My Big TOE
AWAKENING – DISCOVERY — INNER WORKINGS
A TRILOGY UNIFYING PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICS, AND METAPHYSICS
Thomas Campbell
Book 2 Discovery – Abridged Version – Part 5
We evolve our individuated piece of basic consciousness by lowering its entropy and increasing its quality. As we drop our ego delusions, we become more AUM-like — an embodiment of love and caring. This is our goal, our purpose. We began this trip as a chunk of individuated digital consciousness with enough complexity, memory, and processing capability to evolve ourselves from a high-entropy relatively dim awareness to a low-entropy brilliant embodiment of love.
To accomplish this, we have been given two attributes. First, we are individuated into existence — a tiny snippet of the AUM hologram — an interactive subroutine or defined object running in its own piece of mind-space
— a part of the Big Picture consciousness- evolution fractal that contains the pattern of the whole. Second, we are given free will so that evolution (growth) is possible. The evolution of our personal fragment of consciousness is directly and exclusively based on the individual choices we make. We exist, operate, interact, and individually evolve (modify ourselves to occupy lower entropy states) all within the immense digital mind that is consciousness. Fundamentally, we are consciousness. The evolution of our individuated unit of consciousness is the point of our existence.
This is how the fundamental consciousness-energy- ecosystem evolves, lowers its entropy, and avoids stagnation, regression (increasing entropy)
Trying to remain marginally viable, balanced in the astable state between the two is a poor strategy. The eventual price of not continually expending effort to reduce the average entropy within a consciousness system is to allow the average entropy of the system to increase
You are part of such a consciousness system. You are part of its strategy to survive through continuing growth and evolution. You are it. It is you. All That Is, is of the One. One consciousness organism. One energetic self-aware ecosystem.
Do you now understand why experiments in consciousness evolution are important
Do you now see why it is vitally important to you and to me and to every other chunk of individuated consciousness that you learn, grow, and improve the quality of your consciousness? We are all in this thing together; all are a part of the whole. The whole prospers through the contributions of its parts.
You, individually, right now, this minute, are either part of the solution or part of the problem
There is a point and a purpose to your existence. You have a mission. That your consciousness has the potential to evolve requires that you have free will.
The initiative must be yours and yours alone. Your spiritual growth is not a group activity — it is a personal transformation achieved only in personal terms. No group or association can lower the entropy of (increase the quality of) your personal consciousness by even an infinitesimal amount.
Each individual contribution, however small, is vital to the health, welfare, and continuance of the whole. You are the contributor and the beneficiary of your contribution in both the little picture and in the Big Picture. The ultimate reality is the living consciousness system, or consciousness organism of which you are a part. Seeing the Big Picture can be intellectually accomplished by understanding the philosophy and science of consciousness and how and why the consciousness system works. Contributing to the health of the Big Picture requires more than an intellectual effort.
To escape the PMR petri dish, you must eventually come to understand that reality is more than a local rule-set, more than a mindless machine.
You are on this growth-path whether you know it or not
— the path of consciousness evolution. PMR is nothing more than a virtual environment specially created to facilitate your (and others) evolutionary progress; consider it group therapy for dim awareness.
I am afraid I have set you up to fall into this one by referring to our consciousness relative to AUM’s consciousness. This language cannot be helped because we must consider ourselves as individuals in order to conceive of and initiate self-improvement (evolve). Thus, we speak as if AUM and we were separate beings (“What does AUM need us for?”). This is not the case. We are AUM and AUM is us.
If you are partial to sound bites, try these: “We are one with AUM.” “We are made in the image of AUM.” “AUM is the One Source, the Creator of All That Is.” “AUM is love.” I am sure you could think up many more, but sound bites are often misleading in their brevity and usually created to deliver an emotional impact. Sound bites are best used to serve demagoguery and do not make for good communications. Resist turning knowledge into slogans.
