Kundalini Splendor

The following excerpt is taken from a longer article which a friend just sent to me. I found the artic'e fascinating, but the later part became too technical for me to follow. I do not know the author (other than "Letranger") nor the source, other than the blog with the title given here.

Science and Nonduality

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Paradigm Shifts and the Theater of Consciousness

The subject open for discussion is paradigm shifts.

The conventional scientific paradigm that most scientists have of the world is that the world is only composed of matter and energy that exist within space and time. There are several big problems with this paradigm. The first is its logical inconsistency, as it contradicts itself. The other big problem with this paradigm is it’s too limited in nature. It's impossible to explain the nature of the mind with this limited paradigm. A paradigm is a mental model of the world, which is a mental concept that only arises in a mind. The focus of attention of those who examine this mental model of the world is only focused upon the nature of information and energy in that world. The content of the mind is only information content, and all behavior and emotional expression only arises with the flow of energy through the world, and the flow of emotional energy through a body and a mind. With this limited scientific paradigm, the nature of consciousness is ignored.

The big scientific question that this limited paradigm can never answer is about the nature of consciousness. What is it that observes the information content of a mind, and the emotional behavior of a body?. What is it that focuses its attention upon a mind and a world? What is it that looks and sees? What is it that knows?

When we examine anything in the world, it’s always the focus of attention of our consciousness that is focused in that examination. As long as we only focus our attention on the nature of information and energy in the world, we are stuck with the conventional scientific paradigm of the world. We are stuck with that mental model of the world. The only way we’ll ever become unstuck from these limited ideas is if we no longer ignore the nature of our consciousness for that world.

We might ask 'How do we know what we know?', but a much better question is 'Who is the knower?'. If you answer that 'I am', then the obvious next question is: 'What is the true nature of That?'. What knows about the world? To answer this question, it’s necessary that we no longer ignore the nature of consciousness. It’s absolutely necessary that we focus our attention on the nature of consciousness.

There is another scientific paradigm, called the 'theater of consciousness', but very few in the modern scientific world want to take it seriously. This paradigm is at the heart of the philosophy of Plato and Socrates. Plato wrote about it in the Republic and the Allegory of the Cave. This paradigm runs through our greatest literature and philosophy, written by the likes of Shakespeare and Spinoza. Shakespeare refers to the world as a stage, populated by actors on the stage:

All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players

Implicit in this description of the theater of consciousness is the nature of the audience. Who is out there in the audience watching this play? What is the nature of consciousness present

he audience? Shakespeare doesn’t give an answer, but does describe the futility of everything that can be done in the world:

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing

Shakespeare refers to shadows the same way Plato describes the shadows of images displayed on the wall of the cave, just like the animated images displayed in the frames of a movie. Plato describes prisoners who observe those shadows, and mistake those shadows for their true nature. The prisoners self-identify the true nature of what they are with the shadows they observe, and they believe that they are those shadows. The prisoners believe something about themselves that is untrue. The prisoners believe they are shadows. The prisoners believe they are the animated forms of images that they perceive. That false belief is what we call a delusion. In some sense, the prisoners only believe that false belief about themselves since that is the way it ‘feels’ to them as they perceive it, and ‘feeling is believing’. You'll also find these ideas in the writings of Whitman, Thoreau and Melville. Moby Dick is only a retelling of the Allegory of the Cave:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But it is enough.

Socrates expressed this idea with his famous saying 'Know thyself'. This was the motto for the movie the Matrix, which was another retelling of the Allegory of the Cave, and was about a virtual reality created within the theater of consciousness. The story is about a prisoner self-identified with a character in that virtual reality, and the journey that allows for escape from that prison. The journey that allows for escape is the end of that false belief. That journey allows a knower to know its true nature, and no longer believe it is something it perceives. That knower only believes it is a shadow, or the animated form of an image it perceives, since that is the way it really feels, and feeling is believing. That is the delusion. The central character of that movie is told 'you are the one', but is also told that 'you've been living in a dream world'. Shakespeare also tells us that 'life is but a dream':

We are such stuff As dreams are made on and our little life Is rounded with a sleep

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

The theater of consciousness idea has a long history in science, which dates back to Plato and the development of mathematics. Any science based on the logical consistency of mathematics is forced to incorporate it. This is what the Gödel incompleteness theorems are all about. This is the kind of mental model that Einstein had of the world, and that all Platonist have of the world.

Unfortunately, modern neuroscience has totally ignored Plato, and seems to be stuck in the nineteenth century, with its outdated ideas of classical determinism and absolute space and time. Neuroscience won't grow up until it incorporates relativity theory and quantum theory, which must inevitably lead to the theater of consciousness idea as the correct mental model of the world. Even the best neuroscientists in the world, like Antonio Damasio, are confused on this matter.

Theoretical physics has recently rediscovered Plato. Recent scientific attempts to unify the laws of the universe and explain the origin of the universe are perfectly consistent with the

'theater of consciousness' mental model of the world. These important discoveries include the nature of the big bang event, as explained by inflationary cosmology, and the holographic principle of quantum gravity, which unifies relativity theory with quantum theory. It's just not possible to understand the nature of the world, or the mind, without these modern scientific concepts. Researchers in neuroscience, like Damasio, won't be able to go beyond their outdated ideas of the mind until they understand modern theoretical physics.

The twentieth century was rocked by the paradigm shifts of relativity theory and quantum theory. We are now in the midst of another paradigm shift that in some sense is much greater, the mother of all paradigm shifts. This paradigm shift is the idea of the theater of consciousness. It's just not possible to understand the nature of the world, or the mind, or the self-concept that is constructed within the mind, without the mental model of the theater of consciousness.

As far as I can see, without the theater of consciousness idea, neuroscience reduces down to biology, all of biology is molecular in nature and reduces down to chemistry, all of chemistry reduces down to atomic theory, and all of atomic theory reduces down to quantum theory. Every idea in neuroscience that cannot be explained by molecular biology must implicitly refer back to the theater of consciousness idea. When we talk about our ability to 'see' things, or 'know' about things, that's the idea we implicitly refer back to.

All of cosmology reduces down to relativity theory. The big question in science is how to unify quantum theory with relativity theory. That unification leads to the holographic principle of quantum gravity, which unifies the equivalence principle with the uncertainty principle. This idea explains the fundamental level at which all information is defined and encoded in the world, and reduces everything down to that fundamental level of information. But scientific reductionism can never explain the nature of consciousness. The natural interpretation of the holographic principle is the theater of consciousness.

It's worth a brief examination of how we got here:

1600's: Newton formulated classical mechanics and the law of gravity 1800's: Maxwell formulated electromagnetism 1800's: Boltzmann formulated the second law of thermodynamics 1900's: Einstein formulated relativity theory

1900's: Heisenberg and others formulated quantum theory 1900's: Feynman and others formulated quantum field theory 2000's Susskind and 't Hooft formulated the holographic principle of quantum gravity

It's worth noting that the idea of molecular biology grew out of atomic theory, which only developed after quantum theory was formulated.