My Big TOE
AWAKENING – DISCOVERY — INNER WORKINGS
A TRILOGY UNIFYING PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICS, AND METAPHYSICS
Thomas Campbell
Book 2 Discovery – Abridged Version – Part 10
The requirements for spiritual growth on the Path of Knowledge and the requirements for awareness and functionality in NPMR are similar and related. It is the dropping of ego and material attachment that produces the high signal to noise ratios required for being sentient in NPMR (see Chapter 4, Book 3). Spiritual knowledge and paranormal ability do not have to occur together (making that connection depends on your interest, focus, and intent) but on the Path of Knowledge, they often are intertwined. On the Paths of Service and Surrender, paranormal abilities may or may not be encountered. Spiritual knowledge and paranormal ability are not opposite sides of the same coin, but rather mutually supportive and strongly related activities. Paranormal ability is an available byproduct of the Path of Knowledge that you can choose to ignore.
Though quality consciousness and paranormal abilities often occur together like families and children, they are not logically dependent on each other and though normally related, each can exist separately.
Focusing on or being attached to paranormal abilities will halt, retard, or degenerate spiritual progress as well as degrade the abilities themselves. Thus, the potential for great misuse is self-correcting as is an interest in doing paranormal demonstrations or tricks for science or curious individuals. It is not only a waste of time (as described previously), but is also self-limiting — a drag on your energy and personal progress.
You might become an advanced scientist by reading and studying books, but do not expect to develop an advanced consciousness (become spiritually adept) by studying books or hanging out with a spiritual master: You have to be it, live it, experience it, and subjectively interact with it. There is no easy process, shortcut, or technical solution. PMR actions alone (studying psi phenomena, following meditation techniques, reading books, believing anything) will not open NPMR to you unless you experience spiritual growth and decrease the entropy of your consciousness. And if you try in your mind (like a Flatlander) to force NPMR to conform to the form, function, and properties of PMR (science, or philosophy, or 3D space- time reality), you will, like traditional contemporary scientists, be haplessly and hopelessly trying to force the proverbial NPMR camel through the eye of a PMR needle.
The experiences you need to grow the quality of your consciousness happen to you every day. What you need to learn to evolve your nonphysical being is not a secret that is hidden from your view. It is your effort, direction, and intention that determine how you utilize, embrace, or shun the available opportunities, experience, and information. Being open minded and willing to personally experiment as well as expend considerable effort is the only way to make serious progress along the Path of Knowledge. Because personal experimentation is often subjective (not the stuff group-science is traditionally made of), it requires a commitment to continue working and learning until you have developed enough knowledge and understanding to produce objective results that can be validated. Substantial progress requires a substantial commitment — like the commitment it takes to get through college and graduate school along with the commitment required to become an accomplished musician. Everybody can do it, but not everybody will do it.
In order to build new concepts, there is no other construction methodology except stretching existing concepts and metaphors beyond their current use — beyond their common applicability. That is why transcending paradigms is exceptionally difficult. You must, by definition, start with inadequate conceptual tools for the job and somehow develop the necessary perspective that necessarily lies beyond simple linear extrapolation. You must combine a creative synthesis of old ideas with inspired intuition to find a new paradigm, which is nothing less than a new, more complete, more functional, bigger picture of reality — a more profitable organization of the available data.
First things first! Crawl… then walk… then run! I know that you want to run in the worst way because running is obviously superior to crawling or walking, but if you try to run before you are ready, you will simply fall flat on your face and probably come to the erroneous conclusion that running is impossible. That is a worse outcome than being frustrated because you are not able to run right now. Why? Because getting the horse far out in front of the cart by trying to run prematurely may permanently damage your ability to ever be ready to run.
“Hey, I tried it myself — running doesn’t work! It’s all a pile of horsepucky! It is not only impossible, but dangerous as well! People who say they can run are delusional, nuts, or egotists trying to impress everyone else! Beware! Don’t listen to a word of it — trust me on this one, I have firsthand experience — look at that black eye and bruised nose. I will never try to run again! Anybody who tries to run is either an idiot or a fool.”
Eight-month-old humans sometimes feel like that but they keep trying because the success of others within their physical reality is eventually undeniable. On the other hand, intellectuals who are committed to justifying their cultural beliefs occasionally become champions of denial in order to convince themselves that their ignorance, rather than their belief, is the delusion.
Jeez, those belief traps are amazing — they can transmute simple ignorance and incompetence into blind stupidity in a flash.
By now you may be convinced that I enjoy torturing you, but that’s not true. The nature of reality is an extremely complex subject which is difficult to grasp because it can be seen and understood only from a Big Picture perspective that must necessarily appear wild and crazy when compared to your familiar little picture. Big steps or leaps forward in understanding always have and always will seem wild and crazy when first encountered from the viewpoint of the old perspective which is, by definition, built upon a less expansive knowledge.
