June 1, 2013

Philosophy of Consciousness

“If we turn our contemplation away from our outer world and to the inner one, as the sages advise, a different reality becomes evident. Like light, consciousness has no place, and no shape. It is invisible, yet illuminates everything. It is unimpeded by time and space…While the physiological basis of consciousness is not yet understood, recent evidence indicates that it may depend on electromagnetic vibrations–light, though not in the visible range–involving significant portions of the nervous system.” – Christian Wertenbaker

At the very heart of human life, beyond the rhetoric of all our religions, our sciences, and our philosophies, there exists an elusive and ineffable element, which I prefer to describe as “the human spirit.” Admittedly difficult to quantify, and frequently described by a variety of other names, it consistently alters the equations of life in ways not anticipated by evolution, genetics, or physics. The existence of the human spirit is, for most of us, primarily subjective in nature, through our experience of it within us. The capacity to traverse the gap between what we all have in common and what we can only know subjectively with any certainty, requires a leap that is generally referred to as transcendence.

Regardless of our cultural heritage, our experience or lack of religious training, our economic status, or our individual life experiences, we all share a connection to the essential human subjective experience of existing as a person, which unites us with every other human consciousness, past, present, and to come. It is within the realm of human consciousness where the clearest connection to the human spirit can be found. Even though all our attempts to describe it must inevitably fall short, I believe outward indications of the existence of the spirit are available to us if we both seek them out and look in the right places.

We tend to think of ourselves primarily as physical beings–”bodies moving through space,”–and as any modern physicist will affirm, our bodies are made up of quantum particles or strings, which when brought together in a sufficiently dense conglomeration (and according to the proper architecture) result in the tangible human person who winks back at us as we gaze into the mirror. The spirit which animates our bodies–bodies composed of particles moving through space–does not occupy physical space as we know it, and may be, therefore, not perceptible by ordinary sense perception. Its existence currently can only be “inferred” or detected subjectively through some sense or process, which may not be discernible to us through conventional scientific methodology.

If the nature of life, sentient or otherwise, is reliant upon or supported by some sort of non-physical underpinning in order to exist, however it might be constituted or described, we would have no other means of detecting it, other than through some sort of internal or subjective awareness, since the existence of such underpinnings and their nature would have no relevant reference in the temporal domain. While these two aspects of life, the temporal and the spiritual, could both be absolutely real and substantial in their own way, each according to their nature, they could not be said to be “within us,” in the sense of being in any specific locus, but would have to exist both independently and interdependently, without regard for our ability to comprehend them through conventional means.

Credit: Alfonso Rodríguez-Baeza and Marisa Ortega-Sánchez, 2009

See the whole series of brain images here:

http://www.livescience.com/14413-brain-images-portraits-mind.html

Our ability as human beings to not only pursue the nature of consciousness, but also to produce an image like the one above is nothing short of miraculous in my view. The larger structures at the top of the image are, according to the caption, “…the large blood vessels surround the surface of the brain (top of image), sending thin, dense projections down into the depths of the cortex (bottom of image).” Examining this image gives me a sense of what might be described as a “philosophical view” of how structure manifests in very particular ways, based on the essential nature of life and its necessities.

The connections between our experience of life, our emotions, and changes within the brain are well established, and the chemistry of brain physiology has clear consequences for both the thought process and the physiological responses triggered throughout the body. There is a direct link between thought, emotion, brain activity, and the physiological responses generated by hormones, glands, and specific neurotransmitters which pass through these intricate pathways right down to the tiniest cell within the cortex.

One could say, much in the same way that “male and female” are both distinct, yet simultaneously both human, or two bowls, one containing hot water and one containing ice, yet both containing water, that the physical universe, filled as it is with specific temporal structures and individuals, may be a manifestation of both the physical and the non-physical, which are different aspects of the same existence. Living creatures, planets, solar systems, and galaxies, are all made of exactly the same universal elementary particles, which, so far as we can determine, ultimately become indistinguishable from one another once you descend far enough into their most essential nature. While we are able to identify and categorize distinct structures, elements, and individuals, distinct in one light, they are all simultaneously joined into the oneness of all life. It is an expression of the true nature of all things.

We can only affirm and make reference to objects and forces through our experience of them. Our experience of them is reliant on our physical, sensory, and cognitive functionality. Our collective functionality is founded upon our physical existence. Our physical existence is fundamentally a series of quantum events characterized by a fleeting fluctuation between being and non-being. What I am suggesting is that human consciousness may be the bridge between our temporal nature and spiritual forces which support life.

