“God” As Cosmological Consciousness

V’Yomer Elohim — and God(s) said… Genesis 1:3

I’ve explored what I’ve come to call “the hard problem of consciousness” (thank you, David Chalmers) since I was an undergraduate taking my first philosophy class under a remarkable professor, Dr. John Atwell. The question is simple to ask and maddening to answer: What exactly is consciousness, and where does it reside? Or, as someone hit hard on the head might put it: Who am I? Where am I? What am I?

I can’t help but think that even the ancients — and possibly earlier peoples, of whom we have no record beyond burial rites suggesting religious belief — felt some presence “in back of” consciousness that sparked their attempts to explain a power they felt but couldn’t name. Out of that impulse came tens of thousands of religious belief systems.

My purpose here is to persuade those open to persuasion that, whatever the source of their religious beliefs — family tradition, genuine conviction or something else — we can make far better use of our own consciousness by adopting modern techniques for connecting our local consciousness to the cosmological consciousness from which the perceived universe derives its existence.

Picture our ancient forebears in the long stretches of time between hunting, eating and sleeping. Once they had enough vocabulary to string thoughts together, some likely spent their free time spinning stories around the consciousness they were discovering within their own minds around the campfire, about the creation of the world and the origins of their tribes — a preoccupation we still see in the mythologies that survive today. Given the human propensity to seek control over others, those with the greatest creativity but the least empathy turned that control into advantages for themselves. We call those systems of advantage “religions.”

Judaism seemed ahead of science at the time Torah took shape. Its roots seem to grasp an understanding of consciousness that various streams of philosophy are only now approaching. And yet Judaism is also a case study in how a simple insight calcifies into a stifling structure of laws — one that heaps advantages on men and hands vast control to whoever is appointed to pass judgment on the rest.

Judaism begins with “Father Abraham,” of whom history has no independent account. I suspect he “discovered” the God of Judaism during one of many meditative moments. He was, after all, the son of a wealthy idol maker, presumably with plenty of free time. In that state touched by what I call “cosmological consciousness,” or “the hot wire of consciousness,” he glimpsed something far bigger than himself.

Still, I marvel at how far ahead of its time the Torah seems, in light of what quantum physics tells us: that all matter is composed of the same atomic substrate, vibrating at different speeds. Consider the Shema, Judaism’s most sacred prayer: “Hear, O Israel, YHVH is our Eloheynu, YHVH is Ehad” — roughly, “the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” It’s that word “Ehad” that provokes my attention. I believe it can be read to mean that YHVH — a name that roughly translates to “Is, was, and always will be” — is all that is: everything, for all time. As far as modern physics can tell us, that’s a fair description of the cosmos itself.

Philosophy has arrived at something like the same conclusion about the nature — and the root — of consciousness. These questions have occupied thinkers since the Greeks, through the present day, when whole forests and untold electrons have been spent recording attempts to answer them.

After much study, weighing the arguments for physicalism, panpsychism, Idealism (as laid out by Bernardo Kastrup), and Integrated Information Theory (as explained by Christof Koch), I find myself agreeing most with Idealism, or “cosmopsychism.” Kastrup’s Idealism holds that everything we think we know about “the universe” reaches us only through our senses. When other sensing beings report similar sensations of the outside world, we can feel confident we’re sharing a world we can agree on, and build rules around. Every driver sees the same red light and agrees to stop. But we know the light, and the rule about it, through our senses first. Consciousness takes in the input, then sorts out how to behave in the world we’re sensing.

I don’t think we can go much further than that without making unsupported claims about consciousness. I’d like to say “consciousness is love” — but there’s no real support for that. In my seventy-two years on this earth, I’ve seen at least as much evidence that consciousness is hate. Maybe yin and yang come closest: consciousness as one or the other, depending on the moment and the receiver.

If I’m honest, I’d prefer panpsychism — it carries all the appeal of Idealism with a dash of artistry. I experienced something like it firsthand during a Native American sweat lodge, welcomed by members of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, who taught me that even rocks carry consciousness — the heated stones carried into the lodge, called “Grandmother” and “Grandfather,” are chosen by a medicine man who listens for which ones speak to him. Communion with rocks implies a belief in their consciousness. But panpsychism asks for a leap of faith, and faith is the opposite of science, which rests on shared sensory experience: a red light means stop everywhere in the world, a universal experience. The medicine man’s communion with the “grandfathers” is not — which makes it an article of faith, no different in kind from the God of Abraham being an article of faith for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The sheer variety of religious experience, tens of thousands of traditions strong, is itself evidence that these effects rest on faith rather than science.