Likewise, resist the sloganeer’s attempt to slip highly spun pseudo- knowledge into your mind. Without slogans, politicians would be forced to express real thoughts instead of just sniping at each other with test marketed sound bite bullets. Can you imagine a politician without emotion laden sound bites; can you imagine a politician with nothing to say?
Bear in mind that a politician, like any marketer, is interested in manipulating opinion and behavior, not communicating information. In general, do not look for truth in congress, court rooms, or in advertising, behind lecterns or pulpits, or on TV. Regardless of what the media might be if the speaker (or writer) has a product or a point of view he is trying to sell, he is marketing to capture your opinion, not trying to give you information for your benefit. As always, open minded skepticism applied to your own data solves the problem, but you must get out there and get the data before tentative conclusions can become actual ones.
We are an integral part of a bigger consciousness system. Do not let your innate sense of self-importance allow you to disregard the fact that we are only a minor part of this larger consciousness system. Being a small part of the whole makes no statement about relative importance; without a doubt, the notion of relative importance within a consciousness system is a contrivance of needy ego.
We would never contemplate ripping out our colon and anus because they cannot, either singly or in combination, initiate and maintain polite dinner-table conversation. That is not their function. Some might consider them as undesirable parts, but that would be stupid. Their function is as important and critical as the function of other parts of our physical system. They are an integral part of us. We are an integral part of AUM. There is no justification for either feeling special or feeling not special because of the part you play.
Consider how important it is that all the cells, tissue, organs and other parts of the complex biological system that we call our body perform their individual missions and fulfill their purpose without worrying about what is in it for them. What if your liver, heart, or the bacteria in your intestine, in a fit of laziness and self-importance generated by not being aware of the bigger picture, concluded that their constant effort was too much trouble and decided to goof off? You get the point. If every part does not fulfill its purpose, the entire system suffers or perhaps dies. Your relationship to the whole of consciousness is like that. Although knowledge thrives on separateness, wisdom sees itself as part of a whole.
Let’s look at some examples of entities that do not relate to the whole, that do not understand the larger system that sustains them — entities that live within a small picture. In the biological realm we have malignant cancers, parasites that destroy their hosts, and most people who, in a convincing imitation of the cancers and parasites, abuse their niche in the larger (ecological) system to whatever extent possible seeking only to maximize their personal short-term gain. In the consciousness realm, again it is people who seem to have a difficult time seeing the Big Picture. Do you notice a consistency in behavior here that tells us something about ourselves? If people understood the Big Picture within their consciousness system, the Big Picture within their physical system would be obvious and earn their utmost respect. They would naturally see themselves and all others (human and otherwise) as full partners in a shared experience of existence.
If the cancer, the parasites, or the people understood the relationship that they have with the whole, possessed a free will, and were intelligent enough to do something about it, they would first control, and then reverse, their self-destructive behavior. They would work to change the long-term lose-lose situation they are generating because of their lack of awareness and would develop a symbiotic win-win relationship with the larger system that sustains them.
We humans are part of several ecosystems that sustain us. We must be good citizens and develop and maintain a long-term win-win relationship with each. As aware, bright, sentient entities, either physical or nonphysical, consciousness is the largest and most fundamental sustaining system within the capacity of our awareness. Consciousness is the primary ecosystem to which we belong. NPMRN is our biome; OS is our community; PMR is our niche; and earth is our habitat.
At the next lower level of awareness, within PMR and on planet earth, the earth itself and its life-forms and element-forms comprises the largest sustaining system. Below that, there are species, cultures, nations, businesses, families and individuals. Most of us know that we must constantly expend effort to form win-win relationships with other individuals. That realization is a good start at locating the bottom rung of the greater ecological hierarchy and is the first step toward being a fully responsible individual making the most of your native capacity. You must become a responsible citizen (integrated contributing part) at all levels of interaction and relationship — from individuals, to organizations and groups, to the earth, to AUM consciousness. Growing up seems to be nothing more than achieving a series of ever widening perspectives. Don’t quit prematurely, before you have fulfilled your full growth potential, outgrow your belief traps, and begin to enjoy the magnificence of your true heritage as a chip from the old AUM consciousness block.