If the history of humanity is any indication of what is required to progress as living creatures, the gradual blending of ideas seems at least worth a try. The interdependence of individuals within a group, of diverse species within ecosystems, of the various minute particles that produce elements, of the many processes which produced life within our own galaxy, all suggest that life is not simply the result of either the empirical or the mystical. At this stage of our development, blending ideas seems like a sensible alternative.

May 19, 2013

Body, Mind, Spirit

“If we seek genuine psychological understanding of the human being of our own time, we must know his spiritual history absolutely. We cannot reduce him to mere biological data, since he is not by nature merely biological, but is a product also of spiritual presuppositions.” – -Carl Jung from a presentation at the C. G. Jung Institute Zurich, Küsnacht, 15 Nov 1953

“If we can reconcile ourselves to the mysterious truth that the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit–the two being really one–then we can understand why the striving to transcend the present level of consciousness through the acceptance of the unconscious must give the body its due, and why recognition of the body cannot tolerate a philosophy that denies it in the name of the spirit.” – C.G.Jung from “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, CW, vol.10

The persistent assertion by modern scientists regarding the development of consciousness and the human mind as “an accident of nature,” is an idea which not only opposes our natural inclinations as cognitive human creatures, but also one that is difficult to sustain in a definitive way given the equally persistent assertions to the contrary by researchers in a variety of disciplines. The tendency of modern science to view the development of our human mind as an accident seems to me to be more a result of the limitations of science to explain it, rather than being a conclusion that is justified by the evidence.

Considering that it took hundreds of millions of years and countless variations of living creatures for life on Earth to produce Homo-sapiens, one could be forgiving of the empiricists for being a bit skeptical, considering that it is only one variation–an anomaly so to speak–in the pantheon of life. Considering the nearly miraculous confluence of events which permitted life to evolve on Earth in the first place, any suggestion that it was not only BOUND to happen, but inescapably bound up in the fabric of life, does require a bit of a leap intellectually. Although there have been some exciting and compelling exceptions over the millennia, scientists are frequently reluctant to include their intuition, and tend to resist directing their imaginative inclinations outside the realm of science.

No one disputes the essential nature of neurological functioning in achieving an awareness of experience. All one has to do is observe the devastating effect of trauma to the brain to establish how vital brain function is to awareness. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the subjective experience of consciousness is created SOLELY by the brain. Neurological functioning involves a multitude of interactions within the brain itself. It includes a process of fragmentation and re-integration of multiple components: neurons firing in specific sequences, synaptic transferal of electro-chemical impulses, sensory input, cross-referencing of iconic imagery and memories of previous experiences. It is a very complex process which still eludes our understanding, and any attempt to reduce it to biology alone must surely fall short of the mark. We may be DEPENDENT on our brains to enjoy our capacity as human beings to experience our existence, but it seems unlikely to me that our brains GENERATE that experience.

In an enormously compelling and technically superb rendering of how the brain supports and grants us access to the world of conscious experience, Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman, and his colleague, Giulio Tononi, explore at length the foundational elements and functional components of our complex thalamocortical system in “A Universe of Consciousness,” and their treatment of the subject is “highly plausible” according to the book review excerpt on the cover. The level of attention to detail in discussing the various aspects of conscious states is reasonably accessible for anyone with an intense interest in the subject, and they present the reader with an enormous body of information relevant to brain functioning. In a refreshing change from many treatments of the subject, the authors acknowledge the limitations of what we are so far able to discern about this complex organ:

“The ability of the nervous system to carry out perceptual categorization of different signals for sight, sound, and so forth, dividing them into coherent classes without a pre-arranged code is certainly special, and is still unmatched by computers. We do not presently understand fully how this categorization is done…but we believe it arises through the selection of certain distributed patterns of neural activity as the brain interacts with the body and the environment.”

When addressing this “distributed neural activity,” they cite the example of how we are able to read after “…a time in which we had consciously to learn about letters and words in a laborious way, but afterward these processes become effortless and automatic.” They then acknowledge “…How our brain performs these demanding tasks remains largely unknown to us.”

