Consciousness and Contentment: Understanding the lack of contentment and logical thinking in wise men or so called ‘Homo sapiens’

Abstract

We are considered to be highly evolved conscious beings, but if we look at ourselves, do we actually feel that we are there; wise men or Homo sapiens as we call ourselves? In today’s world, reward based conditioning forms our contemporary culture that deeply defines how we look at life and how we intuitively perceive our consciousness. Presently, acquisitions are our priority and we behave as narcissistic conditioned puppets and let governments and corporations rule our lives. We are hypocrites that can see, but behave blind; blinded within the realms of our short-termed thrills, joys and beliefs. Augmenting logical questioning and logical conditioning is the only way we can come out of this state that cannot be done individually, it has to be a collective effort. This paper is an attempt to understand our very own evolved consciousness and its relation to the current world with the true meaning of our existence, where we seek to understand it from a logical sense.

Keywords:  Contentment, Consciousness, Logic, Reward, Conditioning

 

The ubiquitous and fundamental nature of consciousness makes it subtle and of central importance where the manifestation takes place within the sea of its existence to shapes and forms that brings out the beauty of our consciousness (Pereira and Reddy 2017). Scientists have shown that from birth we continue to grow throughout our lives shaping and reshaping our consciousness, building our ability to achieve by means of rationality and focused approach to understand what we are. Unfortunately, we have ended up pursuing interests ranging from material possessions to impressing our social circles, seeking momentary thrills and growing our greed exponentially. The world that we live in today depends on how we are judged by our social circle and by society at large seeking to be like the other (Baumeister and Leary 1995). Our opinions and our identity today depends on our reward driven obsessive system wherein our natural tendency to logical questioning gets discouraged and we are rewarded for actions that we often don’t see the meaning of and become dedicated to seeking approval of others (Edwards 2017).  Our whole purpose of life is the life of others, which comes with reward based conditioning at an early age. Kindergarteners and first-graders demonstrate a high level of enthusiasm with their logical questioning and thinking, as they question everything around them, but as adults this curiosity fades away where the focus is on acquiring to be content of materialistic desires and beliefs (Peterson 1979).  

Lack of contentment leads to greed wherein the scope of logical thinking is diminished (Chan 2009). Politicians scare us with inaccurate claims, while corporations lure us into happily consuming toxic substances advertised along with an imagery of laughter and joy preferably from known individuals who are idolized to be perfect in society (Zaller 1999; Cawley et al 2013). To understand how we have changed, we need to go back a few years when cell phones were considered inappropriate for teenagers or for use on public transport and we could barely imagine why anyone would want to put random thoughts along with personal pictures on the internet for everyone to see. But this has changed, now about everyone is sensitized into having an active social media account and in only a few years taking selfies went from a strange and narcissistic habit to a cultural norm leading to mental health issues and suicidal cases (Alloway et al 2014; Ling and Haddon 2008); as if we opened the door way to hell. In a world with a continuous stream of tragic events we can easily be influenced by the chaos, but we no longer risk our lives in order to make a difference; our inaction kills on a daily basis while we mentally recite to ourselves the mantras we have been taught and join in the hypocrisy. We are conscious beings and we had to go through a long way to reach here; a journey which began in the stars.

Why have we become what we are? It is an existential question and the answer lies in our evolution and our manifested consciousness. We often question our consciousness with respect to all our trivial problems unknowingly seeking answers from the thoughts that reside in our subconscious. We are practically nothing and we came from nothing and there is nothing there to see when we seek consciousness. As a fundamental constant, energy exists and we see it manifested as work force, consciousness is also a fundamental constant that exists, and we observe it as an experience. In our quest for finding some sort of core of what we are, we can look even deeper and zoom in on the basic building blocks of what we are made of, but if we peer into the individual molecules that make up our cells, our findings become mysterious, not only will we not find any mysterious trace of a soul, we will also not bump into any kind of structures that science claims as tiny particles that everything else is made of.  We are waves that behave similarly to vibrations of sound or ripples in water, built in the oscillations of matter, the peaks and valleys of these quantum waves are not made of anything tangible, they are waves of probabilities. Our universe is inherently probabilistic and all the things in it cannot be 100% predicted with certainty (Villenkin 1989) but does exist as patterns or fractals (Schmitz 2002; Reddy and Pereira 2016) manifested out of nothingness.

