My Big TOE
AWAKENING – DISCOVERY — INNER WORKINGS
A TRILOGY UNIFYING PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICS, AND METAPHYSICS
Thomas Campbell
Book 1 – Awakening – Abridged Version – Part 5
The Right Attitude
Significant personal benefit can be gained simply by developing an explorer’s attitude. You must be courageous and open minded enough to contemplate the unknown and then step into it (experience it) to find out for yourself. There is no other way. Your experience, your time, your effort, and your mind compose your only doorway to an understanding that is not belief-based. A belief-based understanding is only slightly better than no understanding at all if, and only if, what you believe turns out serendipitously to be true. Do you think the correct belief system can get you to the finish line without running the race? Unfortunately, it cannot — even if your belief turns out to be true.
Some people believe that they do not have the time, energy, or ability, to gain consciousness quality on their own. They think that if they find the right religion, organization, book, teacher, guru, or advisor, they can minimize the effort required to develop their personal experience of Big Truth because the teacher will explain what is true and they will simply believe it. Do you think this strategy will work? No, it cannot! You cannot believe your way into consciousness quality any more than you can believe your way into being a master violinist, sumo wrestler, or the president of your country. There is yet another problem. You obviously must choose whom to believe very wisely. How can you do that without great wisdom of your own? Though knowledge can be passed from person to person, wisdom is derived only through your personal experience and is nontransferable from others.
You need to be wise to choose the belief system that can make you appear to be wise so that you do not have to earn wisdom through experience and actually become wise. There are no shortcuts. You must develop the quality of your being through your personal experience. Attaining wisdom, choosing paths to spiritual growth, improving the quality of consciousness, discerning pseudo- knowledge from actual knowledge and discriminating good teachers from bad teachers will all be discussed in more depth in Chapters 13 and 14 of Book 2.
Your beliefs (cultural, religious, personal, or scientific) are for the most part not relevant to the quality of your consciousness, except that they may retard it by limiting what your mind can think. Evolution is not a matter of passing an exam. It is a matter of how you are, the quality of your being, not what you believe. Beliefs don’t often, if ever, translate into quality of being; they are only about using pseudo-knowledge to fill in for unavailable (or difficult to obtain) real knowledge. You can talk about it, know about it, and believe anything you want to about it for free, but you can’t be it without paying the price (extensive diligent experience generated from rigorous dedicated effort). That is true of a pro football player, a brain surgeon, a nuclear physicist, a master carpenter, a sumo wrestler, or a concert violinist — as well as a spiritually evolved being. No pain, no gain.
There is no free lunch. You either pay the price or forgo the benefits. Because the benefit is the growth and evolution of your consciousness, forgoing it would not be a wise choice. Why? Who cares? What is the cost of an opportunity lost? We will discuss that later. Let me say for now that the costs are severe and once incurred cannot be sidestepped — but its effects are reversible. The costs should not be construed as a punishment; they are merely the logical result of not evolving.
For those who are wondering what evolution, belief traps, and consciousness quality could possibly have to do with deriving a more comprehensive physics, be patient and the connections will eventually become clear. First we must develop the conceptual landscape more broadly and in more detail before PMR physics can logically be birthed from a more general level of causality.
I do not want to leave anyone with the impression that spiritual growth (improving the quality and thus decreasing the entropy of your consciousness) is like working in a salt mine. Besides being useful, spiritual growth is also thrilling, interesting, rewarding, fun, and joyful. Once begun, it is so exciting an adventure that you will gladly want to put more of your time and energy toward it. It is also practical. Increasing the quality of your consciousness immediately increases the quality of your life.
Who Ya Gonna Call?
True enough, in matters of evolution there is no free lunch. Nevertheless, contemplating and evaluating the ideas of others can be an immensely helpful aid to your progress, and to your effort to grow the quality of your consciousness. You do not need to figure everything out for yourself. The advice of others can be like having a map to guide your explorations. An incorrect map can send you off on a wild goose chase. You must evaluate the correctness of the map as you go — because, before you go, you can only guess and assume your way through a shallow evaluation of any map. A useful map must necessarily be somewhat general, whereas each journey must be individual and personal.