“A Soul Brought to Heaven,” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

As someone who feels certain that a comprehensive theory of consciousness will eventually require us to include some sort of essential non-physical interaction, the anecdotal reports of visions, apparitions, and other psychic phenomena which humans periodically report, while mostly amusing to scientists and philosophers in our day, all suggest at least the possibility of an interaction with the ineffable or the mysterious. All of my research and study into the nature of our cognitive functioning continues to intrigue me beyond measure, but nothing I have encountered thus far has eliminated this possibility for me. On the contrary, much of it seems to ENHANCE the possibility! Much of the literature and astonishing progress in neuroscience points toward activity that is INFUSED with the spirit. Far from being dissuasive regarding a potentially “spiritual component” to human consciousness, examining the astonishing complexity of neuroscientific progress seems to me a fair indication of its PRESENCE!

It may well be that LIFE itself has, as a natural component of its nature, the infusion of nor-corporeal aspects for which there may only be a subjective awareness. That we are unable as yet to establish with certainty, a universal experience of a transcendent consciousness for all humanity is not sufficient cause to suppose that it does not exist. The quality and nature of our lives generally compare in many ways to that of all other living entities, and it is not difficult to detect subjectively, a profound connection to the natural world all around us, and to recognize that we are an essential member of the terrestrial community of life on Earth. Our higher cognitive capacities distinguish us in important ways, adding a significant element to our human nature which allows us to perceive and appreciate our interconnection with ALL life.

We owe the scientific community a great debt for the many benefits we enjoy today as a result of the advancement of empirical knowledge and the elimination of superstition and fanaticism which were the cornerstones of our ancient worldview. Science has brought us a long way from the “Earth as center of the universe,” mindset of ancient times, and in modern times it has created “miraculous” technologies that have enhanced life on this planet a hundredfold, and we need to continue to pursue its advancement vigorously.

But even as solid and predictable as the the laws of physics seem to us today, not one of them eliminates the existence of the human spirit, just as the many avenues of pursuing the human spirit cannot alter or eliminate the laws of physics. It doesn’t take an Einstein to conclude that both can co-exist and that each may be dependent on the other in important ways. Our subjective sense of “being” relies on being able to use our senses, but our senses do not BRING US into being, nor do they determine the significance of our existence. They are our window to the world of experience, and it is that world of experience that connects us to our sense of being and to the spirit.

April 28, 2013

Birds of a Feather

photo by Mike Hyland

“Once we reach a certain age, we often worry that those precious hours and days–the ones which we remember so fondly and so well–will never come again. We think that all of our best experiences are contained within them, and that all we really have now are our memories of them. While none of us knows well what the future holds beyond our basic understanding of the limitations of our bodies to sustain us indefinitely, all that we have experienced in our lives–every nuance of the totality of our contributions to life and those of life to us–every single twist and turn that led us to this moment in time, lives within us at every moment, and the reverberations of all those moments and memories echo in each of our thoughts and actions as we breathe in this very moment now.”
– excerpt from a recent correspondence with a friend

Sitting at my desk this afternoon, trying to resolve some of the inevitable clutter that accumulates during the all-too-brief time I get to spend at it writing, I finally felt comfortable enough with the clear view of the desktop to settle in to my writing, when I suddenly noticed a thumping sound outside my window. At first it was on the periphery which I dismissed as a branch from the tree outside banging against the window in the wind. Each time I heard the noise I would look over at the window, and after a moment, it seemed to be quiet, so I continued with my reading. After several minutes, the thumping sound would return and it started to make me wonder, so I stopped what I was doing and simply stared at the window, waiting for the sound to return.

To my astonishment, the thumping sound was being perpetrated by a robin, who apparently found some sort of fascination with my window. At first I was mostly curious as to what might be attracting the bird, which appeared to be attempting to land on the middle ledge where the two windows met. Some confusion may have been possible, I thought, and so I adjusted the window to change the appearance, hoping that would dissuade the bird. It did not. I decided to attend to some other chores for a time, figuring that the bird would get tired of failing to land or get through the window or whatever it was trying to do, but after several delays away from the desk, each time I returned to it, the bird returned as well.

Now I was starting to get a bit anxious. Why wouldn’t this bird get tired and just give up? I opened up the inner window to expose the screen, and when the bird came near I made loud noises and tried to wave it away with my hand. It still came back. I went so far as to walk outside, waiting for it to appear outside the window, and started throwing sticks in the air to discourage it from landing on the branches outside the window. It flew away, and when I went back to my desk, it would start thumping against the window again. This went on for several hours. I decided to call my sister to talk with someone calm and steady to question about this. We checked for a solution on the internet: “Block the window with something so that the bird can see that it’s not an open window.” This seemed to work for a while, but then the bird returned again. I started up Skype to show my sister what the bird was doing. It was so…persistent.

