My Big TOE
AWAKENING – DISCOVERY — INNER WORKINGS
A TRILOGY UNIFYING PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICS, AND METAPHYSICS
Thomas Campbell
Book 2 Discovery – Abridged Version – Part 4
Life and Love in the Petri Dish Great Science, Good Plan — Now Get To Work
An effort to spread Big Truth may be a noble undertaking, however, using an organization to spread Big Truth to the multitudes, many of whom are not yet ready to personally assimilate its underlying wisdom, has historically ended up being counterproductive. Once organized, the Big Truth — which requires individual wisdom to understand — is replaced by culturally relevant dogma that everyone can easily understand and a structure designed to grow the power, influence, and cash flow of the organization. Eventually, defining, maintaining and growing the organization becomes an end in itself on the path of power while the original driving force of Big Truth is replaced by a more effective and marketable self-righteous dogma fanned by the flames of ignorance and fear at the lowest common denominator of organizational (group) mind. Low quality consciousness is, by nature, easily manipulated.
I am speaking in terms of generalities here; there are always individual exceptions. Fear-based organizations (believe our way or suffer the awful consequences) are inherently and fundamentally incompatible with the promulgation of spiritual values and growth which require a love-based individual understanding. Trying to express and spread love through dogma, self-righteous arrogance, legislation, political or social pressure, narrow-mindedness, or fanatical violence is like trying to strike a wooden match under twenty feet of muddy water using only your elbows.
Imagine a space-time elementary school, or perhaps a space-time entropy reduction factory, where individuated chunks of consciousness could more effectively evolve their energy toward more profitable states of being.
To facilitate self-improvement, each individuated consciousness would need to cut through the layers of convoluted intellectual assessments, opinions, image, and ego to get to the truth of a buried intent. Something was needed that allows individuals to see and feel their consciousness quality directly reflected in their actions. Effective consciousness evolution needed a truth device or quality meter that accurately measures, displays, records, and accumulates the entropy reducing profitability or rightness of any motivation initiating an interaction. Without such a device or if the device is ignored), individuals would have no truth reference and could be easily captured by their ego’s propaganda.
What a great feedback-driven learning tool this would be! Can you imagine? Something that would accurately grade the quality of every thought we have and action we take, as well as maintain a running sum of the results. An entity whose accumulated experience-quality represents a large collection of good quality intentions would naturally create a loving and joyous existence; in contrast, one that represented an accumulation of entropy increasing ego-driven intentions would automatically create a stressful, miserable, unhappy existence.
Wow! With a feedback device like that to guide your growth, how could you go wrong? Jeez, this is going to be easier than I thought: All I need to do is learn how to pay attention to this quality meter gizmo, do the right thing, and then check my score. With a little trial and error experimenting, it should be relatively simple for me to get better and better scores over time. Cinchy! Where is this gizmo, and what does it look like?
“raw emotion”
This what-you-feel-reflects-what-you-are internal quality meter is the mother of all biofeedback devices. That love and joy do not dominate our feelings most of the time is both normal and not a good sign. Love, joy, peace, compassion, humility, and balance are the dominant expressions and feelings of a high quality consciousness. What you and I feel most of the time is probably more representative of a high entropy consciousness.
Your feelings always reflect the real you with perfect accuracy. If you feel anger, negativity, inadequacy, or anxiety, that is a reflection of how you are and what you are on the inside; not how other people make you feel. Additionally, entities of higher quality often couple emotion with a conscience containing the values of its underlying consciousness to produce a better, more sensitive, quality-meter. Take a note: Perhaps you should investigate what your emotive energy (instantaneous and cumulative) is telling you about the quality of your consciousness.
“That jerk really makes me mad!” Actually, he does not. You cannot logically blame others for creating your emotions; you must take 100% of the responsibility for whatever you do, feel, and are. Others merely show you a reflection of yourself as you react to them — the reactions are yours alone. You are in charge of and responsible for you. You react and interact as you do because of how you are. No one, no thing, and no circumstance can possibly force you to be someone other than you. Only you are allowed to make your choices.
PMR is where the rubber meets the road — where your actions and feelings reflect the actual you, not what you think you are, or want to be.
