Today I’m starting yet another book review/discussion for my blog. I realize that I have a couple of other book projects going such as the Law of Attraction and Zohar (which is 23 volumes) but for me, I often read several books at one time and this blog is sort of a place for me to share my thoughts on whatever I’m reading at the time. Today that book is “The New Science of Conscientiousness Survival” (or NSCS for short). Of all of thoughts occupying my mind spiritually of late, it the concept of Panpsychism that most excites me and this book is recommended as a top book on the topic of Panpsychism.
What is Panpsychism
To put it into my own words, Panpsychism is the belief that EVERYTHING that is (all that we see in the physical and spiritual world) has some form of consciousness and is in a way, a living conscious thing. This means that not only are humans, animals, plants, trees, etc alive but that also in some way so-called inanimate objects such as rocks, cars, television sets, or even a piece of paper are conscious. I wrote about this briefly in my article “The Importance of Building a Relationship With Your Things” and it’s been on my mind a LOT recently.
To further explain MY current understanding of Panpsychism (which may or may not be in agreement with the book), every single particle of the universe is made up of universal energy or universal consciousness and thus even the smallest particle in the universe is itself an energetic/conscious packet or thing. Taking this further (and trying not to get overly complicated), if everything is conscious then in theory we can communicate with everything if we only knew how. As the eastern sages frequently say, EVERYTHING is connected!
Where it starts to get really weird for me is that idea that collections of particles, when gathered or grouped together, start to take on their own conscious awareness. For example, the massive collection of particles that make up your entire physical body have created for itself a conscious entity which you identify as yourself. You have a name for yourself and you identify yourself by that name and interact with other entities which have developed conscious awareness of themselves by their names.
However, within your body is a heart and that heart is a collection of particles which ITSELF may have developed a conscious awareness of itself. The heart knows when to beat all on it’s own. It does not need YOU consciously telling it to beat because it itself is alive and conscious. Now, your heart may recognize itself as distinct from other entities in your body (i.e. your liver, your kidneys, etc) and your heart inherently knows when it is healthy or sick and sends signals to (i.e. communicates with) other parts of that being you call YOU to let YOU know when it is not feeling right (i.e. a heart palpitation or even heart attack). But consider perhaps that the heart realizes it is part of the larger entity known as “you” much like you know and recognize that you are part of a larger collection of entities you might call citizens of your country. The collective conscious of a nation is a real thing just as the singular conscious of YOU is a real thing.
The ancients understood that all things have consciousness. Native Americans, for example, tend to believe that plants, trees, rocks and animals all have a spirit (or consciousness) which some refer to by the term Animism. Likewise, ancient philosophers realized that even on a massive scale like the universe, that the sun, moon and planets themselves have a form of consciousness and that these conscious entities influence behaviors on earth. This gave birth to our modern concepts of Astrology.
I have now come to believe that all places and things take on a form of conscious awareness. A home for example, becomes a conscious thing and starts to develop a consciousness of its own. If we know what we’re doing, we can learn to communicate with it. Those bumps and creaks in the night, for example, might just be your own home learning to communicate with you in a manner that your conscious awareness can understand. Places also take on a form of consciousness and therefore become what we might think of as an entity that we can communicate with. In fact, I tend to believe that entities created out of distinct collections of energy packets are constantly forming all around us wherever particles gather together. Most of us have forgotten how to connect with and communicate with those forms of energy or consciousness but they are still there.
Reasons I’m Excited About This Book
According to the summary of the book, the author believes that modern science is not being intellectually honest with the overwhelming evidence in support of panpsychism and the book suggests that it will offer some of that overwhelming evidence. I’m super excited to see it! I leave you today with this quote from the book summary:
“Today, there is a new convergence of physics, biology, and spirituality, all pointing to the scientific reality of consciousness survival in a non-religious afterlife. The reason for this metaparadigm shift is because quantum electrodynamics, formalized in 1934 and mathematically proven since 1965, has shown materialism to be entirely false in its very foundational First Principles.”
Star dust.