Because of the efficiency of specialization, we and all other extremely complex products of evolution are not simply monolithic homogenized entities — we are made up of specific parts with specialized functions. Likewise, AUM is not one big homogenized uniform mind-thing with no parts. AUM is nothing other than consciousness and must design, build, and evolve its structures and subsystems with consciousness. AUM can structure and limit subsets of consciousness, information, memory, and digital processing power in a multitude of interesting and profitable ways. Every being, as it evolves on each level of its existence, must learn how to use and explore the possibilities within that level to improve its profitability. AUM is no different.
We are part of the mechanism that eventually enables the conversion (evolution) of dim individuated units of consciousness into empowered love-beings.
Our perspective is too small to see the bigger picture that connects us to a whole that exists beyond our comprehension.
Why are people so poor at fulfilling their immediate purpose of becoming more, growing, improving their spiritual content, and evolving the quality of their consciousness? Given that this is our larger purpose — that this is what we are supposed to do — you would hope that we would be better at it. Most humans (and other residents of other PMRs) and most sentient nonphysical beings as well, are delusional (ego bound) because they live in a small- perspective reality with small-perspective knowledge and even less understanding. There is no privileged group. Everyone must start at the bottom and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That is how consciousness reduces its entropy — by growing up, maturing, dropping limitations of vision and understanding, shedding ego and delusion — becoming all it can be.
Your ego, in its reaction to fear, insulates your delusion from reality with an array of self-protective and self-justifying rationalizations. The only way out of that trap is by making a serious effort to outgrow your limitations and overcome your fear by developing a Big Picture understanding of existence. A personal Big Picture understanding, improving the quality of your consciousness, and developing your capacity to love are all interrelated mutually reinforcing aspects of a successfully evolving consciousness being. There are no shortcuts. You are an evolving chunk of individuated consciousness within the OS community; that by itself defines the nature of your being and determines the purpose of your existence.
Mind, Brain, and Body
How does all this feeling consciousness interact with what we experience as our bodies? In the physical world, in accordance with TBC’s space-time rule-set, our limited senses collect the data that define our physical reality. Our nervous system sends certain types and patterns of signals (utilizing neurons, synapses, nerves, and the like) representing the collected sensory data to the brain, which interprets these patterns of signals (encoded sensory data) to create the perceived physical reality within the context of past experience. The nonphysical mind receives the PMR reality-experience from the brain’s experience-limited interpretation of the signals. The mind then applies its unique knowledge and quality to produce a response that expresses its intent in terms of internal and external action.
Thus, it is a value-based nonphysical consciousness with knowledge, memory, fear, ego, understanding, intent, motivation, purpose, and individual quality that determines what the brain sends back down the communications links (nervous system) to guide the body in transforming the mind’s intent into a new state of being that is in direct response to the original sensory data. In this simplified model, the brain serves as a transducer and a constraining filter between the physical and the nonphysical components of the being as well as a controller of autonomic body functions that must satisfy space-time biological requirements. Nonphysical consciousness energy animates the experience-body and gives it non-trivial uniqueness, originality and purpose. Fish, hedgehogs, foxes, and people all work this way.
The mind-body process described above is grossly over-simplified and presented from the PMR perspective. Though it makes this discussion more abstract and thus more difficult to understand, it is more accurate if you think of your body as a virtual body. Consider that your body is a projection of your character into a multi-player digital simulation consciousness trainer (a virtual reality). Your projected character represents the total accumulated quality of your consciousness employing only a fragment of your individuated consciousness energy. Its allowable interactions (its experiences) are constrained by the space-time rule-set. This particular virtual reality has many trillions of interacting players — some sentient, some not. Additionally, there may be random components occasionally thrown into this complex mix to make sure that our free will always has a sufficiently rich array of possibilities to choose from in order to facilitate optimal evolution and learning.