Before going on to the wholly new concepts of the next chapter, let’s first pull together what we have learned about the origins and consequences of belief and the requirements of personal growth so that those who are so inclined can get started on developing the experience base you will need to construct your personal Big TOE or, at least, evaluate this one.
In the preceding chapter we determined that you must do your own exploring and grow your own wisdom. You cannot progress by letting others do the work. To believe what someone else (including me) tells you (to become a believer) is lazy, risky, and amounts to accepting someone else’s belief or knowledge in place of your knowledge. Copying the behavior or beliefs of others, or reciting or memorizing their knowledge, cannot produce significant spiritual or personal growth for you. Although some guidance by a fellow explorer may help you better understand your challenges and choices, discovering Big Truth and increasing the quality of your consciousness is fundamentally an independent individual effort. Talking about it all day and all night with the greatest of gurus won’t produce one iota of real progress. Your lasting progress must be the result of your personal effort.
Personal growth is most efficiently and effectively the product of good science. This is subjective science or personal science, not to be confused with either organized or personal religion or objective science. Subjective science is the mother of objective science. Real personal science requires real, verifiable, measurable, objective results. Here, the word “results,” at the most basic level, refers to significant, continuing verifiable progress toward the improvement of the quality of your conscious being, the evolution of mind, the growing-up and maturing of spirit. Why? Because that is the nature of the reality we live in. You will see that the physical nature as well as the spiritual nature of our reality is straightforwardly derived from the natural process of consciousness evolution. By the end of the next two sections, science will have logically derived the origins, nature, purpose, and mechanics of both spirituality (increasing consciousness quality through evolution) and your physical world.
You will eventually discover that our reality is fundamentally nonphysical (from a PMR perspective) and is animated and driven by profitability toward states of lower entropy. If your efforts do not produce measurable, significant growth, your personal science is only illusory. The knowledge gained through personal science continually and dramatically modifies itself as it grows and changes. On the other hand, cultural, personal, religious, or scientific belief systems require only a sincere belief in the assumed truth of their associated dogma, doctrine, and creed.
A belief system requires faith in the correctness of its beliefs. Because correctness is simply assumed, actual results are not required (correctness cannot be objectively demonstrated — that is the nature of belief). Mature and stable belief systems, including those generated by cultural, scientific and religious belief, once in place, do not tend to change. There is a logical disincentive to modify significantly what is, by definition, assumed to be complete and perfect. In contrast, the knowledge gained from mature personal scientific experience is always in continual flux. Open minded skepticism and continual scientific exploration for new data make sure of that. The search for truth is, by its nature, in a constant state of discovery, refinement, assessment, and reassessment because new data continue to pour in as long as the individual is aware and interested in growth.
Honest truth seekers never become know-it-alls — there is always room to improve yourself as well as your knowledge. When you know it all, when you believe that you have all the answers, you have, in fact, lost it all — nothing remains but a hollow shell.
You do not need any particular belief, disbelief, or faith to motivate you to start on this journey. You need only to grasp the possibility of a greater reality of some sort. After that, the desire to discover the truth should be motivation enough. Additionally, if this just-perhaps- possible larger reality is also potentially very important and significant to your life and being, nothing should hold you back from expending the necessary energy to explore the truth of the matter for yourself.
You can and should learn from others to the greatest extent possible, but you must grow yourself. Learning from those who have gone before can speed your progress; however, choosing those that you think you can best learn from is an iterative process that must constantly be reevaluated in light of your experience and your results. Those who can be most helpful, at any given time of your life, will change as you and your situation changes.
Do not get stuck in patterns, habits, or rituals. Do not look to groups or organizations to tell you what to do. Do not fall into belief traps. Have confidence in yourself. You not only can do it yourself, but you must do it yourself eventually, quickly or slowly, easily or with great struggle. We are all constantly evolving our consciousness. Evolution forces choice and change. Remaining the same by choosing the no action option is not possible. Change cannot be avoided. Change can take place as either positive growth or negative deterioration; the individual choices you make ultimately determine the direction (positive or negative) of your growth.