To oversimplify, the basic motivational dynamics (as opposed to structural dynamics) are; love, knowledge and wisdom vs. fear, ego and ignorance and the equally popular theme, good vs. evil. Could the dynamics of this fundamental struggle at the root of our consciousness be the source of our deepest self-expression? Our arts (literature, cinema, painting, theater, and music) are dedicated to expressing our interest and preoccupation with the motivational dynamics that are fundamental to our existence and the existence of our reality.
The same themes that universally stir emotion and captivate interest within every culture on our planet are those that describe what is crucial and important to the evolution of our consciousness. Because consciousness is common to humanity, tales of love, knowledge, wisdom, fear, ego, ignorance, and good vs. evil are also common to humanity as well as to all other highly aware conscious beings. The motivational dynamics of consciousness are our motivational dynamics as well because we are consciousness. Could anything be more simple or straightforward?
Do you ever wonder why all the gods of men seem to have a strong want, need, expectation, or desire to be worshiped? An obsession with being worshipped and wanting or needing the little people to “believe in you” must be either an occupational hazard of godship or a prerequisite for the job. Haven’t you always wondered what, exactly, gods get out of being worshiped and “believed in” and why — it certainly appears to be extraordinarily important to them.
The fact is, unconditional love, compassion, and humility can have no requirements, no ego, no needs, no desires, and no expectations.
It must be difficult to get people to join your organization and give you money and obedience if all you give them in return is permission to develop the quality of their consciousness in their own unique way and on their own time (which is the only way an individual can improve their consciousness quality). A spiritual organization can offer no more than casual nonspecific encouragement to its members without also becoming an inhibitor of their progress.
Hey, I just got a great idea! Listen, I hereby fully encourage you to develop your consciousness quality in your own way, on your own time, and at your own pace so would you please send ten percent of your annual income to the address inside the front cover of this book?
And just for my dearly beloved favorite readers, a onetime special introductory bonus offer: After I get the entire ten percent, I’ll throw in an autographed book and a set of twelve self-addressed tithing envelopes for next year — absolutely free!
Wait, there is more: a triple extra bonus! Wow! I hereby solemnly promise to 1) let you sleep in every Saturday and Sunday, 2) never lecture you or preach to you or make you wear a suit and tie, and 3) allow unlimited disobedience!
Jeez man, compare that package to what the competition offers! A fantastic deal at half the price!
Don’t waste your time or money — there is no address inside the front cover of this book. I am just having some fun. Laughing at yourself is not only fun, but good medicine. Everybody enjoys an occasional dose of good medicine, right?
The point is: The process of encouraging spiritual growth does not lend itself to being organized. To the contrary, when a spiritually focused organization becomes successful (recruits a sustaining broad membership), it inevitably becomes part of the problem — it begins inhibiting spiritual growth instead of encouraging it. Although the raising of consciousness quality requires an individual process, the raising of good feelings within a secure ego requires a group process. Because the two processes are generally incompatible and destructive of each other, it is a good idea to be clear about which process best represents your personal investment in consciousness quality.
AUM is dim consciousness evolved into brilliant love-consciousness — which is how positive consciousness naturally evolves. The negative intent consciousness critters and beings (evil) can evolve only toward power-control-force. That is as far as evil can go — the establishment of power-control-force. Minimizing entropy by growing or evolving in the negative direction is extremely limited and relatively worthless compared to the advantages gained by a consciousness evolving positively toward the expression of itself as love. In PMR, power-control-force is a way of life — a primary motivator. That fact should tell you there is much low quality consciousness, negativity, and evil running loose in our local reality. The only way to help clean that mess up is to clean yourself up. You do not have the ability to improve anyone else. All you can do for others is to provide opportunity for them to do for themselves.
In the PMR elementary school of 3D space-time, power-control-force may seem to be a big deal. It may appear to many as a superior means for achieving material success and winning the latest round of “King of the Hill.” However, in the bigger picture, in consciousness-space, power-control-force is, for the most part, a short-sighted, short-term ego booster which is a big deal only in the neighborhood of anti-rat town where it holds sway. Yet, the negative can eventually overwhelm the positive as a bacterial infection or a cancer might overwhelm and eventually kill a once productive, healthy and strong sentient human.