We talked wistfully about how uncanny the whole thing seemed, and talked about our dear late brother, Mike, who not only was a bird fanatic, but whose last weeks of life were filled twice daily with flocks of birds–once in the morning and once in the evening, as they flocked in the tree outside his window as he lay dying. We marveled at the many such instances where birds seemed to appear since then in our daily routines, and how it always seemed like there might be some connection in the strangeness which always surrounded such appearances. I almost got through writing this post, some seven hours after the thumping began, when the bird appeared again. I opened the window all the way, and left it open while I typed. The air felt cool and the gentle breeze was soothing to my spirit. The daylight was fading as it past 7:30 PM here on the East Coast of the United States. I put on some classical music, and continued to write.

The photo at the top of this posting was one of my brother’s favorites, and it was on his desktop background for many months after he took it at a nearby bird sanctuary. We all felt that there was some importance to the image of the bird, and today, as we skyped, we felt as though we must have needed to talk, and the persistent bird thumping at my window was the catalyst for our conversation. That seemed to satisfy us all, and whether or not the prompting was in spirit or just a practical matter, we enjoyed the conversation, and as night fell, I looked out the window, contemplating the words I had written to my friend. All of our wonderful memories of our lives which included our dear brother, as fine as they are, contributed to our lives in THIS moment now, and perhaps, that is the best conclusion of all.

April 13, 2013

The Tides of My Heart’s Longings

“Dreams are but momentary stays against the relentless throbbing of my pulse in waking hours, a pause amidst the endless tide of my heart’s longings….the very essence of desire.” – JJHIII

I had a dream last night about the time I spent in Paris back in the mid-1970′s. It felt like I had traveled through time to stand in those same places once again, wandering the streets, inhaling the scents, embracing the sights, absorbing the sounds, and floating amidst the powerful memories of those moments. It seemed like an impossible dream had come true once again, and even though it has been many years since I last walked those streets, in the first few moments after I sat up in my bed upon waking in the middle of the night, it felt like it could have been yesterday.

The dream felt viscerally real and my response seemed almost prescient in those first few moments, sending me this afternoon to the archives in search of a passage I remembered recording in my personal journal:

October 25, 1976

“I am beginning to wonder now, as always, how this experience will affect the stream of events to come, and what new realizations will arrive within me when at some future time, I reflect upon them in silence. Paris is alive. It vibrates with life. It engulfs you with its intoxicating air. To walk the streets of Paris has felt alternately like a stroll through my fondest dreams, and in certain moments, like some kind of horrid nightmare. Swift though the moments seem, and as alone as I have felt in the nights by my window, this city breathes and pulsates with passionate feeling to the discerning eye. Time passes in Paris unseen, unheard, and unnoticed, almost as though it were never there from the beginning–lingering somewhere outside of perception, or as some distant memory.”

At age twenty-three, assigned as a soldier in what was then described as “Western Europe,” engaged in gathering military intelligence on our counterparts in Eastern Europe, my travels took me to a variety of technically non-military locations, and concerned matters far beyond anything I might have anticipated in my life prior to that assignment. The process of intelligence gathering seemed to be moving at a much swifter pace than anything else in my life, which hardly seemed to move at a snail’s pace when I look back on it. Without actually realizing it during that time frame, I raised my level of knowledge and experience to such an extent, that as I reflected on the dream in the early hours of a cool spring morning, I wondered what might have become of my life in another place or through another time.

Direction and purpose were strange entities for me then; vague and fluctuating between the minutes in a day. Not once did I ever truly concern myself with what might become of me. My influence on the world-at-large, in my mind at least, was at best a matter of chance, and certainly not within my power to determine. Having entered the military at the age of 19, I went from being a mostly unremarkable young man of limited means and experience to suddenly being engaged in matters of national security, with my every move a matter of close scrutiny by myself and by those around me.