The revelations of modern Relativity and Quantum mechanics, the fact that solid physical matter is composed of atoms that are mostly empty space, and that our beloved earth is not at the center of the universe were all seen as ridiculous absurdities existing on the delusional fringe before they were accepted by the mainstream. Successful explorations of consciousness, mind, and the larger reality must by necessity seem similarly absurd because they will conflict with the traditional ways of thinking about and defining reality.
We humans, in general, know much less of what there is to know than we think we do. Given the depth and pervasiveness of the belief blindness that reflects the quality of our species at the dawn of the twenty-first century, if this Big TOE did not seem wild and was not difficult to understand, it could not possibly be correct.
Many people feel that Western culture is slowly growing up, opening its collective mind, becoming more able and willing to take the longer and broader view. Optimism and seeing ourselves through rose colored glasses are two of our most pervasive cultural traits. It is true that explorations of consciousness, mind, and the larger reality that remain strongly connected to our little picture belief systems have become somewhat more acceptable during the last thirty years. Unfortunately, the failure of such efforts to deliver profound insights has encouraged the commonly held belief that no solution exists and that a scientific Big TOE is impossible.
Significant theoretical progress seems unattainable, inaccessible, and forever beyond our reach because our thinking must be based upon traditional ways of defining reality in order to maintain at least marginal respectability and support from the center of power that dispenses research funds and credibility. Failure is assured by the requirement to use a proper, rational, and scientific exploration and analysis process which is, at its root, based upon the dogmatic belief that all reality must be physical. Under this handicap, researchers may easily prove that something truly strange is going on, but they will never figure out what or why. This recipe for failure resembles a resolute decision to look for your misplaced car keys or sun glasses only in places that you have never been.
Belief traps, dressed up as obvious truth, always make new Big Picture concepts struggle for credibility against the prevailing social, scientific, or religious currents of assumed rationality. That is simply how it is, and how it will continue to be for a very long time.
When one is only a little fellow starting near the bottom of a long evolutionary ladder, as are most humans, Big Picture perspectives are difficult to come by. It is a designed-in feature of our larger reality that makes Big Truth appear to be an impenetrable mystery to the limited perspective of the average person, yet it is also a designed-in feature that a grand panoramic view of the whole is available to anyone who makes the effort to climb the mountain. Indeed, climbing the mountain is one gateway to the successful evolution and advancement of our individual being. For those wondering why opacity should be a designed-in feature, consider what your neighbors, coworkers, spouse, children, boss, mother, and mother-in- law might do to you if they knew how to manipulate you with their minds: It is better that they grow up first.
A TOE, by definition, must explain all the facts that are known to exist as well as new facts that belong to a bigger, more complete picture. My Big TOE is no different. It must subsume all present knowledge including PMR science. As we all know, traditional science is nowhere close to producing a credible Big TOE that explains intuition, mind, consciousness, and the paranormal, as well as the normal physics of PMR. PMR scientists and their egos deal with their inability to see a bigger picture by denying the existence of what they cannot explain. Facts to the contrary are either ignored or attacked as an unacceptable heresy that offends the obviously correct beliefs of the current scientific establishment. There always seems to be a plentiful supply of self-righteous scientists who spare no venom in defense of the sacred dogmas of contemporary science. From their limited view, PMR science and truth are synonymous and define each other.
Do you see the parallels here? The last four sentences in the preceding paragraph apply equally well to religion and culture as they do to science. That should not be so surprising: At the bottom level of their belief-based foundations, traditional science, culture, and religion share the same genetic material. That is why their members and their institutions exhibit many of the same individual and organizational traits. In the West, science and culture have made an alliance of mutual support, while in the Middle East and East, religion and culture have allied themselves. Together they provide a throne from which the human ego reigns supreme.
Discovering a more profitable bigger picture, as well as raising the average quality of the human spirit, is a job that necessarily is left entirely up to you. We the people remain objectively clueless because our awareness is far removed from an integrated holistic view of reality. We the people remain subjectively clueless because our belief systems forbid the truth. Having been artificially separated, our objective and subjective cluelessness feed and maintain each other.
There are two conditions that a successful Big TOE must meet. First, a successful Big TOE cannot be logically inconsistent or conflict with known facts. It must explain and contain (be a super-set of) what is presently known. Second, a successful Big TOE must appear to be logically inconsistent and conflict with traditionally accepted beliefs and the opinions based upon those beliefs (pseudo-facts). It could not possibly be a correct Big TOE, or even a major step toward a new Big TOE, if it did not dramatically conflict with our limited little picture belief-based culture, science, and knowledge.