Disease has its function — it gives as well as takes. Free will choice must include the ability to choose badly. Though an individuated consciousness can lower its entropy through growth in the negative direction, negative growth, because of natural limitations, is a poor long-term investment. A fatal cancer, without meaning to, always ends up killing itself as it kills its host. The cancer is not aware its activity is self-destructive because it is trapped in a little picture with no vision into the larger system. The host on the other hand, living within and being a part of that bigger picture, must take care not to encourage the cancer or let the cancer get a foothold. An aware entity that chooses to lower its entropy by growing in the negative direction is, like a cancer — self-limiting and self-destructive in the long run. Evil contains the seeds of its own stagnation, if not destruction. A potential host’s best defense is knowledge, truth, and Big Picture awareness.
If you are careful not to jump to conclusions, it will be profitable for us to consider interactive consciousness dynamics. How do kind and benevolent pacifists fare in a land without laws? What if you start with 90% pacifists, 8% everyday plain vanilla non-pacifists and 2% violence prone self-centered low-life scum bags that lie, cheat, steal, and worse? What are the natural survival and growth rates as well as conversion rates between these groups? The individuals within all groups are of equal size, strength and intelligence. How will the dynamics of this experiment play out under various amounts and types of law and law enforcement (remember, law enforcers must be able to be violent), I will let you come to your own sense of the dynamics and variables involved as well as what their outcomes are likely to be.
I do not expect you to derive the final answers to the preceding questions — at least not today. I simply wish to create some appreciation of the type and complexity of issues that a study of interactive consciousness dynamics must address. The above example barely scratches the surface of a discipline that growing consciousness systems would need to explore to ensure their continued profitability.
Recall from our earlier discussion in Chapter 24, Book 1 that evolutionary pressure is derived from an entity’s internal and external environment. The bottom line of that discussion was that the evolutionary goal of consciousness is to lower its entropy. Thus for consciousness, successfully evolving, increasing quality, self- improvement, spiritual growth, and increasing the capacity to interact with love, are all the same thing. These attributes, along with the increased functionality and capability that accrues with more energy available to do work (from our definition of entropy — near the middle of Chapter 24, Book 1), are artifacts of a low entropy consciousness.
From the limited PMR little picture view, the increased functionality and capability that naturally occur in low-entropy consciousness may be experienced as personal power, unconditional love, or paranormal ability.
Free will gives you the responsibility for your growth and enables you to evolve. Without free will, there is no way for individuated consciousness to decrease its entropy.
Our System (OS) is designed to give you maximum opportunity to succeed under the given conditions.
Everything you need for success is laid at your feet, all the help you could profitably use is there for you, but you have to make the choices. You have to execute your intent.
Balance, humility, compassion, joy, peace, sadness, love, and caring as well as a desire to evolve, learn, and grow are the natural attributes of a highly evolved and aware consciousness. We are an individuated part of the larger consciousness that has been constrained (matter bumps on the lumps in the AUM sheet) to go through the same evolutionary process as the whole. The value of knowing and understanding the origins and processes of your existence, as well as being aware of the available options and pitfalls that lie before you, is obvious. Knowing what you are doing and why you are doing it should contribute immensely to your ability to get the job done.
As our individual consciousness evolves, we contribute to the quality of the entire consciousness system of which we are a part.
By lowering the entropy of our individuated consciousness, we also lower the entropy of the entire larger consciousness system.
We are profitable beyond our contribution to experimental results. That is why we get lots of help and encouragement.
Why would an entity take the negative route? Because they are shortsighted and do not understand the Big Picture; that is a common problem.
Going for the apparent short-term gain is how most sentient entities, consciousness systems, or beings in any reality or situation) function if they do not have the requisite quality and do not possess the perspective, capacity, or understanding to see the Big Picture. That is a simple fact of existence. Do you know anybody or any organizational entity that is fixated on the short-term view or lacks Big Picture vision? Wait a minute, I am afraid that I inadvertently put you in an endless loop — you will never finish that list. Let’s ask it the other way. Do you know anybody (besides you and me) or any organizational entity that is not fixated on the short-term view and possesses a Big Picture vision? Now that is one short list!