Consciousness and nothingness are constants which we can never seek; made up of nothing but a sea of probabilities via the route of evolution over a period of 4 billion years. Our consciousness is an event of capacity for learning and course correction, making us sentient or self-aware, capable of interpreting our own evolutionary drives and our purpose in ways that can even go against our survival. Despite knowing that we have come such a long way by nurturing our own consciousness; we seem to be less content with everything that we have gained. The mere thought of our existence in actuality should make us leap in joy, but we frown over thoughts and things, which are short-lived and trap ourselves into the deep depths of needs and greeds. Somehow our cognitive evaluations seem to dominate in the overall evaluation of life and we infer happiness on the basis of our content (Rojas and Veenhoven 2011). We evolved for a reason wherein all the mechanisms that we learnt were to overcome the obstacles in our path where life fundamentally aligns itself with reality, genetically and biologically, instinctively and intellectually. But as we grew we aligned ourselves to imitating others, parents, friends, teachers and with various cultural and religious influences which over powered our true inner selves. This is not something that we are born with, but get forced into, because our reward system only values their approval more than logical deduction, trying to live up to the expectations of society and family (Combes 1998).

In the present we can much better comprehend the cold heartedness of a career fixated individual if success or social validation is what he or she craves more than anything else in comparison to an individual who spends all resources helping siblings or parents wherein family is this person’s core drive (Wood 2000). Lack of contentment in adults is usually a result of a childish attachment that lurks in our subconscious; where the sub conscious overcomes our inner consciousness making us dependent on a thought that is created by the world around us and not by the logical thought provoking process that is suppressed within us. We often see logic as the opposite of emotion but instead it is the engine of our emotions and it provides reliable answers when we are frustrated or confused (Ciompi 2003). Logic is what creates rhythm or structure; is fundamental in the melody of music and the colors and symmetry of flowers, it creates biological machinery so intricate and rich that they can become self-aware, capable of love and selflessness being able to observe the majestic logical patterns that created them. Logic is innocence, the prime directive of our consciousness, which we must value as such if we want to break free from the clutches of hollow reward mechanisms.

Satisfaction can be achieved when one can feel the flow of consciousness; can experience the outcome of consciousness; can understand the subjective state of consciousness and most importantly, understanding the nature of acknowledging the relevance of consciousness and its beauty (Pereira 2015). Consciousness plays an active role in processing information and making decisions (Koch and Crick 1991), it has a say in what our most deeply rooted core motivations are; concepts and ideas only have power over us when we emotionally invest and hold on to them. If logic is not applied the role of consciousness is diverted from its task positive network of making us selfless, clear-headed and focused to actually being a selfish, confused and unsatisfied individual. Logic pushes the limits of our consciousness to explore the vastness of its emptiness; it creates an awareness that is often described as being in the present or being in a state of flow wherein rather than identifying with our thoughts we become an observer of them and are much more inclined to follow reason over impulse (Brown and Ryan 2003). The best example to understand the importance of logic is when we apply it to superstition, which has reduced considerably over the years because of our logical thinking, wiping away our sub conscious values, which we had gathered in the past. Logic makes us selfish in the other sense, where we become selfish for love, compassion and kindness, which are derivatives of a mind that uses our inner consciousness.

Reward based conditioning is what drives the lack of satisfaction that urges us to survive on greed and envy. We need to realize that we live in a probabilistic universe which emerged from a probabilistic occurrence not known till date, in such a probabilistic universe with our ability to reason we can come up with pretty good approximations of what the best action is at every point in our lives and if done in the sense of logic can supersede our subconscious values of social validation and greed for reward and recognition. Everything takes place in our consciousness and there are no limits or borders of what is a part of our existence, nothing is external (Pereira and Reddy 2017). Each second the consciousness that emerges from our perception is different, sometimes unrecognizably so from what it was a second before. The truth is that every moment we are a new entity that existed only for that one single moment and will never manifest itself again; no experience can truly be replicated; no identity can ever reflect an ever changing synergy in the endless stream of experience. The only place where this memory resides is within the infinite space of nothingness that we are all made up of.

For their benefit, philosophical or religious beliefs tend to provide an explanation to our existence conditioning us with the concepts of sin and fear in relation to the existence of an external granting source. Seeking the path of logic and science in the infinite realms of our consciousness provides an expression of the emptiness that exists within all of us and its importance and falsifies such kind of beliefs. The void is what decides and manifests for us; the nothingness is where all physical and non-physical emerge. Consciousness emerges from the vast interplay of star dust becoming aware; countless genetic mutations for thousands of years led to the evolution of culture and necessity to form complex thought and finally our current society’s condition, education, social influences and parental guidance all elements combine to eventually creating these experiences; all of it is interconnected. Despite knowing all of this our individualistic ideology programs us to only care when there lies a benefit to themselves making them inherently selfish wherein our ideology is a façade; a collection of excuses that we let ourselves and each other get away with. An attempt to be logically selfless can seem scary as it threatens all the conditional attachment that emerge in a culture where enjoyable feelings are considered the ultimate goal but it leads to far more fulfillment than chasing our positive emotions as our ideology demands.

