The Nature of Consciousness: Part II
Humanity’s dance
Dance, song, and music. Every society knows these melodies. There may be some little-known exceptions, but every culture partakes in drumming. Dance, song, music, and drumming; they all share the qualities of expression, creativity, play and enjoyment. On another level, they are all founded on rhythm. Every culture has rhythm.
Dance flows back and forth, side to side, around. Song and music are based on rhythm. Most obvious of all, the beat of the drum is underpinned by rhythm. Like hide and seek, rhythm, a beat, is deeply engrained in humanity. Even earlier than peek-a-boo, the baby starts to be part of the beat. From 18-20 weeks a growing fetus in the womb will start to hear, and can be awoken by movement or noises. Aside from loud startling noises, there is one sound that the baby is able to hear throughout the rest of its time in the womb; their mother’s heartbeat. Of course they have their own heartbeat too. This is their introduction to the world of rhythm and beats.
When the baby (let’s make her a girl) emerges from the womb, those present, are usually concerned with making sure she is breathing. Now she has a pulsing heartbeat and breath going in and out. The two most important rhythms in our life. Like our lungs, our heart expands and contracts to create this rhythm and keep us alive. Throughout nature we also witness this expansion and contraction. At rest, mice breathe over a hundred times a minute, an elephant, four or five times. Small things generally expand and contract more quickly than large things. What about stars and galaxies? It is estimated that our Milky Way galaxy has taken 13.6 billion years to expand to its current size.
Is it a reasonable to conclude that the growth of the galaxy, and the expansion and contraction we witness in nature stem from the same? Where else can we find the macro represented in the micro? Within our own bodies. In each nucleus of our cells we have deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA that is the same across our whole body with genetic code that represents an imprint of the whole. Is it possible that the universe leaves its imprint on us?
We are inside the universe, but surely we are separate, individual beings? Surely, our heartbeat and breath are just there to keep our physical bodies alive. To pass the necessary nutrients and oxygen around our body. But dance, music, the drum beat? These are not necessary to our physical survival. It is here where we find another clue as to the nature of consciousness. Inventor and futurist, Nikola Tesla once said, “if you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” Like hide and seek, music and dance are a manifestation stemming from our deepest essence. Tesla asserted that everything in the universe has energy, frequency and vibration. We have energy, frequency and vibration. At the smallest level, our cells oscillate with a 24-hour rhythm. Every cell in our body vibrates, every atom in the universe. We are also conscious. We are composed of energy, frequency, vibration and consciousness.
I propose that consciousness is a fourth phenomena that spans the other three, just like it spans or underlies nature and nurture to form the human experience. A combination of energy, frequency, and vibration are what aligns us with our subjective experience of consciousness. Perhaps consciousness is as the conductor. Much like the musician or the singer composes, there is a consciousness that composes. Everything is composed with a certain quality or amount of energy, frequency, vibration and consciousness. We are, a bird is, a flower is, a rock is too.
Much like in Tesla’s world, where everything is vibrating, the world of consciousness is not still. It expands and contracts, it pulses. Each living breath you take is different from the last. Life moves, consciousness flows. Dance and music go beyond enjoyment or cultural significance, they point to the nature of consciousness. We dance, we respond to rhythm because we are rhythmic beings – consciousness is rhythmic.
In unified field theories vibration is at the deepest fundamental physics of the universe. If we keep exploring deeper and deeper, maybe one day we will find the source of consciousness.Could the omnipresent vibrations and frequencies throughout the universe be how universal consciousness communicates and creates? If our understanding of reality evolves until we find that physical reality is not bound by time or space or based on matter, then we might be at a point where we can say that consciousness stems from the physical universe. However, it will be a universe that is infinite, relative, and fluid, not bounded and absolute. Cause and effect will be understood very differently.
In the realm of consciousness perhaps vibrational coherence or synchronised frequencies, rather than linear force, are causal. The sweet-potato washing macaque monkeys were connected and in tune with monkeys on other islands, irrespective of distance. You knew your best friend would call because you share the same vibrational frequency. Like the beauty of an orchestra comes from being in tune, the intensity or energetic power of consciousness comes from synchronicity and clarity rather than mechanical physical force. If the intention is consistent, clear and unconflicted, if the vibration is synchronised, then it has greater power to create. The consciousness of those monkeys was clear, they wholly accepted the new behaviour and through this, not only their behaviour evolved, but their collective consciousness expanded too. Consciousness or awareness is not passive, but shapes ourselves and our reality.
Returning to melody, I am sure you have your own personal connection to music. We also gather in large crowds, we desire to transcend the personal and dance as one. We attend huge rock concerts, idolising musicians and singers like gods. Why? Because they sing so beautifully or their music is so touching? Of course there is an emotional element, but going deeper, it is because music and dance bring us closer to to each other, closer to ourselves, enabling us to transcend the feeling that we are finite physical beings in a struggle for survival. We feel connection with others, we feel connection with all, our boundaries are shattered, we glimpse into our true nature. This urge, so pervasive, so universal, so deeply engrained, could it be an urge to connect with our true essence at the deepest level? To be at one with our purest vibration, to transcend our physical nature and experience ourselves as primarily conscious awareness.Maybe our individualistic ego disappears. For a moment we are not the drop of water, we are the ocean.