Because our traditional science believes that the little picture is all there is, it restricts its investigation of the Big Picture (epistemology, ontology, cosmology, quantum physics, evolution, metaphysics, physics, consciousness, mind, psi effects, and intuition) to little picture phenomena. Traditional science is placed in the hopeless role of expecting the Big Picture to be contained within, and be derivable from, the little picture. Looking to extract the Big Picture from the little picture is a totally illogical approach and will produce nothing but frustration and the apparent conformation that either the Big Picture does not exist or it is beyond objective knowing. This approach to reality is analogous to trying to ascertain the properties of the larger forest by interrogating the moss growing on a tree, or perhaps expecting to understand modern microprocessor design and manufacture by studying a chunk of raw silicon ore.
The door of your mind must be opened at least a crack before you are likely to notice the passageway to a more complete conscious awareness and step through it to investigate what lies on the other side. If you have the courage to seek the truth, the My Big TOE trilogy is meant to facilitate the opening of such a crack in the belief barrier constructed by the ego-mind. A primary goal of My Big TOE is to help you get your Big TOE, or perhaps your entire foot, wedged in your mind’s door to prevent it from slamming closed before you are able to explore the true nature of your consciousness. This is more difficult than it first appears because you are easily seduced by your cultural, scientific, religious, and personal beliefs to seek the habitual comfort and refuge in the safe bliss that ignorance creates. Delusion, like a drug addiction, is a habit that is difficult to break.
You might think that separating fact from opinion is not difficult. We all think we know how to perform that operation reasonably well. Nevertheless, it is obvious that many people are not especially good at it — but we, you and I, truly know how to separate BS from truth. It is not that difficult because.… well… we just know. We have been around the block a few times and are experienced and perceptive enough to know what is genuine and what isn’t. Separating fact from fancy is intuitively obvious — our BS detectors are sensitive and finely tuned — we know how people think, what they want, and the games they play. It is difficult for anyone to pull anything over on us: we are not naive or easy targets for New Age hustlers or status-quo promoting traditionalists.
Everybody feels like that, including teenagers. It is a pile of belief- trap-crap that you should be careful not to fall into. The reason that discriminating truth from falsity is extraordinarily difficult is: 1) you are unaware of what you don’t know and 2) it is your ego’s solemn job (remember, your intellect is a servant of the ego) to convince you that your belief-based pseudo-knowledge is actually real knowledge. Because of invisible ignorance, the needs, wants, and desires of a slick ego, and a self-justifying intellect, your apparently solid grasp of either Big Truth or little truth is likely to be delusional. There are exceptional people who see things clearly, but except for you and me, I don’t know any of them.
In a culture like ours where scientific, religious, and cultural beliefs forcefully constrain and dominate most intellectual effort and essentially define the boundaries of each individual’s local reality, it is more difficult to think out of the box and to separate the facts from the beliefs and opinions that masquerade as facts than you might imagine.
In many ways, we are not that different from the entities that we simulate in our computers. Operationally, there are many similarities while the few differences are mostly differences in the quality and richness of the input data (from our primary five sensors), the extensive use of parallel processing and feedback loops, and the capacity of our dedicated processing equipment (brain and central nervous system). You may be surprised to discover how functionally similar we are to some of our digital creations even though we are of radically dissimilar substance, motivation, limitations, and construction.
It would seem that the single most significant difference between us and what we might create within a computer is our free will to make choices that reflect and define the quality of our evolving consciousness. We, it would appear, are unique and fundamentally superior to digitally simulated entities because we possess a nonphysical component and a will that is free to make decisions, express intent and complex motivation, and evolve itself. From a similar but different perspective, we humans are special (at least in our view) because it appears that we have emotions and a soul while simulated entities in digital computers obviously do not.
The belief that humanity exclusively possesses a nonphysical part (soul) is a human conceit that leads many of our species to place themselves in a superior role to all other (lesser) life-forms, and doubly so to digital creations. Nevertheless, we will soon see that even this great source of human pride and distinction that seemingly would set us apart from any simulation, no matter how sophisticated, has its simulation analog and is perhaps not as important a distinction as it initially appears.
The finite set of free will choices available to each sentient player generally reflect the quality of their consciousness. It is the extent to which fear (ego, beliefs, needs, desires) and love (knowledge, caring, balance, joy) drive the individual’s motivations that defines the subset of available choices which in turn limits the conditionals that a player is capable of considering and contemplating. This limited subset of conditionals defines the choices and possible short-term interactions that are operationally available to an entity. The choices that are operationally available to (within the decision-space of) a given entity are the choices the entity has the ability to recognize, understand, and implement. Choices that are operationally available usually represent only a small portion of the complete set of choices that are actually available. It becomes clear that the extent of a sentient individual’s operational awareness is a function of the quality of that individual’s consciousness. As the entropy of a consciousness decreases, its awareness expands and blossoms. A high entropy consciousness is constrained to exist, live, and experience within a relatively small reality.