Conclusion

We are deeply programmed with a set of requirements that must be fulfilled in order for us to experience abundance; requirements that are often so elusive that we become mostly entrapped in this scarcity mindset but as soon as we see through this which can be achieved in many ways, we are able to distinguish truth from indoctrination, to dispel our confusion and dissolve our apathy. Behind everything there is a logical reason we can find when we choose to follow curiosity rather than fear. We don’t have to feel regret or guilt when we know our intentions are pure and we did the best we could at the time with the knowledge that we had. The world can seem like a cold and dark place when this knowledge leads us to recognize the selfish motives behinds people’s actions and how it causes idealistic movements to scatter and fall apart but with these insights those who choose to not make life about them and can seek out and trust each other.   Over billions of years molecules configured themselves into complex units that we call human beings; these units are like cells in the body of humanity wired to evolve and move it forward. This is what brought about the evolution of manifested consciousness wherein we became highly conscious beings with the ability to create and destroy ourselves. Evolution has fundamentally programmed us so that we want our beliefs to align with reality. Logic is innocence, the prime directive of our consciousness, which we must value it as such if we want to break free from the clutches of hollow reward mechanisms that exist in the world today.

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Dr. Contzen Pereira (Editorial Board Member/Contributor)
Independent Scholar, Mumbai, India
Corresponding Author. Address: Nandadeep, Chakala, Andheri (East), Mumbai 400 099, India. Email Address: contzen@rediffmail.com, contzen@gmail.com

 

God, I and the Universe

I see a broken mirror at an unsure time in Brooklyn. The early hours of the morning leave the streets quiet. I am walking with good energy next to me, and a whole lot of conversation that means little to me logically — for opinion appeals to my heart. My friend speaks of god, and inner peace, and my mind is screaming, ’this makes no sense.’ My heart says, yes. This fits like puzzle pieces.

In the beginning, maybe there is silence within. Usually, thoughts create thought processes, which build the scaffolding for a story, which creates a feeling. Beyond this, there is a gut-reaction phase, an ability to intuitively grab what the mind puzzles to understand. But I wish to understand. What happens when I am religious? Is my thought-process in complete submission to superstition? Am I moving sideways to my thinking? Am I shutting down my mind working on blunt ‘faith’?

Is God necessary for morals? I see no statistical difference between atheists and religious believers in making moral judgments. Robb Willer argues, when feeling compassionate, Atheists and Agnostics may actually be more inclined to help their fellow citizens than more religious people. Besides, religious people don't derive their morals from scripture, or if they do, they choose the nice bits and reject the nasty. Their personal judgment of what is relevant from the bible is very much at play. Many Old Testament passages we would now describe as immoral. Richard Dawkins writes: ‘the very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don’t. We shouldn’t, because if you actually look at the bible or the Koran, and get your moral compass from there, it’s horrible – stoning people to death, stoning people for breaking the Sabbath.’ ‘You don't need religion to have morals. If you can't determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion.’

Maybe religious ideology exacerbates the world’s problems? Taboos against marrying out, the labeling of children in terms of their religious beliefs (before they even know what they believe), and damaging emotional blackmail, such as threats of Eternal Damnation, and whatever other undefined ideas they can conjure up, leave a person wondering if there is even any space for god inside these archaic structures. I wonder: is religion actively perverting morality? Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate utter madness —from holy wars to countless terrorist attacks. The current war against terrorism is a tragic consequence of religious idealists who have an unquestioning faith. Unquestioning faith is not a path to peace, but a pathway to war.

As for the logical reasoning, there is an argument for the existence of god that goes as follows: when I see a complex object such as a watch, I know it has been designed. Therefore, when I see a complex object such as a tiger, I should infer that it has been designed. This act of comparing two objects and drawing similar conclusions based on similarities (while ignoring important differences) is a prime example of a false analogy. The point of the analogy of the watch is that a watch implies a watchmaker, and that the world is like a watch, in that the world implies a world-maker. There are many flaws to this analogy (the world isn't even remotely comparable to a watch, for example), and in fact, Scottish philosopher David Hume pretty much demolished this argument, called the teleological argument, before Paley was even born in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The watchmaker analogy has evolved to include the notion of "irreducible complexity," a term coined by the prominent Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe. So now instead of having the mere presence of a watch imply a watchmaker, we are to conclude that the watch is far too complicated to have been created by natural processes, and that therefore the watch must have been designed by an intelligent agent. Thus life, like the watch, is too complicated to have arisen by natural causes. But if the watch looks designed compared to its surroundings, the only logical conclusion we could draw is that its surroundings are not designed. (If we were unable to differentiate the watch from its natural surroundings, then we would deem it to be a natural object no different from a rock or a tree.) If we say that life is designed, again, with what are we making the comparison? Suppose we say that the entire universe is designed. Well, we don't have another universe to compare ours to. We only have experience with one universe, and unless we have the opportunity to examine other universes (which we have not done as of yet), we cannot say with any degree of certainty that our universe is designed for lack of comparison.