While my military activities required much of my attention in those days, occasionally my assignment would allow or open up opportunities for downtime, and I often would explore on my own, sometimes secretly, and occasionally, I would lapse back into my personal reveries, and flirt with the tides of my heart’s longings. It was during such moments that my awareness seemed to be expanding into a wider world than the one in which I found myself embroiled so often as a soldier. Looking back at my life as a young boy, I regard with much fondness my life before this expansion of awareness. I never really thought that my life would be anything more than that which occurred from day-to-day; moment-to-moment, year after year. It was, I thought, a secure environment; beyond the reach of any sort of violent change. It was a rude awakening indeed that found me thousands of miles away from all that I had known. All that was once my reality suddenly seemed a lark–a crystal-clear pond in paradise.

….more to come….

April 5, 2013

Back to Square One

Over the years, I have consistently focused on the subjective experience of my own consciousness as a starting point for exploring most ideas I have considered related to human consciousness, as it seemed to me that, in doing so, I could speak with greater confidence about them and explore them more fully. If I couldn’t find a way to apprehend an idea as it related my own experience, how could I accurately express it or expect it to be viable for others? In that spirit, I have made a practice of maintaining a personal journal for many years, recording my thoughts, impressions, experiences, and investigations as they occurred whenever I could. Every so often, I try to review these writings in the interest of illuminating my current views, and recently I came across a passage that seemed timely:

“There is a connection to the consciousness of humanity, and to the interaction of emotions and cognitive functions of the brain, with an essence that is clearly transcendent of human nature. Our natural inclinations, particularly with regard to the arts, demonstrate a capacity within us that has as its source, a force or character that is inexplicable in terms of neurobiology alone. The ineffable aspects of our existence, and their connection to our very human nature, driven as it is in large part by biology, are never going to yield to vigorous empirical scrutiny, no matter how profound the comprehension of our biology becomes.”

While this passage attempts to address the ineffable, it actually only describes the problem, and it expresses the heart of my concerns regarding how we might discover a path that can address the challenges the are embodied in the essence of this matter.

The long path of human history, which now seems so familiar to us, was once a future as yet unrealized. As life evolved on our singularly fertile planet at the edge of an unremarkable spiral galaxy, history itself was also forming a foundation of both progress and gradual enhancement of our natural cognitive endowment. The well-worn path of human evolution has provided modern humans with a marvelously complex and adaptive hominid brain, and continues to provide us with access to richly-textured sense of subjective awareness, as yet unrivaled (to our knowledge) by any other known species. The entire spectrum of life on Earth seems to possess some degree of consciousness, and while it is particularly evident in those species whose structure and component systems resemble our own, there is much evidence to support the existence of various degrees and types of consciousness in nearly every living entity known to us.

With the hundreds of thousands of years of a relatively stable environment on earth, humans have been provided with the opportunity to take our natural cognitive endowment, and to evolve and expand our access to consciousness, permitting us to begin to unravel some of the most daunting mysteries of the universe, and to piece together many of the components of the extraordinary progression of life here on Earth. In spite of all our accomplishments, utilizing the cognitive skills made possible by evolution, and the physiological processes of the electrochemical and neural networks within the brain, somehow, the very existence of human consciousness itself remains an elusive mystery, and has eluded all of our attempts to construct a comprehensive understanding of its essential nature.

Some scientists and philosophers have suggested that the intricate web of interdependent systems within the universe itself, not to mention those within the billions of cells and trillions of neural network connections that compose a human brain, by their very nature, are so vast and overwhelmingly complex, that supposing we can unravel them and force them to yield to our scrutiny is somewhere between arrogantly preposterous and laughably hopeless. For those of you who have been following along in my blog here, you know that I tend to disagree with any such evaluation. But in fairness to those who take such a position, examining the development of life on Earth, and in consideration of the astonishing convergence of essential conditions that made intelligent life here possible, you could see how such a conclusion might be drawn.

Conditions in the early universe were chaotic. They fluctuated wildly for billions of years. The temperatures early on were inhospitable to all but the most fundamental of forces and elements. As the universe cooled and expanded, the heavier elements formed. Swirling clouds of dust and debris only began to coalesce into a semblance of discernible matter after a considerable amount of time had passed. The formation of stars and planets and galaxies followed in accordance with physical laws that took unimaginably long stretches of time to stimulate cause and effect.