Music brings awareness of our vibrational state. However, we are in a continuous state of vibration. Our brain waves have different frequencies or vibrations; delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma, corresponding to different states of consciousness. We talk about someone’s energy, being in sync, vibing, or being on the same wavelength. These are not just casual expressions, they point to our deeper nature.
Of all aspects of dance and music, the drum beat is the one that most echoes though time. Before techno raves, before 60s love-ins, before Gregorian chants and church bells, there was the beat of the shaman’s drum. Sat around fires, we absorbed that drum beat and we transcended. Today shamans, from Siberia to the Amazon, still beat the drum to enter trance states and connect with invisible realms. There is a knowing, conscious or sub-conscious, that a beat, a rhythm, a vibration, connects us, that it pervades all. It connects humans with an aspect of our own consciousness, or with a universal consciousness.
The drum, the heartbeat, the breath. Everything is pulsing, in and out, back and forth, expansion and contraction, at the micro and the macro level. Everything is part of this all-encompassing universal rhythm. When we breath in and out we tell ourselves we are breathing air, we are taking in oxygen to stay alive. Is it possible that we are also breathing in and out consciousness? If we follow the view of the panpsychists, then we are. We don’t consciously control our heartbeat, but we can alter our breath, and in doing so we are able to alter our brainwaves and state of consciousness. This changes our experience of the world, as the observer changes, so does that which is observed, does our breath also change the world? Try altering your breath and being completely present in the now and see what happens. This is another clue as to our true nature and the nature of consciousness — we are in constant interaction with the universe. A biologist might explain this in terms of our body needing food, drink and oxygen for survival. On another level we are exchanging consciousness — connecting, communicating and creating. Our bodies are in constant interaction with the world and so is our consciousness.
When our heart beats freely, when we breath deeply and easily, when our cells vibrate at a healthy frequency our body is in harmony and we live healthily. Compassionate thoughts, altering the breath, and meditation change the frequency of our brain waves. Cancer cells have been found to vibrate at a different frequency to healthy cells (David Mittelstein et al. 2020). The universe flows, pulsing, and circling around. There is day and night, expansion and contraction, growth and decay.There are rhythms, frequencies, and vibrations that are healthy and in harmony, and there are those that are disharmonious and destructive. There is peace and there is conflict.
Human and universal consciousness
There is human and there is universal consciousness, and in between an endless number of ripples or threads of consciousness. In investigating universal consciousness we must go beyond the methodology of observing human behaviour and also look at patterns and reoccurring phenomena throughout the universe.
We are the gauge of our own intelligence. The universe is also imbued with intelligence. The mere observation that the universe supports life suggests intelligence. The question is; is life created and evolves through an almost infinite number of random permutations optimised to sustain life, or is it purposeful and designed? The more we investigate, the more we discover the intelligence infused throughout the universe. From the solar systems of galaxies to the structure of a leaf, intelligent design is found. It is ordered and life supportive.
Wherever we examine life we find repetition of patterns. There are DNA strands, the fractals of snowflakes, and the petals of a flower. There is order and balance imprinted in every form of life. Our bodies comprise patterns and structure, the same with plants and animals. Is it reasonable to conclude that the whole universe is infused with a similar ordered structure?We tend to think of patterns or phenomena such as fractals and DNA as part of natural forces and evolution. Part of processes that happen automatically without the need for any conscious awareness — surely consciousness cannot be behind everything that happens in the universe? We tend to think of only things that have free will or decision making as having conscious intelligence. The rest is either scientific law, like gravitation, or processes devoid of awareness.
However, what if awareness is infused throughout? Let’s consider the view of seeing phenomena such as DNA as being a form of communication. So beyond being a mechanism for biological life to evolve and thrive, DNA is a trail of communication of universal consciousness that enables it to evolve and experience itself through physical form. Intelligent consciousness communicating through patterns that ripple out. Creating through patterns. If everything is composed of energy, frequency, vibration and consciousness, then a combination of these can create a channel or channels of communication and simultaneously creation. This is a way for intelligent consciousness to communicate, create and grow. Evolving via a trail of communication from its source outwards, an ever flowing pulse of information and awareness.
Going back to how our senses and brain limit our experience of the universe, our limited subjective conscious experience also serves to limit our awareness of the intelligence infused throughout the universe. Until we expose it through scientific theory or observation we are unaware of it. However, the phenomena of the universe does not need us to be aware of it to go on. Is it rather, that by living the human experience, we become isolated or separated from an all-pervasive awareness that obscures our knowledge of it? Thus, the result of having an individual conscious experience is a loss of the connected universal experience and awareness of its myriad forms of communication. Many scientific breakthroughs have been made by pioneers in moments of solitude when discoveries came in flashes of inspiration. In these moments, were they able to tune into a wider field of consciousness? They reached out and sought answers and universal consciousness reached back.