A good teacher provides encouragement, makes the learning experience more intense and more concentrated, and gives the student an opportunity to learn more quickly. Unfortunately, the more you need a good teacher, the less likely you are to be able to tell a good one from a bad one.
A good teacher focuses your effort to speed up your progress; a bad one misdirects your efforts and inhibits progress. Always stay skeptical, open minded and belief free, and most of all, taste that pudding — continue to require and evaluate actual measurable results. If six months go by with no obvious measurable results, this indicates that you need to buckle down and get serious, or change your approach.
Results, results, results, results. Actual, clear, unsubtle, measurable results — that is how you must evaluate the efficacy of your process. Intellectual knowledge and intellectual results are not the results I am referring to. These are no substitute for the real results of a growing, changing being. Knowing about it can be interesting and helpful, but it should never be confused with being it.
A change in the quality of your being, growth in the quality of your consciousness, evolution of your spirit: these are the results I am talking about — results of the being, not results of the intellect. It is about who you are, not what you know. It is about why you do what you do, not what you say, or what you do. When you start intending, doing, and being differently, you will produce measurable results. The tests you must pass are not written ones. Great factual knowledge cannot help you pass a test of the quality of your being. You are who and what you are — and it shows — no matter how good you might be at controlling your behavior with your intellect.
Truth is absolute, but how to discover it, and express it within your being, must be personal. Develop your tentative road map by applying open minded skepticism to the experience and conjecture (theory) of others. Then modify that map as you collect your data. This makes good sense, and offers you the possibility of leveraging the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of others as you define your unique growth path. Adopting a set of beliefs is a comparatively unproductive and risky approach to the evolution of your being and the quality of your consciousness.
How do you go about increasing the quality of your consciousness? How do you purposely pursue the evolution of your spirit? If dogma, ritual, and intellectual or emotional group-gropes are out, how do you get from here to there on your own?
For the scientists who are wondering what consciousness and all this blather about spirituality has to do with physics, let me assure you that I have not lost my focus and that this discussion is directly on the path to a scientifically legitimate, more general theory of physics. However, we are now, and will be for some time, developing the necessary basic concepts required to construct this Big TOE. Because this is a Big TOE and not a little TOE, a larger perspective supported by several wholly new paradigms must be developed. This process may appear, from time to time, to wander through irrelevant, ridiculous, or far-out ideological territory but if you can maintain open minded skepticism through the end of Section 6, you will eventually understand these unusual connections and their significance to science.
Because this is science and not theology, let me digress in the following aside on the process of getting from here (wherever you happen to be) to there (an increased quality of consciousness). The journey to higher quality consciousness is more simple and straightforward than you might think. I cannot promise easy and quick, but I can promise easy-to-do techniques and exercises that are simple and effective. For some it will be as easy as learning to swim, for others progress may come slowly; nevertheless, all dedicated and courageous explorers can succeed superbly if their desire to do so is sufficient.
Because improving the quality of your consciousness (spiritual growth) is not, and cannot be, an intellectual achievement, it makes little difference how you intellectually approach the initiation of such improvements. How you start or what you do to improve the quality of your consciousness is insignificant compared to the act of starting. Additionally, an improvement in the quality of your being does not automatically flow from any external activity or practice. All you need is the will and the insuppressible drive (energy) to grow your being and the path, the process, to do so will appear before you. You are surrounded by opportunity to grow; your optimal path starts from wherever you are. I am talking about changing your being, intent, motivation, and attitude; modifying the quality of your interactions with others — changes in behavior and action (what you do) are secondary (results, not causes) and will follow on their own. Primary changes, when significant, are clear, obvious, and measurable to you and to others.
The evolution of consciousness is an extremely difficult concept for the Western mind to grasp because we are exclusively focused on the materially productive fact that right results are the products of right action. Westerners want to know what action they should take to get the results they want. Because they deal almost exclusively with external actions designed to produce external results they do not appreciate that internal results follow a different logic. What you are presently doing, how you live your life from day to day, is probably good enough as it is — what you need to change or improve is why you are doing it. When the “why” — the motivation and intent of what you do — is right, the “what” will take care of itself. Improving the “why” can start anywhere any time because it requires modifying internal variables, not external variables; nothing must change but you.