What is perhaps most astonishing is that any sort of “life” ever got off the ground in the first place. If the various fluctuations in temperature, dispersal of matter, and sufficiently advantageous conditions which permitted life had even been only slightly different in any of the essential requirements, it is highly unlikely that any “beginning” would have resulted in a physical universe of the sort we observe today. Additionally, on our own blue and white oasis in the Milky Way galaxy, there were so many opportunities for the existence of life to fail, that our very existence as “intelligent humans,” constitutes a victory over every potential variation in those conditions which might have prevented it, not to mention the potential for some sort of cosmic disaster which may have been (and may yet be) the cause of our demise.

Since it is reasonable to assume that many such planetary “failures” have occurred throughout the apparently limitless expanses of our universe, even given such far-flung potential for both disaster and failure, by modern scientific estimations, statistical probability predicts that other “successes” such as ours are also conceivable. By virtue of the improbability of our OWN existence, since we DO exist, seems to suggest that we may not be alone in the universe. Even given this improbability, the potential for other intelligent life to exist elsewhere in the universe, should there be any, must surely, at some point, result in a species of some sort which will acquire a cognitive capacity to acknowledge the existence of consciousness in some manner. A natural inclination for the existence of “intelligent life” elsewhere, should it be discovered, would illuminate and inform our awareness of consciousness as a natural consequence of life anywhere.

March 22, 2013

Turning Points are the Peaks of Transitions

We seldom look back over the years of our lives and view them together as a comprehensive whole, but rather, most often, in retrospect, we see ourselves as having experienced a number of “turning points,” and while this terminology does address the sometimes “sudden” nature of what feels like pivotal moments of our lives, it seems to me that these moments are actually more accurately described as the “peaks of transitions.”

We are all on a journey through time. This is not a journey in the sense of the H.G. Wells novel, or the film, “Back to the Future,” but in the sense of a lifetime, or the time in which we live, or the time it takes to accomplish our goals or reach certain hallmarks. The journey is through time, and since the beginning of time, humans have contemplated the passage of time, looking for ways to make use of it, to master it, and to comprehend the meaning of our journey through it.

Throughout our daily lives, although through the night there can be a peculiar sense of time possible in our dreams, our days begin as we awaken, and through whatever routines and habits compose our days generally, we experience a continuum of mental and physical events. Many of these events go unnoticed, or slip quickly into the background of our day, but some days in particular are punctuated occasionally by more urgent or important events that soon become our memories of that day. Our days end at whatever time we relinquish waking consciousness, once again suspended as we enter dream-time.

Looking back over the past week, certain events stand out—the sluggish beginning on Monday morning due to a late night conversation on Sunday evening—the surprise visit on Tuesday by my daughter—the aching back that kept me awake on Wednesday night—the daunting effort to close out the workday on Thursday—and the preparation for this discussion after the house got quiet on Friday. In between all of these events, were innumerable others, each of which composed the transitions between the minutes, hours, and days of the week.

Looking back over the years, even larger gaps between events, and the avalanche of moments, hours, and days, all of this turned into the weeks and months, and then the totality of the years. All the while, as life progressed through these measurements of time, memories of potent experiences, endings and beginnings, and the relentless cycle of change and stability, composed the transitions between who we used to be, and the person we are constantly becoming.

When we do finally achieve even a moderate degree of longevity in life, and take the time to consider the passage of whatever time we have accumulated, this progression of all the transitions from where we were to where we are at that moment reveals certain “peaks,” sometimes described as “turning points,” which can range from the most subtle realization of change, to the stark realization that nothing will ever be the same again.

For me, there seems to have been many “peaks” which occurred in my youth and early stages of life, and with a fair amount of regularity. The early memory of life as a middle child—the loss of a beloved brother at age eight—the end of innocence as adolescence arrived—the first real torment of lost love in high school—the collapse of my relationship with my father during my tenure as a college student—my agony and successful completion of basic training in the Army—all of these “events” signaled a change in the direction of my life from the perspective of youthful innocence to the harsh realities of independence. Once established finally as a truly independent person, the stage was set for a stunning “peak experience,” which stands out even today as the one irrevocable and life-altering event. This most potent “turning point,” took place almost two years into my training in the military, and set me on a path that continues to this day.

In the autumn of 1973, I experienced what C. G. Jung described as “an eruption of unconscious contents” which led to the creation of a document entitled, “The Beginning, The Foundation, The Entrance. Although I did not fully recognize it as such at the time, I gradually came to view the experience as a pivotal event in my life, and I have spent much of the time since it occurred attempting to decipher its message. The bulk of the document’s contents remained poorly understood by me for many years afterwards, and only in recent years have I finally begun to comprehend it more fully and place it in perspective.