So here’s the leap, for those willing to take it: religion, I believe, was invented by ancient people for two reasons. First, to explain a sensation of “something more” behind their everyday thinking — a feeling stirred up alongside natural terrors like thunder, lightning, and earthquakes. Second, to impose order on people who needed a shared code for living together — something better than the lawlessness of every man for himself.

Does this mean we dump religion as no longer viable in the Age of Technology? Given religion’s use in controlling the masses — many of whom don’t engage, or don’t know how to engage, in higher-level thinking — it might be unwise to give up that control without something more rational to replace it. Some people hold their beliefs so sacred they’re willing to die and kill for them. Still, religion has bound people together as well as controlled them: storytelling around the fire gave people a sense of history, purpose, dignity and community. Every religion on Earth has its stories binding its believers together.

Fear of the environment’s more violent moods drove humans to develop explanations on the fly — a child’s fear of thunder assuaged by “the angels are bowling.” Once one human got his mind around a force that ordered —or punished — human behavior, the stage was set for other men (males dominated by size and strength in a primitive state) to turn the whole shebang into a way of controlling others, living off tributes demanded from subordinates.

Religion became oppressive when it started dictating the intricacies of human life. Judaism, in its strictest form, dictates practically every movement in a person’s life — from circumcision to prayers for using the toilet to what can and cannot be eaten.. All of it traces back to some primitive person, lost in contemplation — perhaps accidentally achieving, for the first time, a different level of consciousness through unwitting meditation — who discovered that something exists above or behind her own consciousness.

They say “God is Love.” Given the violence that has attended most of the world’s religions, I’d question that. Given the evidence that for every Yin there’s a Yang, I don’t think Cosmological Consciousness (CC) is simply Love — it’s Love and Hate and everything in between. My working principle: if an attribute of consciousness appears in human form, it must exist in CC as well. Consider the traditional attributes of “God” — omnipotence, omniscience, love and mercy — and notice each has its opposite, traditionally assigned to “the Devil”: deception, destruction, cruelty. The traits we consider desirable get labeled “of God,” and those detrimental to a healthy society get labeled “evil.” That structure helped build an arguably functional society for millennia. But it wasn’t just insufficient to prevent unspeakable crimes committed in its name — it directly caused the suffering and murder of hundreds of millions of people throughout history.

Cosmological Consciousness — Return to Source

My brain is only a receiver. In the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge. —Nikola Tesla

My only rule for describing consciousness is this: we can make no unfounded, baseless assumptions about it. Take the claim that our God is a loving God. Putting aside the drowning of all life except Noah, his family and the paired animals — can the same God who supposedly created human beings also be the one who created a worm whose larvae survive by consuming the inside of a child’s eyeball, blinding that child for life?

The simplest explanation for the source of consciousness is that consciousness is itself one of the components of matter, part of the substrate of the cosmos, like atoms. I’d prefer to ascribe consciousness to all matter, but while I can easily believe a boulder is conscious, I have a harder time believing that of an industrial concrete block. Torah offers an odd bit of support here: when “God” commands Moses to build an altar, He specifically requires “uncut stone” (Exodus 20:25) — as if processing a natural substance drains its share of consciousness.

By this logic, an amoeba possesses consciousness: it searches for food and defends itself. Plants show signs of it too, growing toward light and warning neighbors of danger. Animals show plenty of what we’d call “thinking”; my dog has a sense of humor. But nothing competes with human consciousness in breadth and depth.

The physicalists claim human consciousness is contained entirely within the brain. Kastrup, Koch and others make a strong case against that, and I think the idea has been largely discredited. The more reasonable explanation, to my mind, is that the brain is a receiver — something like a radio, tuning into a “consciousness signal” that pervades the cosmos, undetectable except by a device built to receive it. I like to call it “touching the hot wire of consciousness.”

By way of illustration: I studied Edmund Husserl as an undergrad, and from his thinking on the mind I got a picture of a catenary line — the overhead wire that powers an electric trolley — and the pantograph — the structure that rises from the trolley to touch it. Cosmological Consciousness is the catenary line; each human brain is a pantograph rising to touch it. When I die, my connection to CC is gone. Period. The individual who was me is no more. The hot wire remains for the next receiver to make the connection.

Why, then, aren’t we all the same — the same thoughts, the same capabilities, the same desires? This is where the individual brain becomes the deciding factor. Each brain makes its own decisions, and not every brain is aware of its connection to CC. It takes knowledge — not just of techniques for accessing CC, but of the awareness that the connection exists at all. One reason for religion’s popularity, I’d argue, is the widespread lack of that awareness.

The primary obstacle to connecting with CC is the “ego” — an internal consciousness fully capable of deciding against CC’s best interests. I’d posit that what religion calls “sin” is the ego doing exactly that. The mythological Jesus underscores this.In Matthew 12:31, he teaches that every sin will be forgiven except blasphemy against the Spirit. Read this way, early Christianity recognized, and revered, a connection to Cosmological Consciousness — even while missing its source.

