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Consciouness and the more abundant life!
Consciousness and the more abundant life! You
are invited to join the consciousness movement
and enjoy a new and far better living experience
Bob Wells (WELL246)
We can safely assure you of this--that there is a new life
'sitting out there' waiting for you--a new kind of living experience
that far outshines anything you have known in the past or
perhaps have even hoped for in the future!. And it requires only
that you follow through intelligently on some startling ideas
advocated by important elements of modern science, psychology,
and common sense.
Here is a gentle hint, offered by one of this era's foremost
scientists and philosophers of science--the theoretical physicist,
David Bohm (Wholeness and the Implicate Order):
The notion that the one who thinks (the Ego) is...completely
separate and independent of the reality he thinks about
is...firmly intrenched in our culture.
"Firmly intreched", but--he goes on to say--utterly wrong!
Bohm was a protege of Einstein, and Einstein's position is
described by Lincoln Barnett in his classic book The Universe
and Dr. Einstein:
The whole objective universe of matter and energy, atoms
and stars, does not exist except as a construction of the
consciousness...Even space and time are forms of intuition.
And the famous mathematician, physicist, and astronomer,
James Jeans, writes in The Mysterious Universe:
The universe cannot admit of material representation, and
the reason, I think, is that it has become a mere mental
concept...consisting of pure thought. Today there is a wide
measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science
approaches almost unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is
heading toward a nonmechanical reality. The universe
begins to look more like a great thought than a great
machine.
The primacy of consciousness does not in any way detract
from the substantiality of the world of our awareness. It merely
derscribes it differently. This is a flat-earth-round-earth type of
intellectual development. And it carries with it the seemingly
ridiculous notion that the consciousness concerned is a
wholeness or oneness--in other words, that there is only one
consciousness or mind, not many consciousnesses or minds.
The Nobel physicist, Erwin Schroedinger, put it this way in his
little book, Mind and Matter:
Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in
the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more
than one consciousness, but there is no trace of
circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in
the world...Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. I
should say: the over-all number of minds is just one.
There is one consciousness, and it is all there is to existence!
What we have for centuries assumed to be separate minds or
consciousnesses happily or unhappily interacting with each other
turn out to be merely happily or unhappily related aspects of one
conscious activity. This explains the wisdom of Jesus' teaching
(Jn 8:32) that individual conscious rightness is effective over the
whole range of experience. It paints an entirely new picture of
the human circumstance!
To repeat: what we are aware of ("the whole objective
universe") consists of nothing but different aspects of the activity
of one all-encompassing consciousness. These two ideas--the
allness and the oneness of consciousness--completely upset our
usual common sense, but with tremendous gain for our
enjoyment of life!
The dream experience provides a perfect analogy for both
ideas. We have generally and unwisely belittled the dream-
experience as unreal and insubstantial, but in the light of the
allness and oneness of consciousness it turns out to be quite the
contrary. Dreams differ from our everyday experience only in that
they are confined to the activity of one small portion of
consciousness rather than the whole of consciousness.
In your dream there may be ten people sitting around a table
talking and arguing. One of them is a person you in your dream
call 'me'. If another of those dream-persons told the dream-me
that the whole experience, including the table and the people
sitting around it, did "not exist except as a construction of the
consciousness", you well know how he would react! At best, if he
was willing to venture into new territory in his thinking, he might
consider the concept as interesting, and maybe even true, but
hardly something to be directly concerned with at the moment!
Then the awakening occurs, and the dreamer discovers the
very practical truth of what the dream-me was told He now quite
naturally and easily considers everything in the dream--the
interacting people and the table--to have been simply developing
states of his own thought. It was all an activity of consciousness
--and of one consciolusness only.
Modern science, and modern thinking in general, are
awakening us today just as the dreamer is awakened nightly from
his dream, to the awareness that the activity of one
consciousness is all that ever rightly concerns us in any field of
our experience.
The ramifications of this current awakening are immense in
their implications for the way we live our lives, or can and should
live them. But they are simple and natural and easy to come by
and develop. They introduce us to areas of interest and concern
and health and enjoyment undreamed of in our past and probably
unexpected in our future.
If you are intellectually and emotionally able to go along with
this scientiific and psychological and commonsense awakening,
you will find that your life will change much for the better and in
innumerable vital ways. You will begin to plan your experience
from a quite different point of view, you will aim for different goals,
your little 'me' will relate to other 'me's very differently, you will
beyond-measure enlarge your field of enjoyment, you will read
and write differently, even worship differently, eat differently,
sleep differently, and dream differently. In Jesus' predictive
words, you will have a new "life, and have it more abundantly."
We invite you to participate with us in the learning process
involved. We are a not-for-profit educational organization. We
publish a centerpoint snail-mail newsletter called Consciousness
Forum, intended for networkers like you and for the 10 to 20
others outside the computor-network field for everyone in that
field--who are just as interested in learning as you are. We are
confining ourselves here to e-mail communication on the network.
So e-mail your comments and inquiries, plus (if you wish) your
name and street address so we can mail you a copy of the
centrally-important newsletter--WELL246.
