The Mystery of Consciousness – Part One
As we have seen from previous instalments, the scientific quest to discover the fundamental building blocks of the universe led quantum physicists to the inescapable conclusion that there was no outward physical universe at all, and that all of our sensory impressions of what appears to be “out there” in space are in fact impressions that are registered upon our consciousness “within”. This conclusion led inevitably to the search for the nature and origin of consciousness itself.
Because scientists had previously operated on the belief that the universe did exist outwardly in space as our senses suggested, it was natural for them to assume that the source of consciousness was to be found within the human body. It was assumed that consciousness itself was somehow generated inside the human brain. Yet it soon became apparent that the source of consciousness was not as easy to locate as scientists had imagined.
It was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who noted that the mind was capable of producing scenarios which involved an entire range of sensory responses. These mental pageants could arise in dreams, but they could also be derived from a variety of stimuli such as alcohol, chemical or psychedelic agents. They could also arise as a result of stress or trauma. These illusions appeared to be every bit as veridical as the events that were witnessed in waking consciousness.
What troubled Jung was the fact that the mind was capable of projecting these illusions whether the percipient was conscious or not, and regardless of whether the brain was damaged or intact. As he noted in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” published in 1961:
“There are certain astonishing observations in cases of profound syncope after acute injuries to the brain and in severe states of collapse. In both situations, total loss of consciousness can be accompanied by perceptions of the outside world and vivid dream experiences. Since the cerebral cortex, the seat of consciousness, is not functioning at these times, there is as yet no explanation for such phenomena.”
Jung’s mystification is easy to understand. For if the world exists as a three dimensional reality outside of ourselves, and if the function of the senses is simply to convey messages to the brain reflecting the content of this world, then how is it possible for impressions of the world to continue to be experienced when the brain is severely damaged, and the body is physically unconscious?”
The solution to this mystery, which Jung along with many leading scientists to this day have still refused to accept, lies in the fact that the cerebral cortex is not the seat of human consciousness, as mystics have been pointing out for millennia. The reason why people continue to experience hallucinations even when they are unconscious, or suffer from severe brain damage, is because the brain, the body and the entire world exist within consciousness, and not the other way around.
Consciousness is not created by the brain, nor does it have its source within the body. Because consciousness is not dependent on the brain, it is not affected by the physical condition of the human body. Projections of the mind can continue to occur, albeit on a different level from that of normal waking experience, even when the brain is severely damaged and the body is totally unconscious.
We remain convinced that our senses are merely windows to an outer world that exists outside of ourselves. So if we see an oak tree in a meadow, we believe that it is our brain that creates this image of the oak tree in our minds, and that it is also our brain that creates our state of inner consciousness that allows us to witness it in the first place. As it is with our eyes, so we believe a similar operation occurs with each of our other senses.
But when we trace the network of nerve signals from our senses to their ultimate destination within the brain, we discover that the cells that are apparently responsible for our ability to see or to smell or to hear, are not the most wonderful and complex cells within the human body, but are no different from any other nerve cells in the body. Our exquisitely complex function of sight or touch or taste appears to be the product of of the most elementary forms of cellular life.
As Dr Charles A. Muses wrote in “Paraphysics: A New View of Ourselves and the Cosmos“:
“Even in the hypothalamus, often thought of as a prime ‘center’, what we have is not a source but only a concentrated bundle of fibres. When impulses have been traced further than even concentrated bundles, we end up with specific neurons. But these are specialised amoebas, and by accepted evolutionary theory, protozoan sensibility cannot be regarded as the executive suite of human intelligence!”
Scientists have therefore been confronted with a mystifying riddle. How is it that these simple nerve cells, which have been found to comprise the visual centre of the cerebral cortex, are able to perform the stupefying trick of creating images in consciousness, as well as the thoughts that are associated with them? In spite of its accumulation of knowledge over a span of four hundred years, science has still been unable to solve this riddle.