You can hope and pray for someone else to provide you with enlightenment (trust me, that won’t happen), or you can take the steps to develop and grow it. Do not expect to find shortcuts through the flypaper realms of religious, scientific, or personal dogma, or along the midway of a New Age carnival. You must keep your mind free to change and grow. The right question is: How has the fundamental quality of your being changed. The answer to that question defines the metric of your progress. Self-proclaimed success means nothing; progress must be demonstrated by clear and obvious results.
The answer to how the fundamental quality of your being has changed is either totally obvious to everyone (including yourself), or not much progress has been accumulated. Genuine results are not subtle. You and most other people, given enough time with an individual, have the capability to tell the difference between a wise and loving being and one that is only trying to appear that way. This is not rocket science; it is not difficult to determine if you are making real progress. A significant change in your capacity to love is as subtle as the healing of a badly broken leg — nobody, including you, could miss noticing the change.
Are you like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car — frozen, unable to take the first step? Because of our cultural belief that we must do something in PMR in order to affect change (even if that change is within our consciousness), most people are effectively paralyzed and cannot take that first step. “What should I do? Where should I start?” they ask, looking for a prescription or set of clearly directed “how to” steps. Improving the quality of your consciousness, energizing spiritual growth, and gaining a Big Picture perspective are not accomplished by changing what you do, but by changing what you are. Reread the previous sentence at least twice and think about your need for a physical process to develop your consciousness. You are a product of your culture — you cannot help that.
Spiritual growth, improving the quality of your consciousness, is about changing your attitude, expanding your awareness, outgrowing your fears, reducing your ego, and improving your capacity to love. To succeed, you must change your intent, and modify your motivation. The problem (and the solution) is one of being, not one of doing. You can do everything by the book, meditate regularly, be conscientious, try very hard, go through the proper prescribed motions and still make little progress. Going through the motions does nothing if the mind is not open to, and in pursuit of, fundamental internal change.
The prospect of fundamental internal change can be very frightening. When change begins to occur, many people run away because they are terrified of the unknown. They are afraid of where the changes may lead (which is often directly into the face of their fear) and of not being able to intellectually control the process. They find that shaking the foundation of their being at its deepest level is too unsettling an activity. What if the entire I-structure comes tumbling down into ruins? The ego begins to fear its own dissolution and death.
Fear and belief cause many well-meaning people to reject fundamental internal change, particularly if their beliefs are incompatible with the required changes. Instead of embracing change and facing fears, many would-be spiritual seekers focus on the external rituals associated with some type of mental or spiritual discipline: They go to church or learn to meditate. Many meditators and a few church goers hope to produce measurable external changes and to have cool internal metaphysical experiences.
In the West, meditation is acultural and an individual, rather than a social, activity. Most church goers continue their attendance out of social convenience, habit, duty, or cultural expectation — whereas most meditators eventually decide that meditation does not do anything for them, or at least not enough to be worth the effort and time required for a long-term commitment. A few of each group pretend their effort has made them superior. The more honest and objective of the failed meditators give up in frustration or due to a simple lack of interest and soon forget about it. “I tried spiritual exercises, and they didn’t work for me.”
Practicing some form of meditation to effect external change, gain paranormal abilities, placate the guilt of doing nothing, or simply because you think you should, is analogous to a carpenter trying to build cabinets while holding the screwdriver and hammer by the wrong ends. All the pieces are there, but the execution is flawed. Make the required internal changes and the measurable external changes will occur on their own. You have to grab the screwdriver and hammer by the wooden end or you will come to the erroneous conclusion that they are useless tools that only someone else can effectively use. Or, more arrogantly, that nobody could use such stupid tools, that cabinets are a logical impossibility, and that all carpenters are delusional frauds and fools.
You must realize that you cannot modify being merely by taking physical action within the local physical reality. Westerners have a particularly difficult time understanding this fact and often feel helpless without a way to compel results from the outside. The opportunity to bolt to personal success and freedom by employing a more complete knowledge is lost in a culturally conditioned false commitment to the little picture. Belief traps are bigger problems than most of us think they are.