DNA, the electromagnetic field of the heart, and the different vibrational frequencies of sub-atomic particles are all ways to communicate information. And these vibrational frequencies vary, enabling not only differing life forms, but differing experiences or fields of awareness. For example, I am aware of the tree in front of my house, but not all the processes that go on inside the tree to help it grow. Forestry scientist, Dr Suzanne Simard, has found that trees exchange nutrients with and via mycelium in the soil. Communication happens in an infinite number of ways. Words and sounds, which are comprised of vibrational waves, being just one of those ways. Perhaps non-audible vibrational frequencies are to universal consciousness, what words, and the other ways we communicate, are to humans? And universal consciousness has the ability to communicate and create in an infinite number of ways, many that are beyond our comprehension or ability to experience. At least, not able to experience or be aware of while we are having a human experience.
When birds flock, or bees swarm there is intelligent communication, when a tree shares nutrients via mycelium with its seedlings there is communication. Not human communication of words, a touch on the arm, or gaze in the eyes, but communication beyond our awareness, the communication of a consciousness that sustains life. And where there is communication there is awareness. Not the thinking, emotional experience of humanity, but awareness. Our brain is so complex, so powerful that when we sense, when we think, we drown out all the other shades of awareness that we could experience. Inside our own body, cells communicate with a level of awareness that is outside our field of awareness, yet encompassed by the infinite fields of awareness through which universal consciousness is able to communicate.
When the branches and leaves of a tree grow and open up to the sun there is awareness. Not the awareness of a person lying sunbathing. The awareness of a plant that stretches through the air, absorbs sunlight, and grows roots through the soil. A living organism that interacts with, supports and competes with billions of other life forms. Pull one thread of our ecosystem and spools of threads respond. Is it possible that beyond animate conscious life, that the planet is only connected physically, biologically and chemically? Or is it also connected consciously? It displays the qualities of a conscious entity; it self-sustains, it communicates, it circles, it has rhythm. Our planet doesn’t sit apart in an informational vacuum of non-awareness. Are we humans the odd ones out because of the cage of our rational mind that firmly separates and categorises? There is no deeper line of separation drawn in the universe than that drawn by the rational human mind.
With all this is mind I will try to communicate consciousness through words. One of the questions that persists is; are there multiple consciousnesses or one consciousness? That is, is every occurrence of a conscious entity (such as myself) a separate individual conscious entity or is it all one, and separation merely an illusion, or result of subjective experience?
Perhaps consciousness is in the eye of the beholder? I experience my consciousness, you experience yours. If you have human consciousness you experience it as a separate entity. Our lives are like drops of rain, finite, unique and complete in themselves. When the individual drop of awareness returns to the ocean, it becomes one with it and experiences a unified awareness. You are part of an infinite ocean, a wave that ripples up and down.
Like the intimate game of peek-a-boo is a microcosm of the macro game of consciousness, fractals emanate wave-like throughout the universe. The universe expands, and life grows through replication of patterns, from cells to galaxies. The swirl of a seashell, a pine cone, a galaxy. It is ordered and balanced. Nature grows, creates, gives birth through replication of pattern. DNA is both a means of replication and the replication itself. As are we.
Although we may sometimes perceive chaos, or call something random, if every aspect of the physical universe lives by immutable universal laws, then it is ordered and predictable. It follows that novel creativity or creation lives outside the realm of physical laws, and must occur first within the non-physical, ie. consciousness. A realm of potentiality where all is possible.
Humans are part of the ripple of creative energy, and this is the key to revealing our relationship to consciousness. Akin to cell mitosis and the reproduction of our bodies, human awareness is like a fractal of universal awareness. The infinite represented in the individual. We are as a wave of infinite universal consciousness, unique, but of the same essence. This is our relationship to consciousness. We play hide and seek because universal consciousness plays hide and seek. We dance because the universe dances.
Consciousness is infused throughout all, but you experience it, each manifestation of it, experiences it from its own perspective. The leaf blows in the wind, and the branch sways, but the leaf and branch belong to the tree. The leaves are many, the tree is one. The trees are many, the forest is one. The stars are many, the galaxy is one. The galaxies are many, the universe is one.
Our level of awareness is what gives us our unique perspective. This is the game of peek-a-boo. If you are reading this essay, this is your perspective, your experience at this moment. You will have an infinite number of different experiences or perspectives. These are mere glimpses. Dots, yet each dot is connected. There is no separation, only an experience of separation.
A tree is rooted to the earth, a rock sits without the ability to move, a mouse can explore a field, and a lion roams the savannah. Then you have humans, with the ability to go within and without. We have words, we have imagination and invention. With these we can traverse a vast inner and outer galaxy. Our level of awareness corresponds with an ability to explore and experience a vast expanse of the whole. The more expanded a being’s consciousness, the more of the universe it can experience. Is it possible that there are beings with a more expanded awareness than humans, that have the ability to explore more of the universe and its strands of awareness? What about the artist or the inventor whose creations and discoveries are timeless? Is there a source consciousness that experiences all?