows.

*Science and philosophical enquiry give us two schools of thought: consciousness – our experience of ‘mind’ - is either generated within us, i.e. via electrochemical reactions in our brains and central nervous systems, or is external to us: our brains acting like ‘transmitter/receivers’, exchanging data much as a computer does with ‘the cloud’.

*This gives rise to a further complication: is consciousness the fundamental, underlying ‘substrate of reality’ or is the material world of objects ... things?

*The trouble here is that the ‘science of reality’ is defined, in so far as it can be, by two incompatible strands of physics: the way the universe works ‘at scale’ – as stated by classical physics and Einstein’s general relativity - and quantum mechanics: its workings at the sub-atomic level. There is no ‘theory of everything’ to marry the two, leaving sizeable holes in our scientific knowledge.

*The dark energy/matter conundrum was a case in point – both dark energy and dark matter are, in effect, postulated artificial components – some have gone so far as to refer to them as ‘fudges’ - with properties that permit mainstream science to explain deviations from standard predictions. These properties do not alter the fact: we can account only for five per cent of the stuff of the universe; the rest is an abject mystery.

*With the precedent, to corrupt Wheeler, that the study of anomalies gives rise to breakthroughs in new paradigms of understanding, what would it take, I wanted my research to examine, for mainstream science to be comfortable with the study of the paranormal, whose phenomena might hold clues to breakthroughs in this impasse – as well as in many other areas – that has so successfully impeded much-needed scientific progress in the past several decades?

Here, by corollary, was what I wanted my small research programme to accomplish:

*To present the paranormal as ‘science that is not yet understood’ to facilitate a needed discussion between scientists, parapsychologists and related researchers on the true nature of reality.

*To explore consciousness as it relates to the above – what it is or might be: a, or perhaps the missing link in the formulation of a grand unified theory of physics (and, de facto, reality), linking the macro world of classical science and general relativity with the micro world of quantum mechanics.

*To determine whether there are ‘shortcuts’ to individual experiences of the ‘deeper reality’ gained through ‘experiencer data’ – the kind of subjective evidence that would normally be thrown out ‘pre-trial’, so to speak, before a ‘scientific court of law’.

*To allow silo’d scientists to talk to each other on the subject of consciousness and paranormal/esoteric phenomena using a ‘lingua franca’ understandable to outsiders and acceptable to science.

*To set the framework for a cross-disciplinary approach to our understanding of the above by – in the future - bringing scientists and experiencers together in an ‘intellectually safe’ environment, in which sensible opinions, no matter what, would be respected; this for the purpose of exploring common threads of understanding regarding the true nature of reality.

My lack of formal knowledge would be both a hindrance and a help. On the deficit side, I was entering an unknown field from a near-standing start.

But I was also coming to the subject with few, if any, preconceived notions about what was and wasn’t permitted discussion, which might, conceivably, be an advantage.

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.