The possible decisions each player is operationally capable of making is limited by the quality of that player’s consciousness. Thus, an entity’s evolutionary profitability must generally progress through a long series of small steps. Each step represents a free will excursion; a stretch of that entity’s being, beyond its current capability. Growth must necessarily occur in the margins and accumulate through small increments. Athletes bootstrap (incrementally grow by applying a focused effort that demands performance beyond present capability) their proficiency in much the same way. You must reach beyond your present abilities to actualize your full potential. For consciousness, this evolutionary dynamic is implemented by a feedback loop that modifies the quality of the individual’s consciousness based upon the quality of the intent driving the free will choices exercised. Tiny positive or negative increments in the quality of your intent, over many thousands of choices, eventually lead to either an increasing or decreasing consciousness quality.
Evolution provides sentient entities with the imperative to grow, to improve, and to increase profitability at every level of existence.
People have the important free will characteristic of being able to change their minds, and have the ability to be inconsistently inconsistent. The extent of an individual’s natural randomness is related to the quality of his or her consciousness. Higher quality produces a clearer definition of intent, steadier and more focused motivation, lower entropy, less uncertainty, and less randomness. A low entropy consciousness is more consistent, rational, capable, and powerful. For example, both the paranormal and normal power of a spiritual adept — an enlightened individual with a high quality of consciousness — is the result of a low entropy consciousness having, by the definition of entropy, more energy available to do work.
People — bright, sentient, conscious entities — being the magnificent creatures they are, do not have to choose the minimum energy state, the path of least resistance, but they usually do anyway in a convincing imitation of the cleverness of inanimate objects. Being content to drift along the path of least resistance is a common attribute of many humans. That is how most of us live our lives — pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain along a minimum effort trajectory. Mimicking the aspirations of inanimate objects is not exactly on a growth path to greatness. The extent of your awareness and the size of your reality depend upon the quality and entropy of your consciousness.
Brightness and awareness accelerate the process of consciousness evolution. Unfortunately, many humans who are content to evolve at the rate of clams and rocks focus only on their external environment while conscientiously pursuing the path of least resistance. Taking the simplest and easiest path available dramatically reduces an entity’s decision space and minimizes the size of their operational reality. Differences in rates and capacity of evolutionary development are often the result of differences in the number of possible available states to explore (decision space). The larger and richer the array of possibilities, the greater the evolutionary potential and the quicker it is explored. In long-term consciousness evolution, love-motivation is productive and profitable, whereas fear-motivation and no motivation are counterproductive and unprofitable.
Running with the herd down the path of least resistance in support of the status quo and ego needs is a dead end for consciousness evolution. Decreasing your entropy to become sentient in the larger reality requires a long-term pro-active effort by an open mind. Living in a tiny self-limited reality appears to be a great idea only to those who have traded their vision, gumption, and curiosity for security, status, and self-importance. Trading an expanded awareness for an expanded ego is an exceptionally bad deal.
To develop your awareness, you must carefully discover the nature of your personal reality, your local reality, and the larger reality — not through studying, talking, or reading about it, but through your firsthand experience. That is what your life is all about: growing your quality through the subjective and objective experience of an interacting consciousness. Always remain skeptical and demand clear, objective, measurable results before reaching tentative conclusions. Your awareness cannot expand and learning will not take place unless you make a concerted effort to reach beyond the ingrained belief and dogma (present paradigms) that dramatically limits your vision and retards the evolution of your consciousness.
Intelligence can be an attribute or manifestation of consciousness. There can be no intelligence if there is no consciousness. Consciousness is the stone, while intelligence is the beautiful, ornate, complex, simple, ugly, or plain sculpture made by organizing the geometry of that stone into a specific shape.
Four key concepts define dynamic, evolving, aware consciousness:
1. Self-awareness
2. Evolutionary viability or potential
3. Ability to modify the self
4. Intelligence
According to the above four attributes of consciousness, everything from a simple worm (whose DNA may constitute the memory resource) to humans should be considered conscious and intelligent. Any system, thing, entity or being of any type or form that possesses sufficient self-awareness, evolutionary headroom (many new states to explore), evolutionary purpose (defines profitability relative to internal environments), the ability to modify itself in pursuit of self- improvement (change its own hardware or software), as well as adequate memory and processing capability will automatically develop a personality and is said to be conscious; it also will begin to evolve on its own.