Other shaky arguments include that it is impossible to fake a mass revelation (it is), and the cosmological argument of First Cause. The First Cause Argument is popular, and asks what came before The Big Bang i.e. what happened before time, which means something like what was color like before color? The basic premise of the argument is that something caused or continuously causes the Universe to exist, and this First Cause is what we call God. However, ‘any god capable of intelligently designing something as complex as DNA…must have been at least as complex and organized as the machine itself - far more so if we suppose him additionally capable of such advanced functions as listening to prayers and forgiving sins. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like "God was always there", and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say "DNA was always there", or "Life was always there", and be done with it.’ (Richard Dawkins).

Science has effectively replaced religion in terms of understanding the natural world. Apologists have tried to find God in the realm of physics too, attempting to attribute the big bang to a supernatural origin. Unfortunately for them the data strongly indicates to us that no such miracle occurred to kick-start our universe into being. Some scientists place the formation of the singularity inside a cycle called the big bounce in which our expanding universe will eventually collapse back in on itself in an event called the big crunch. A singularity once more, the universe will then expand in another big bang. This process would be eternal and, as such, every big bang and big crunch the universe ever experiences would be nothing but a rebirth into another phase of existence.

Stephen Hawking wrote in 1988, "In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that the negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero." Apologists will then most likely posit the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?’

Any attempt to answer the question has to be clear about the definition of “nothing.” It is not enough to describe a mechanism in which a baby universe might spark into being through a quantum fluctuation and then undergo expansion and inflation and increasing complexity until finally we wind up with galaxies and planets and dolphins shooting up out of a pool to grab a fish from the trainer. In that scenario your “nothing” still has qualities that give rise to something. It’s not a true nothing. My version of zero has no superscripts. And if you can tell me there’s a Multiverse from which our universe bubbled forth, you’ve merely moved the fundamental problem of existence back onto a broader platform. This also covers the god explanation. If god is the ultimate cause of the universe I’ll want to know why God exists. The obvious answer is: He just does. He is. He’s what Holt calls the Supreme Brute Fact. He explains himself. And so on. A secular version of that, one that doesn’t require a supreme Creator, is how I approach the something-nothing question.

Seems to me that “nothing,” for all its simplicity and symmetry and lack of arbitrariness, is nonetheless an entirely imaginary state, or condition, and we can say with confidence that it has never existed. “Nothing” is dreamed up in the world of something, in the brains of philosophers etc. on a little blue planet orbiting an ordinary yellow star in a certain spiral galaxy. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that nothing could not in theory “exist,” but seems to me that it hasn’t. We live in the something universe, either in our tidy little Big Bang universe or in a Big Bang bubble within the Multiverse, and no amount of deletion of the elements and forces of this universe would ever get us to a condition of absolutely nothing.

The idea of nothing has bugged people for centuries, especially in the Western world. We have a saying in Latin, Ex nihilo nihil fit, which means, "out of nothing comes nothing." It has occurred to me that this is a fallacy of tremendous proportions. It lies at the root of all our common sense, not only in the West, but in many parts of the East as well. It manifests in a kind of terror of nothing, a put-down on nothing, and a put-down on everything associated with nothing, such as sleep, passivity, rest, and even the feminine principles. But to me nothing — the negative, the empty — is exceedingly powerful. I would say, on the contrary, you can't have something without nothing. Image nothing but space, going on and on, with nothing in it forever. But there you are imagining it, and you are something in it. The whole idea of there being only space, and nothing else at all is not only inconceivable but perfectly meaningless, because we always know what we mean by contrast.’ (Alan Watts).

So, then, why is there something rather than nothing? Or rather, is there everything? Obviously there remain huge cosmological questions, and we’d all like to know what happened before the Big Bang, but I’m fairly persuaded by the Hawking notion that time itself begins at the Big Bang and there’s no “before.” There’s no boundary. The universe is finite but unbounded, like the 2-D surface of a sphere.

Next, is when people resort to using the word god interchangeably, saying that scientists replace the word god with the word energy, and so on. However, the laws of nature are not the laws of God. Rather than have a reverence for existence as we understand it to be as science has revealed it to be.

If there is no ‘nothing’ maybe we have everything, I wonder. Naturalistic pantheism paraphrases and reinterprets our current understanding to ascribe nature with a higher meaning. Something that does not exist, except in peoples imaginations — as of yet.