If the experiment is about aware consciousness, the number of participants who have gained a clear view of the Big Picture may well be a metric that measures the progress of the experiment. We are allowed to know; becoming aware and operational within the Big Picture represents a natural part of our potential that we should make an effort to actualize through personal growth.
Complex, self-interactive consciousness can pull itself up by its bootstraps in the same way that bright awareness self-energizes and drives its own development. AUM’s science is focused on understanding those evolutionary processes that affect consciousness and on making these processes as efficient and productive as possible.
What we do with the opportunity to evolve our consciousness is entirely up to us. It is our free will, our self-interaction, and our interaction with others that creates the possibility of learning, which in turn creates our potential for growth. Because of our relatively high entropy, we are slow learners; consequently, our cycles of learning and growth are designed to accumulate results over multiple experience packets.
Some of us become apathetic and cynical because we have to grow and learn on our own.
We become annoyed because we are self-centered and because outgrowing a cherished and needed fantasy is often neither easy nor fun. It is just not fair!
Refusing to work on your spiritual growth because your life is not fun and full of joy is like spanking a baby in order to make it stop crying — counterproductive, and incredibly stupid.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were always a mommy and daddy to take care of you, to make things easier for you? This adult gig is a bad deal! Bummer! Adults need guidance, comfort, and reassurance more than kids do because the penalties and consequences of making mistakes and doing it wrong are more serious when you are an adult.
Step right up ladies and gentlemen; come a little closer, boy, do I have a deal for you! There is no need to feel abandoned and suffer alone, there are lots of organizations and individuals that would like to play the mother or father role to your fear and neediness on various levels. Here is the deal: your ego gets to pretend that you are relieved of some of the adult responsibility for managing and directing your life as well as growing the quality of your consciousness. The parental stand-in gains some control and influence over you, your resources, and your decisions as you forfeit some part of your free will. Take your pick: friend, spouse, employer, religion, church, association, political party, club, support group, gang, charity, or welfare plan — I am sure you can find one or more of these to help you bear your burdens.
The weak, being easy prey, always can find someone willing to offer help for a price — someone or group that will take care of them and make them feel better. All the individual has to do is trade their money and a piece of their soul for the illusion of knowing the answers and the increased peace-of-mind that comes with an imagined offloading of personal responsibility. Listen to that ego purr— stroke, stroke, stroke. These illusions, properly marketed, are now and always have been best sellers. Many are mandatory according to the standards of each culture.
The bottom line is that predators and parasites can make an easy living (money, power and self-importance) by manipulating the fears of those who have no understanding of the Big Picture. That fact brings up another attribute of ignorance: The ignorant and fearful are always vulnerable and easily manipulated. Manipulating believers, regardless of what they believe, is as easy as appealing to wants, needs and fears. Ask any salesperson, politician, trial lawyer, or marketer — they will vouch for the truth of that statement. Having the courage, and taking the time, effort, and responsibility to capture and tame Big Truth is the only thing I know that can protect you from being had by the hustlers that are hawking the Big Delusion. Beware of Dr. Feelgood; his happy-pills and patented excuses will dissolve your personal power.
Don’t misunderstand me: Finding and using help when you need it is a wonderful thing — good for everyone — but becoming dependent upon it, addicted to it, and unable to grow beyond it, is something altogether different. Dependence and interdependence can be helpful and rewarding as long as your free will is not held hostage and you are not trapped by your neediness, fear, wants, desires, ignorance, immaturity, and beliefs. In general, those who are trapped are not aware of being trapped — they are perpetual children predominately from the ranks of the personally powerless. Do not confuse the personally powerless (high entropy consciousness) with the materially powerless; they are not necessarily related. Assuming responsibility for your life is a good place to start anything.
If you do not have what it takes to find your own answers and take charge of the evolution of your consciousness, someone else will be happy to fill that void for a price that is actually much steeper than it appears. How do you calculate the price of being caught in a belief trap? In terms of opportunity lost, entropy gained, progress not made, misery prolonged, or time and energy (a life) wasted? However you figure it, it is too much to pay for a short-term feel-good illusion.