Reviewing the cryptic writing in this document has always been problematical for me, as doing so not only reminds me of how it came into existence, but of how much I have struggled since then to extract some kind of useful information from the stream-of-“unconsciousness.” Over the past twenty years or so, I have devoted every available temporal and mental resource to enhancing my understanding of the content of the original document, although the opportunities to do so have been far fewer than my own inclinations would have provided. My temporal life during this time, all too often, “pushed” active pursuit of my goals to “another day.” Forced to find ways of getting to the research, I resorted to recording my incremental progress and my relevant observations in a series of journals, which provided a consistent location where I could continue to work as time permitted.

Our individual lives, to some degree, are a mirror of the development of all life on this planet. Our beginnings are microscopic; our progression as a fetus has many of the features and developmental qualities of life forms that existed prior to our own species; our development from a child into adulthood is marked by sequential growth through physiological stages, levels of consciousness, accumulation of knowledge, and sophistication through experience. With only a little effort, one could draw many parallels from our individual development as a person, to that of our collective development from a primitive, upright mammal to modern Homo sapiens. I also feel strongly that the metaphor could be extended to the progressive development in sophistication of human consciousness, which in many ways is responsible for our continued survival as a species.

I recognized at this point that all I had endured, suffered, and learned prior to that day had created the foundation for all that was to come. If we arrive at such a moment reasonably intact, where we finally abandon our naïve notions of the world, leaving behind our childhood, we may then hopefully embark on a truly original individual human life.

The journey upon which I embarked as a result of the creation of this document had been in the making for twenty years. My arrival at that moment in time and every twist and turn and significant event of my life–every moment–was a preparation for that day. The foundation had been established for an extraordinary journey.

As my story developed, I began to see links from the writings that flowed from me to temporal events which transpired both in the past and in my immediate world. The story was being written long before I began writing it. I began to search for ways to explain the document within the body of the story. The document soon became an important story element.

For me, it has been a struggle to sift through the avalanche of chaos which surrounded my awakening to the existence of the stream. Since I was not given much latitude regarding spiritual matters as a young man, when it finally was possible to explore freely, it seems to have burst forth from me like a volcano. This past October, I suffered another potent life-changing transition, when I lost my dear older brother to brain cancer. Although life can consist of many potent losses, this most recent one shook me to my very roots. Although the immediate pain of loss has subsided, it has caused me to reflect like never before on all that has come before.

We are meant to understand our lives, not so much in what feels like the sudden “turning,” from one point to another, but in the longer view, which is punctuated by these “turning points.”

March 4, 2013

Van Cliburn 1934-2013

One of the greatest musicians of our time, and featured on one of my all-time favorite recordings, Van Cliburn demonstrated some of the finest qualities to which a person can aspire. Some of my earliest memories include listening to recordings of Van Cliburn performing as he did all over the world, and it seems I have loved to listen to his musical performances my whole life.

As a young lad, I was exposed to a variety of musical influences, but in our home, Van Cliburn was admired in particular by my parents, who made sure we were given plenty of opportunities to listen to him play, since they loved to listen as well. My older sister started taking piano lessons at a very young age, and Van Cliburn was held as a role model for being a virtuoso, and an inspiration to all young people who aspired to learn the piano.

The Washington Times article By Angela K. Brown – Associated Press said this:

Mr. Cliburn played for every U.S. president since Harry Truman, plus royalty and heads of state worldwide.

Mr. Cliburn also used his skill and fame to help other young musicians through the Van Cliburn International Music Competition, held every four years. Created in 1962 by a group of Fort Worth teachers and citizens, it remains among the top showcases for the world’s best pianists.

Despite his phenomenal success over five decades, Mr. Cliburn remained humble and gracious, friends said.

Throughout his life, Van Cliburn represented what is best about our humanity–with great talent and determined effort–he gave us all a gift of love and beauty and grace that is everywhere in our world, but so rarely contained within one soul so willing to share it.

On the website : http://www.cliburn.org/

“It is with great sadness that we announce that our dear friend and inspiration Van Cliburn died peacefully in his home in Fort Worth, Texas, surrounded by loved ones, on February 27, 2013.”

Godspeed, Mr. Cliburn…..

John's Consciousness