Next, comes the question of psychic phenomena. If you strip away the fallacy of most of it, you are left with a nagging something: people seeing spirits, reading minds and auras, telling the future, or the past. But to define this we must first define the self. And ‘I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really hallucination. What we really are is, first of all, the whole of our body. And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. Obviously a body requires air, and the air must be within a certain temperature range. The body also requires certain kinds of nutrition. So in order to occur the body must be on a mild and nutritive planet with just enough oxygen in the atmosphere spinning regularly around in a harmonious and rhythmical way near a certain kind of warm star. That arrangement is just as essential to the existence of my body as my heart, my lungs, and my brain. So to describe myself in a scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings, which is a clumsy way getting around to the realization that you are the entire universe. However we do not normally feel that way because we have constructed in thought an abstract idea of our self.’ (Alan Watts). From there, we can surmise that altered states in consciousness can bring about altered states of perception. And sometimes these perceptions will include the breakdown of prescribed frames of mind, and an introduction of psychic phenomena.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that in her land, "memory works both ways." Not only can the Queen remember things from the past, but she also remembers "things that happened the week after next." Alice attempts to argue with the Queen, stating "I'm sure mine only works one way...I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen replies, "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

People I’ve met, and those I’ve read about, who claim that psychic abilities (such as telepathy, clairvoyance or telekinesis) or paranormal phenomena (such as ghostly apparitions) do not exist because there is no scientific basis or proof for such things, do so out of sheer ignorance. Both the British and the American Societies for Psychical Research, established in the late 1800s, have tons of research data pointing to the existence of psychic and paranormal phenomena. Psychic skills are totally real. We are all wired to do it. The problem with 'natural' psychics is that they do not know the exact and precise method, which the subconscious mind communicates with conscious awareness.

But the truth is that these effects are actually pretty consistent with modern physics' take on time and space. For example, Einstein believed that the mere act of observing something here could affect something there, a phenomenon he called "spooky action at a distance.” (Quantum Entanglement). Similarly, modern quantum physics has demonstrated that light particles seem to know what lies ahead of them and will adjust their behavior accordingly, even though the future event hasn't occurred yet. For example, in the classic "double slit experiment," physicists discovered that light particles respond differently when they are observed. But in 1999, researchers pushed this experiment to the limits by asking, "what if the observation occurred after the light particles were deployed?” Surprisingly, they found the particles acted the same way, as if they knew they were going to be observed in the future even though it hadn't happened yet.

Such trippy time-effects seem to contradict common sense and trying to make sense of them may give the average person a headache. “Quantum Mechanics is completely counter-intuitive and outside our everyday experience, but physicists have kind of gotten used to it.” (Chiao). So although humans perceive time as linear, it doesn't necessarily mean it is so. If we suspend our beliefs about time and accept that the brain is capable of reaching into the future, the next question becomes "how does it do this?" Just because the effect seems "supernatural" doesn't necessarily mean the cause is.

Lastly, we have spiritual experiences. The concept of seeing God, of seeing angels, of seeing Jesus, or whomever. Seeing things within the mind is imagination, and the expression of these visions can result in beautiful works of art: writing, paintings, religious text etc. As J.K. Rowling famously wrote: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” The experience of someone who is having a spiritual experience is profoundly ‘real’. But this in no way makes it true to shared reality, much in the way that someone can hallucinate an experience, to the extent that they can taste and smell and see the experience, without ever having had the experience. “What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” (The Matrix, 1999). The things we imagine are ‘real’ within our heads. But then again, so is life.

Waking up like lucid dreamers, fantasy and reality become a matter of converting ideas into form. Humanity takes an early retirement. Physics continues. Computers replace us and we evolve further. We go home, we stare the most powerful creator we have witnessed in the mirror.

‘Have you been I all along?’ We think aloud.

 Rachel Landes

A Beautiful Revelation

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to critically examine the ways by which Beauty is revealed to the human consciousness and how this impacts its expansion and evolution from an individual and collective standpoint. Three main aspects of how Beauty is revealed is identified and situated in the context of its impact on the evolution of human consciousness.

Keywords: Beauty, Consciousness, Humanity, Evolution, Physical, Creativity, Art, Emotion

A Beautiful Revelation

From the dawn of civilization, humankind has always sought to answer the question “What is Beauty?” This simple question has perplexed philosophers, theologians and scientists alike and has resulted in the postulation of numerous definitions across different disciplines. What has emerged is an abundance of terminological ambiguities that neither satisfactorily encapsulate the underlying essence of Beauty, nor provide for any critical insight into its revelatory aspects. Perhaps this is because Beauty has myriad expressions that are revealed to the human consciousness at different levels or stages of its evolution. This essay will examine three revelatory aspects of Beauty and situate them in the context of the ongoing evolution of human consciousness.