I know, after all that, you still want to know what you should do, how you can best modify your being, and what the most effective techniques are. Let me guess, you feel that you could use a hint — a little help, a little direction to get started. All right, all right, I give up! To help you get started here are some things you can do that may lead to opportunities to grow your being; however, it is entirely up to you to recognize, seize, and develop the opportunities that come your way. You already have plenty of opportunities, but let’s pretend that by doing what I am going to tell you, more obvious and easier opportunities will appear before you. That will get us started with a hopeful, positive attitude.
What is more likely to happen is that by conscientiously working at the following exercises, your perspective will change, enabling you to see opportunities that are now as invisible to you as water is to a fish that lives two miles down in the middle of a four mile deep ocean. With no light and only a dim awareness, the fish knows nothing of water. Water just is, has always been, and is taken for granted. The fish does not ponder the nature of water, it swims in it. We swim in an ocean of consciousness. We are not aware of the ocean, but only of our local interactions with it.
The first and most necessary ingredient is a sincere desire to grow the quality of your consciousness — to evolve your being — to permanently change yourself at a deeply personal level. The second most necessary ingredient is to have the courage to change — the courage to face your fears — to face death and personal destruction, for that is the story your ego will tell (and try to get you to believe) when it comes whining to you with its tail between its legs hoping to dissuade you from increasing the quality of your consciousness.
Why would your sweet little ego do a mean thing like that? Because the ego’s main job is to keep you feeling good by managing various systems of belief that are designed to keep your fears beyond the reach of your intellectual awareness. Increasing the quality of your consciousness requires you to face your fears, overcome them, and dissolve your ego. You should expect the ego to struggle mightily.
Ego does not necessarily imply arrogant self-centeredness. Ego comes in an infinite array of expressions — arrogance is only one. Being timid, unsure, or a worrier are also manifestations of ego. Insecurity and anxiety about that insecurity are common. How each personality expresses that insecurity and anxiety reflects individual quality and style. The strategies that are used to deal with fear, though common at the top level, are uniquely applied to each individual. Great ego reflects great fear; it does not necessarily reflect great arrogance or great pride, though it may reflect both. Self-centered, self-focused, and self-absorbed are three of the many possible aspects of ego — each of these three can be directed either inwardly (producing timidity) or outwardly (producing arrogance) to create personality traits that appear to be opposite.
Courage and determination will grow sufficiently to overcome fear if the intent to succeed is sufficiently strong, steady, and clear.
I will more carefully define ego and explain its functions (how it works and achieves its goals) in an aside in Chapter 8, Book 2. Go there now if you are seriously confused.
The most obvious pathway to the exploration of consciousness is through the exploration of your personal consciousness — a scientific investigation of your subjective experience. Studying consciousness from the outside (objectively) is like studying biology by looking at pictures of zoo animals. Consciousness is fundamentally individual and personal. Our objective sense of consciousness is derived from the reflection of our personal consciousness from the uniquely curvy surface of a mirror that we call “another.”
Our objective experience of other consciousness is the result of an interaction of our personal consciousness (representing one set of possible choices or ways of being) with another, which suggests to us new configurations, interactions, and possibilities for our being. We project our awareness of consciousness into “other,” define the nature of “other” in terms of ourselves, and thus see only a reflection of ourselves in the mirror of interaction with “other.”
To preserve the symmetry of interaction, we also serve as a uniquely shaped mirror in which others can see themselves reflected in challenging new ways. Within this fun-house hall of interactive mirrors, your consciousness is a singular actor. Opportunities for change arise, choices are made, reality is actualized, and progress or regression in terms of personal growth is achieved. Your conscious awareness defines your personal reality. There are as many different shades and levels of personal reality as there are of personal awareness. “Other” provides opportunity for the improvement of the quality of your consciousness by accurately reflecting the truth of you.
If improved consciousness quality along with personal effectiveness, growth, and power are your goals, approaching consciousness from the inside, from the scientific exploration of inner space, is the only logical approach that delivers results. An approach from the outside will limit you to collecting the facts about the shadow that consciousness projects upon the wall of PMR.