Does anyone wonder why recreational drugs are widely popular in our culture (and most cultures)? The feel-good mentality, pursuing its ego-soothing and fear-suppressing belief systems, forms the foundation upon which most cultures are built. Taking recreational drugs is simply acting out with our bodies what we do every day with our minds — escaping reality by making a belief-centered end run around ignorance and fear, and by avoiding personal responsibility for our growth toward love-consciousness.
We play hooky from the learning lab in order to hang out in a feel- good fantasy. Ego driven delusion is at the root and core of our existence — it defines our little picture reality. As always, the mind leads and the body follows. Taking recreational drugs is a direct consequence of an immature individuated consciousness feeling trapped by the anxiety, insecurity, and fear that is created by its own limitations. Low quality consciousness and drug use encourage each other.
A low quality consciousness uses belief, denial, and the obfuscation of ego in order to escape anxiety, insecurity, and fear. Individuals in PMR use recreational drugs to do the same thing. Is it any wonder that the drug-culture primarily attracts the young who have relatively high-entropy systems and adults who feel failed and inadequate? As a culture, and as individuals, we express the quality of our consciousness in many ways and forms but always with absolute accuracy. We are what we are. Belief, ego, and fantasy on the inside — recreational drugs on the outside — different escape methodologies but similar expressions of the same lack of consciousness quality.
To eliminate recreational drug abuse, a culture must raise its collective consciousness quality. This can only be accomplished at the individual level. Any improvement by individuals within the culture raises the quality level of the whole and begins to solve the problem. You personally must solve the problems of your culture. No one else can do more than you can. To believe it is someone else’s problem to solve more than yours simply makes you a part of the problem. You can do nothing more than improve yourself. Fortunately, that single accomplishment constitutes your optimal contribution.
Growing up is difficult to do. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our fear, our ego’s wants, desires, and needs that we do not try, or care, about anything but hiding from our own terrifying ignorance. “Quick, duck in here, you can hide out in this fantasy,” says a helpful ego. Whew, just in time! Helpless little human, huddled, shivering, miserable and unhappy — trapped in a tiny corner of his mind by his ego-fear-belief-system fantasy. This is where the sadness part of love comes from.
To make things worse, as long as this needy human is in the PMR learning lab, the poor little fellow imagines that his existence and well-being is derived from, and supported by, a magnificent rubber chicken (see Chapter 21, Book 1). For this reason, he often refuses (only while he is in PMR) to use the help that is focused, coordinated and projected from the NPMRN part of OS to PMR to support his evolution within the loving and supportive reality in which he actually exists. A fear-driven life, lived from within the shell of a protective ego fantasy, is often demanding, tricky, painful, agonizingly shallow, and not much fun or full of joy, love, and peace. Poor guy — cuddling with his chicken in the un-illuminated darkness; trying to make it through the difficult times that his needy ego has unknowingly created.
Growth requires a focused effort and this hapless human-rat does not have the required time or energy because he is preoccupied with maintaining his illusions. Unfortunately, the maximization of feeling good (mostly stroking the ego) and the minimization of pain (constructing and maintaining a good working fantasy), is more than a full time job. If this being does not escape this trap, he will in time (with age) end up in a never ending and self-perpetuating tail chase that either reaches an accommodating steady state or constantly loses ground. The hope is that one day he will wake up and realize there is more to his existence than just living and that the issue is quality, not comfort or power.
If you know anybody in a predicament like this, please be kind, empathetic, and helpful to them. They have been caught in a trap (many were born in captivity and know of nothing else) and deserve your patience and compassion. These maze rats are not dumb — they are merely confused and blinded by their belief systems. What should you do to help? Love them and let them be — they will eventually figure it out (explaining it to them often ends up confusing them more). Just love them and let them be — and evolve your consciousness to the greatest extent possible. That way, if asked, you can point out unseen opportunities and options from a more balanced and less ego driven perspective, serve as a good example, and provide encouragement through living proof that success is possible. That is about all you can do to help.