As sentient beings in a physical universe, we perceive reality through sensory perception from which we construct and make sense of our world. In doing so, we interact with nature and each other which necessarily opens us up to what we come to know as Beauty. This element of truth is more than a mere ideation or construct of the human mind. It aids in the evolution of our species from a physical, emotional, and spiritual perspective by how it is revealed to us.

We can approach the concept of Beauty as being revealed to us in three primary ways. First, because we are part of the natural world, we perceive Beauty through our senses. When we employ these senses via sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell to our environment, our consciousness can become aware of Beauty as it is revealed in nature. Hence symmetrical patterns inherent on a butterfly’s wings or on a nautiluses’ shell can appear to be beautiful to us because of their aesthetic qualities. Similarly, the sound of rustling leaves or the taste and smell of food, or even the sensation of wind upon exposed skin, can all be perceived as being beautiful.

This particular revelatory aspect of Beauty can be viewed as Topical Beauty. Topical Beauty is the physical manifestation of Beauty as revealed to us solely via our senses. This aspect of Beauty exists in the natural world and is apparent to us from a mathematical standpoint. For example, symmetry can be perceived in the face of a young woman or man and harmony can be gleaned from the acoustics of natural or manufactured sound. The sensations of taste, touch, and smell can also be measured and quantified in a scientific manner.

Such beauty however, is topical because it is revealed only on the surface of what we deem to be reality. In other words, it can be construed as the proverbial “tip of the iceberg”. It is expressed in nature through geometric patterns and is readily observable and measurable to all. Topical Beauty thus represents the physical aspect of Beauty.

The second way in which Beauty is revealed to us is through works of art. When the consciousness of humankind engages in creative pursuits, we are able to perceive the revelation of Beauty on an emotional level. Thus when we listen to one of Chopin’s piano concertos, we can come away feeling deeply moved by the beauty of the piece’s arrangement. Similarly, when we look at a Van Gogh painting, it can have a profound emotional effect on us because it possesses the capacity to elevate our consciousness to a level that is at once both physical and emotional.

When artists engage in creative endeavors, they are opening their consciousness to the apprehension of Beauty that exists in the sphere of imagination and wonder. This is outside the purely physical realm and enables the mind to transcend it by acting as a conduit through which Beauty can be revealed to us from an individual and collective standpoint.  

Art forces us to look beyond the physical and allows for the evolution of human consciousness beyond its material limitations. When we have achieved such depth and breadth of consciousness, Beauty is revealed to us Sub-Topically. At this stage, Beauty has the power to move us in a physical and emotionally way simultaneously. Thus some individuals may weep at a musical concert or be left breathless upon seeing a sculpture, while for others; touching a quilt their grandmother made years ago can move them in a very deep and personal way.

Once revealed, Sub-Topical Beauty allows for the evolution and transcendence of human consciousness beyond the purely physical or emotional. This is because it engenders capacity building by elasticizing our consciousness through art. We can no longer just apprehend beauty via the senses, but we can now feel it in the very core of our being. This further enables us to partake in the beautiful for when we create, we beautify.

Upon reaching this level of consciousness, we are now in a position to understand how Beauty is revealed to us in the third way. When we engage in acts of virtue, whether towards other humans or to other species, we perceive Beauty that transcends emotion and reason. In such instances, the laws of nature do not apply since there is no inclination towards self-gain. Our actions become altruistic and in doing so, they beautify us collectively.

When we show compassion to the other, we engage each other in a beautiful way. When we impart kindness or tenderness to others, there need not be an aesthetic quality to such acts for us to find meaning and beauty in them. When we show love to an animal, it beautifies the human in us. When we forgive, our mercy allows us to redeem and beautify the other and this in turn, beautifies us. Understanding and perceiving Beauty in this manner allows for not only an expansion of our collective consciousness, but a deepening of it too. As human beings, we are flawed creatures. But, if our imperfections are what make us human, when we consciously engage in a virtuous act, it is our humanity that ultimately makes us beautiful.

This third way of perceiving and understanding Beauty thus transcends the physical and emotional. It is, in effect, apprehended by our consciousness intuitively. Such beauty affects us spiritually since we begin to see the other in ourselves and better understand our interconnectedness with all forms of life, human or otherwise. This is what I call Intuitive Beauty.

In conclusion, the apprehension and understanding of Beauty is directly linked to the evolution of human consciousness. As we mature and evolve as a species, so too will our capacity to beautify and become expressions of Beauty ourselves both in a concrete and abstract manner. Our pursuit of knowledge inevitably opens us up to the possibility of finding elements of verisimilitude from a physical, emotional, and intuitive perspective. In this respect, our potential to find Beauty within ourselves is, ultimately, one of humanity’s most profound endeavors.