One can think of these random interactions as the result of biological, psychological, and social Brownian motion — individuals bumping into, and exchanging energy with each other and with their environment in a process that ultimately defines their personal trajectories. These sequential interactions produce cumulative results and define new sets of possibilities with each bump. Unplanned interactions with others, and with our outside and inside environments, create novel opportunities to exercise our intent by making choices that reflect our inner quality. Clearly, personal growth requires us to use our limited awareness to improve our understanding of what is important and to use our free will to improve the quality of our choices. Growing up and decreasing the entropy of our consciousness obviously requires far more than simply acquiring, storing, and processing knowledge. Being conscious, we have the innate ability to modify ourselves
Improving the quality and reducing the entropy of your consciousness (spiritual growth) is more than an intellectual exercise. The intellect (processing, memory and analytic function) can make no significant progress by itself. Though the intellect can occasionally act as a catalytic agent for personal growth, an isolated catalyst cannot induce a reaction to take place. One needs the proper reactants residing within a supportive environment before the nudge of a catalyst can move the process forward.
This is a particularly disturbing fact for those who live out of their heads by controlling and guiding their every thought and action directly with their intellect. Their need to appear rational in the little picture severely restricts their ability to be rational in the Big Picture, or even realize that a Big Picture exists. The belief in the infallibility and completeness of little picture rationality is another belief trap piled high with victims who are bright intellectuals from material- based cultures.
Enlarging the species database in order to improve future hardware (body and senses), software (attitudes and mental ability), and processing capabilities (brain and central nervous system) is not the only, or even the major, goal of implementing the Fundamental Process within the human race.
Fulfilling our individual purpose for existing, decreasing our overall individuated system entropy, improving spiritual content, or evolving the quality of our consciousness are more fundamental, crucial, and necessary components of our total evolution than biological evolution.
Biological evolution merely provides the stage, props, and setting for facilitating consciousness evolution. Consciousness evolution is the main act, yet we spend lifetimes dedicated to nothing more than rearranging the stage props.
The evolution of our physical system (people, critters, plants, planet, solar system, and universe) plays out the choices and random events that are constrained to evolve within the limited possibilities of the space-time rule-set. The physical evolution drama moves forward as a subset of Big Picture consciousness evolution. It provides the setting for our virtual reality trainer and the context and rules for our interactions. Those interactions lead us to choices, and choices provide us with opportunities for self-improvement. Our physical reality, our perceptual experience, and the physical evolution of our species and our universe, is an extremely small part of a much bigger evolutionary drama.
Units of individuated consciousness have the ability to freely make choices from a finite array of possibilities. Individual choices are dependent upon how the entity applies its finite repertoire of motivations and intents that it has developed in reaction to the experience it has perceived through the PMR rule-set filter. Intent eventually expresses itself through action and reaction within an interactive virtual reality. The quality of your intentions or motivations reflects the quality of your consciousness. Simply put, an entity’s profitability and top level goals must be pursued through a purposeful application of direct awareness and intent (sometimes called will). Units of consciousness exercise their intents in virtual reality simulators that provide results-oriented feedback from every experiential opportunity. Aware entities use this feedback to improve the quality of their intent and decrease their entropy. This is how consciousness learns and evolves within the PMR experiential virtual- reality learning lab.
Time enables experience, which is derived from a sequence of events. Experience is the memory of a sequence of perceptions. Perception is a sequence of datum exchanges. Creating specific experience as a learning tool can be implemented through an interactive sequence of perceptions that provide an opportunity for an entity to exercise intent by making choices based upon personal quality and by allowing the entity to assess the results of those choices. An assessment of the choice and the results of the choice (feedback) lead to self-modification in pursuit of fulfilling the purpose and goals of the entity.