Given that CC is capable of good and evil, what would its “best interests” even be? I’d point to the good of the community: what’s good for one person must be good for all. Murder is bad because if it were good for one person, it would have to be good for everyone — and if it were good for everyone, nobody would be safe until only one person was left standing. But every human brain carries the responsibility of tuning in to CC, and few make the effort. Most operate solely on ego, which rarely thinks in terms of community.

Various religions have developed techniques for tuning-in to Cosmological Consciousness — Buddhism and Hinduism through meditation, Catholicism through prayer, Judaism through its mystical traditions. But every one gets tangled up in orthodoxy — I remember my own disillusionment on learning even Buddhists kill each other over doctrinal disputes. Our objective should be to replace religious belief with the techniques needed to connect each human being directly to Cosmological Consciousness.

Channeling the Religious Impulse Toward Cosmological Consciousness

“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” — Hillel

Religion can be credited with civilizing human beings and teaching them to live together in some semblance of peace and harmony. But that peace tends to survive only in small groups where everyone agrees on the orthodoxies of belief; let one person vary, and beware. The so-called Pilgrims left England because their beliefs weren’t tolerated, only to found a community in America that refused to tolerate dissent from its own strictures; Roger Williams was forced out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to found a more tolerant settlement in what became Rhode Island. Ask the victims of religious belief forced on the vanquished, from the Crusades to the conquest of the Americas, whether the domesticating effects of religion were worth the abuses.

Humanity has come a long way from blaming lightning and earthquakes on “the gods.” And yet no matter how scientifically advanced our understanding becomes, there will always be people unwilling to engage with it. Look at the United States right now: after vaccines vanquished diseases that once plagued humankind, an anti-vaccine movement has arisen — even among educated people — and infected the government itself. The same willful ignorance runs through communities of “believers” who will never examine a belief closely enough to reconcile it with science.

So how do we replace these ancient religions with thoughtful connections to Cosmological Consciousness, in a way that respects that those connections will look different person to person? We can’t throw out religion entirely — real insight has come out of many traditions, some of which made a genuine connection with CC before overreaching into beliefs no longer supported by fact. The Creation story that opens the Jewish Torah begins with ruach, Hebrew for both “spirit” and “breath,” hovering over the deep — easily read as Cosmological Consciousness gathering itself before the acts of creation that follow. The writer’s recognition of a connection to CC is what matters; everything after that is fantasy.

Given the history of the world’s religions, and their appeal to strongmen who want to lord over as many people as possible, I don’t hold out much hope that we can replace religion outright with anything — free thought included. But we can become living examples of the peace, well-being, and coping skills that grow out of a real connection to Cosmological Consciousness, and grow our numbers by being examples to people still searching for what traditional religion hasn’t given them.

So how do we actually make that connection? Our awareness as individuals — call it “egoic consciousness” — is local. What we’re after is a connection to Cosmological Consciousness, which is nonlocal: pervasive, an essential element of the cosmos itself, according to panpsychism, Idealism, and IIT alike. Our objective is to see past our local ego — its fears, its jealousies, its endless self-regard — and escape its gravity long enough to connect with CC, which exists entirely outside space and time.

Fortunately, plenty of people before us have done exactly this, through meditation, drumming, chanting, dancing, listening to music, making art and making love. As Christof Koch has put it, meditation, “being in the zone” and similar states of being “lost in consciousness” all get us close to the root of being. Whatever gets you there will do.

Then comes the objection: without religion to guide us, doesn’t life become a free-for-all? But atheists have lived openly for a long time now, and plenty of them live moral, ethical lives without any religious influence at all. Certain “rules” seem to occur to people whether or not religion is involved — and we’ve certainly seen religious groups produce their own orgies of evil.

Given how widely it has proliferated across vastly different societies, I think the Golden Rule would serve as the foundation of a world connected to CC rather than religion — do unto others as you would have them do unto you, taught by the mythological Jesus and by Confucius alike, and echoed in the Hillel quote above. Another useful test comes from evangelist Alan Redpath’s acronym THINK: True? Honest? Inspiring? Necessary? Kind? I can’t see how we go wrong applying that before acting in ways that might affect others.

We can rid the world of religion’s worst effects by keeping the best of what its traditions have given us, and discarding whatever sets human beings against one another. Whether alone or in groups, we can practice whatever vehicle connects us to Cosmological Consciousness — and rather than refusing to tolerate differences in those vehicles, we can welcome them, and see whether they work for us too.

The primary objective is to touch the hot wire of consciousness.

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. — Micah 4:3