Jeevan Bhagwat, See Bios Section for more information -

Contact Information:  @j_bhagwat

What Was it That Was Leaving Me? An Unusual Out-of-Body Experience (OBE)

Abstract

This paper is a narration of a unique experience, that which is arduous to circumscribe as an out-of-body experience; ambiguously to-be called a fractional out-of-body experience or a partial autoscopy. It was an experience in the presence of observers who were naive of what the individual was experiencing. This experience has surely helped the individual plummet into imagining the existence of an form beyond the body; the existence of a soul; that which is conscious; that which can think like the mind; that which resides within the body and that which can detach from the body when death advances. There is a possibility of it being a neuro-psychological or neuro-parapsychological experience; an experience whose actuality is grim to prove or construct in third person, but certainly subsists for the experiencer; the experiencer being myself.

Key Words 

Out-of-body, Experience, Soul, Consciousness

The experience of being out-of-my body

It was a beautiful day; I was with a few friends sitting on the over-head water tank of my 6 storied building, approximately 90 feet high. This place was our regular hangout, as it always felt great to be up there, as the view till today is always amazing. I was 18, with an eagerness to enjoy and explore life; with an enthusiasm to do things that would defy life, but the least I knew that this day would change my perception of life forever. As we chatted, jokes filled us with joy and play, which somehow lead us into trivial games; games that one should never play. The over-head tank is laden with water-pipes and has a large water-pipe approximately 2 inches thick, that runs along the tank, where one could attempt to balance on it; an insane thing to do at such a height, but definitely gave a feeling of achievement if completed. It was not something new that I was doing, as I had been repeatedly doing it whenever I would go up there and therefore was confident about completing it without tripping over.

Excited and with my adrenaline all pumped up, I challenged my friends that I would complete the walk in one go and I decided to attempt the task, not knowing what I was about to experience. Over-confidence made my strides wider and faster, and with everyone cheering, it heightened my confidence and inadvertently my ego. While balancing on the water pipe, I missed a step and slipped, I lost my balance and at that point I felt my body fall off the water tank; I felt my body being pulled away from the tank and with nothing there to cling on to, I knew that it was the end; I was aware that my body would fall 90 feet to the ground and death was approaching. My confidence and ego was shattered as my legs left the ground and my hands precipitously moved around to grab whatever came my way, but all that I felt was nothingness. That moment resulted in an experience where in a flicker of a second a life review began; my past flashed in front of my eyes and I saw images as one would see it in a personal scrap book; my life story in frames flashing in front of my eyes.

As my life review began, I somehow felt being detached from my body and lost sensation of being within it; a feeling of weightlessness. I felt as if I was rising rather than going down. My life review stopped and I could see myself in a form emanating out of the body from the face till my chest and at that moment I felt someone grab me and pull me to the ground. It was my friend who did this as part of his reflex and therefore I owe my life to him. I was back again in my body when I hit the ground and passed out. All of a sudden my eyes opened and I saw all my friends staring at me, all perplexed. It felt as if I had just woken up after a long night sleep, to see my friends looking at me. The frightful feeling of falling didn’t seem to exist and at that moment I felt a feeling of joy and happiness; a feeling as if I had learned something.

As I woke up, my friends asked me what happened, but I did not know where to begin or rather I could not put it into words; I was confused. I asked them how long did I pass out, and they said that it was just a few minutes, but for me the whole episode seemed to have lasted for almost half an hour. The trip, the fall, the review, the experience of the departing form, all of it happened in just a few minutes, but for me it seemed like a long period. As I narrated this experience to my friends, they laughed and joshed about it. It was a personal experience, a beautiful experience where I defied death. If that was my soul, it was definitely nimbler than my body, and in case I would have fallen, that form would have taken off from my body. It was my experience and I felt no one and neither did I see anyone; all that came as a flash in front of me was my past in the form of images.

It seems that my nimbler form exists within my body and knew the limitations of my body as I felt it ripping out of my body, for it knew that my body would not survive the fall; a mutilated body is definitely no place to reside. The moment I was held and pulled back, it realized that my body is safe and it pulled itself back, putting me into a deep sleep. It is an experience that bought a significant change in me; a change that has made me fearless of death; changed my perception of death. I have been very reluctant to share this experience, but my endeavors to understand the existence of a non-local soul or consciousness or mind has made me more open towards sharing it. The vividity and richness of the experience still persists that only I as the experiencer could experience.

Conclusion

My out-of-body or fractional out-of-body experience fortified the feeling of the presence of a form that resides within me; call it my soul, consciousness or mind. Based on this first experience, it can be said, but not concluded that this form that resides within me is aware, it thinks and sustains. This event could be easily passed-off as a neuro-psychological or neuro-parapsychological event associated with the dysfunctioning of the brain, where the brain in mental shock could possibly result in such an event. But for me as the experiencer this event will always remain phenomenal until proven within the realms of scientific explanation. It is definitely a difficult experience to understand and explore from a scientific perspective, but surely a vivid experience that made me realize the beauty that lies within; for it remains as my experience and therefore is purely my opinion. 