We humans have employed interactive virtual-reality training devices (such as flight simulators for pilots) for many years. Experience is the key to learning; whether that experience is actual or virtual is irrelevant. Learning is the key to consciousness evolution. Experience (operational memory and interpretive processing), perception (data collection), free will (choice), and the ability to learn (information processing developing results and conclusions) and grow (self- modification relative to profitability goals) are fundamental attributes of successfully evolving consciousness.
Compare that last sentence with the descriptions given in Chapters 24 through 28 of Book 1 and especially the beginning of Chapter 7 of this book, where memory, a rich array of challenging data exchanges (interactions) between the entity and its internal and external environments, self-aware information processing, and self- modification in pursuit of profitability were given as the fundamental attributes of consciousness. In Chapter 7 these fundamental characteristics of consciousness were used to define consciousness and to describe its evolutionary process in general terms. Now it becomes clear that an experiential virtual reality like PMR facilitates consciousness evolution by thoroughly and methodically exercising each of its four fundamental characteristics. PMR learning labs are well designed by evolution to accomplish their purpose — they deliver exactly what we need to optimize our opportunities for self- improvement.
Free will — the ability to make choices in order to effect self- modification in the pursuit of evolutionary profitability — is part of the definition of consciousness itself. Free will is not an outside condition that must be applied to consciousness, it is fundamental to the existence of consciousness. Free will is a necessary attribute of successfully evolving consciousness. Without free will, a profitable consciousness system is impossible. If you and your many sentient friends and acquaintances are conscious, consciousness must not only exist, but also support a complex interactive system of coherent experience. Given that consciousness exists, it must be enabled by memory, information processing capability (intelligence), the interactive sharing of data, and free will choice making in the service of profitable evolution. Thus, the question of free will reduces to the question of are you conscious, and, if so, is your consciousness part of a complex interactive system of consciousness? If these are answered in the affirmative then your consciousness, and the system of which it is a part, must be evolving against some measure of profitability because that is a requirement of all self-modifying interactive systems. Such a system cannot evolve toward greater profitability without free will to make the required choices.
Evolution requires choice between alternatives. For evolution to exist as a real process, the choices must be free. Pseudo-free is free enough within a sufficiently complex, interactive, feedback-driven subsystem for the Fundamental Process to be effective within that subsystem.
Clams and bumblebees have many daily choices and decisions to make as well — and they live and die, grow or evolve, by the cumulative results of those choices as we do. How predictable are clams? I suspect their individual deliberate actions are spread over a statistical range that represents the decision-space of their species. Humans similarly exercise free will within their own decision-space. The size and complexity of that decision space (for a species or an individual) depends on the capacity and quality (entropy) of the consciousness that supports it. For a given fundamental capacity, lower entropy supports a larger, more complex decision space. Higher capacity also supports the potentiality of lower entropy.
In case you are wondering, the capacity of the human consciousness is immense, yet we exercise only an infinitesimal fraction of that capacity. Our potential ranges far beyond your wildest dreams. Unfortunately, the part of that potential we have intentionally actualized typically supports little more than the tedious soap opera we call “real life.”
That’s right: Beings with a higher quality of consciousness function in a larger decision space with a larger range of free will choices — they live in a larger, up-scale reality. The reality in which their awareness functions is a super-set of the reality experienced by a consciousness with higher entropy. That is an obvious conclusion when comparing yourself to a clam, and much less obvious when comparing yourself to a being of exceptionally high-quality consciousness, although the relative gaps are likely to be about the same.
Most of us have little appreciation for the depth and breadth of our ignorance. You are necessarily unaware of what you are unaware of. Some of us may even feel grateful for the merciful oblivion granted by that obvious fact of sentient existence. However, let me remind you that ignorance is bliss only in the service of maintaining a happily deluded ego. In all circumstances, ignorance (and the beliefs it generates) is a constraint upon vision, a limiter of awareness, a prison wall that prevents awareness from expanding beyond its present boundary, and is a great destroyer of potential.