Lesson 26: Consciousness

Consciousness

What is consciousness?

Here are some dictionary definitions.

The state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings.
The awareness or perception of something by a person.
The fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.

We are constantly aware of two worlds – an inner world and an outer world. The outer world we believe we share with everyone. Our inner world is private.  The outer world we believe to be created by matter.  The inner world is created by thoughts.

It is our consciousness that makes us aware of both the inner and the outer worlds.  As we have already discussed in past lessons, it is our consciousness that creates our outer world when it collapses quantum probability waves into physical reality.  But what about your inner world?  Your world of thought and emotion.  Where does that come from? Many believe that consciousness is just a creation of the brain.  Is that correct?  Before we get into that discussion, let’s tackle a few more questions.

Can you determine for sure that someone is conscious?  You can’t see or experience the consciousness of anyone else.  You might infer that a person seems to act and behave as you do, so they are conscious.  But you can’t truly know for sure.

What about a pet dog or cat?  Are animals conscious?  Surely, they are conscious.  You see them showing their emotions.  You can see a fearful cat as she hunches her back, and her hair stands on end as she hisses and bears her claws.  You can see the love of a dog as he greets you and jumps all over you, trying to lick your face when you come home, and he hasn’t seen you for hours.  Is this a result of consciousness, or is this just a programmed reaction by their brain, which our consciousness interprets as feelings?

How about those pesky flies that sometimes get into your house, and you smash with a fly swatter?  Or that unlucky, yucky bug that just happened to cross your path and gets its guts squished out when you stomp it.  Are bugs conscious?

So, let’s go back to the question, “Is consciousness created by the brain?”

We have discussed a lot about the brain.  We know the brain makes neuron clusters as it learns.  We know the brain is constantly processing electrical and chemical signals so that we can function in life.  Do those signals also make us conscious?

We know the brain is made up of basically four chemicals — carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen.

Do those chemicals allow us to be conscious?  Could we mix all those chemicals together in the same percentages as in our brain and then send electricity running through it and somehow make that mixture aware of the universe?  Not very likely.  Isn’t that kind of like what Dr. Frankenstein did?

How about our emotions?  How could we ever think a mixture of four basic elements could ever produce love, hate, bliss, fear, gratitude, and anger?  They cannot.

I truly believe consciousness is not created by the brain.  The brain is created by consciousness.

Why do I feel so confident in my belief?  It goes back to Quantum Physics, and the reasoning behind my belief is very simple.

We know from Quantum Physics that EVERY physical thing we experience in our world was once a wave of energy that has been collapsed into a physical reality by consciousness.  Our brain is a physical thing. Therefore, it had to take consciousness to collapse the quantum wave, which is our brain, into physical reality. Consciousness came first. There was consciousness before the brain.  If it were not for consciousness, there could be no brain.  Consciousness creates the brain.  The brain does not create consciousness.  

So, where does your consciousness come from?

It comes from your soul, your higher self, the collective unconscious, infinite intelligence. We will talk about this more in later lessons.

We asked earlier, “Can you tell if someone else is conscious? Are animals conscious?”  We have constantly stated in this course that everything is one.  So, in a sense, everything in this universe (cats, dogs, bugs, plants, rocks) can be considered to be conscious.  We will also discuss that in a later lesson.

I want to go back to Quantum Physics and discuss another area where consciousness has a huge effect on current beliefs about the universe.

We know the creation of our universe is often attributed to the Big Bang.  The Big Bang was believed to be like a big explosion that caused the rapid expansion of matter from a state of extremely high density and temperature that, according to current cosmological theories, marked the origin of the universe.

The most important word in the sentence above is “matter.”  Again, we know from Quantum Physics all matter is first a quantum wave of energy that has been collapsed into reality.  So, like our brain had to first have a consciousness, so did the Big Bang.  No physical matter can come into reality without consciousness being the cause.  So, if there was a Big Bang, what is the consciousness responsible?

Infinite intelligence.

We are going to stop here. The next few lessons are going to be concerned with consciousness. Which is definitely one of the hardest subjects to grasp, so we are going to take it slow.

In the next few lessons, we are going to see some amazing things that are possible when we view the universe as created by consciousness and not consciousness created by the universe.  After these lessons, you will never view yourself in the same way ever again.