Contzen Pereira, Ph.D. Independent Scholar, Mumbai, India. Email Address: contzen@rediffmail.com, contzen@gmail.com

 

Cadence

Introduction
I have had many meditative experiences.  Some I documented, many I did not.  After my experiences, I have had and probably always will have many questions.  I will share one here that I titled Cadence.  There could be many rational explanations for what I experienced but I choose to keep an open mind rather than judge a thing.  For me, I find that once I have judged a thing, I have limited the scope of its potentiality.  I don't like the idea of limited potential.

Meditative Vision
Into the depths of the darkness of the void I traveled with my consciousness. No sight or sensation to guide me, just this sound that seemed both within me and outside of me. For long moments I drifted with one foot in two worlds. Before long the entirety of the Multi-verse appeared in my field of vision. No longer had I a physical body but rather a strand of energy consciousness that comprised my being. In the heart of the Multi-verse did I appear to be and then with lightning speed, it began to grow distant. So distant, in fact that the Multi-verse itself seemed to be one tiny pinprick of light in a vast canopy of pure darkness.

To the very edge of the Multi-verse I had somehow traveled and within this space of pure darkness all I saw were thin wisps of blue lightning that appeared now and then without any sound. The peace and the stillness were palpable, peaceful and awe inspiring broken by this beautiful cobalt blue streaks of light. A voice spoke with such a richness of tone that reverberated throughout the whole of my being but there were no words to recount. Being so used to using words, I sent out a thought, “Where are we?”

“We are outside of both space and time as you know it,” said my companion in a wave of feeling interpreted by some understanding I had lost touch with.

“Why am I here?” I sent back to my seeming companion still awestruck at the blue light flickering now and then in the pristine darkness of the void.

“You wanted to explore and so you have come,” my unseen but very much felt companion conveyed.
“Who are you?” I asked so very curious.

“I am the Omega or the Alpha but words and names mean nothing here in this place. Be not so concerned with words,” my companion said.

Contemplating the tiny dot of light in my field of vision, I asked, “Are you the Creator of that?” I indicated focusing on the tiny pinpoint of light that was the Multi-verse.

“I am and I am not,” my companion said.

“Well if you are not the creator then who is the creator of the Multi-verse?” I asked still so very curious.

“The Elohim created the Universe that you know and the Multi-verse that houses it,” the presence answered in response feeling sympathetic to my questioning.

Thinking carefully about the fact that if the Elohim created the Universe and the presence referred to the Elohim as separate from it, I assumed he may have had a different creator. I asked then, “Who is your creator and where do you come from?”

My companion said, “Come, I will show you.”

We traveled, I sensed, as I felt a strange movement as in slight changes in barometric pressure on Earth. I asked about the “traveling” and received in response that we were traveling not within a dimension but through dimensions. After a short time the void of pure darkness was replaced with a light. Glowing pink living light filled my field of vision. A sight my mind could not interpret but for the color and a visual beating with the same cadence as a human heart. A slight motion to the right of the pink light was a blue light and again with a visual I could not interpret or put to words but the same beating and cadence. Another turn and there were more colors that I could interpret but the rest I could not. I felt completely at peace but surrounded by these fields of pulsing light. I asked again, still so very curious, “This is your Creator?”

 Instead of a direct response to my question, my companion said, “The time for thinking is done. Notice the beating of your human heart so very far away back on Earth. Notice how the cadence is the same as it is here and feel it. There are no words but there is feeling, so feel it. Tune into the cadence and know the answer to your questions. The time for words and thinking, the time of questioning and answering is done. It is time now to feel,” the presence said again without a single word.

And the rest was lost in translation and I fell from that place in my consciousness. I opened my eyes and saw a single candle flame dancing on an altar. It was my own back on Earth comprised of sacred things to me. I stared at the flame for a time trying to understand and I heard a faint whisper, “There are no words, there is only consciousness.” I blew out the candle.

Conclusion
I can conclude nothing from my vision with certainty.  Perhaps I simply have a very imaginative and creative mind, maybe I connected with something or maybe everything I saw, felt and seemingly "heard," was just symbolic of what was happening at this point in my life.  I note this experience occurred before my kundalini experience.  In fact, I had many of these types of experiences before my kundalini experience.  Maybe they are related?  Honestly, I do not know.  The feeling during the experience was beautiful and peaceful.  So, maybe I just suspend the desire to judge or label it and leave it at that?

 

© 2016 Jaie Hart

Rev. Dr., J.L. Harter, see Bio Section for more information.