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Consciousness and Cosmos: Wisdom in Oneness |
by Geoff Ward
Latest discoveries in science, in diverse fields covering astronomy, physics, biology, palaeontology and geology, reveal that our planet, solar system, galaxy and universe are embraced in a complex web of cosmic influences.
Our universe is not an icy, hostile void. Instead, our planet Earth is the focus for intricate cosmic energies and forces which have come together to weave a rich tapestry of life. The universe is becoming aware of itself through the consciousness – our consciousness – that it evolves, indicating that it has purpose and intelligence, although this possibility has been hidden from us for millennia.
 What are these influences? In physics, energy is the property of matter and radiation which is manifest as a capacity to perform work. Cosmic energy pervades everything. Radiation comes from planets, stars, including our own sun, galaxies, gas clouds and black holes. There's also cosmic microwave background radiation lingering from the formation of the universe more than 14 billion years ago. Stars and black holes continually emit high-energy radiation from nuclear fusion which permeates space throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Astrophysicists study this radiation to learn more about the early history of the universe and how the laws of physics were established. Earth's atmosphere and the sun's heliosphere, which are crucial for the continuance of life, filter out the radiation which is dangerous to us, but a range of other energies gets through to us from space – solar radiation, for example, including, obviously, heat and light.
How cosmic energies are perceived in new ways could lead us to a deeper understanding of the structure of the universe and how it impacts upon us here on Earth. While the subject matter of this essay is mostly speculative and very much on the edges of academia, many ideas that have started out in this fashion have later become mainstream science. Nevertheless, it still could be said that modern science has not responded to the question of how humans could become more ‘god-like’ and instead has focused on entirely physical issues, in the process diminishing our stature and bringing us to the brink of annihilation.
 However, as we shall see in the course of this essay, some quantum physicists and cosmologists are moving beyond conventional approaches in a manner which seems to vindicate the ancient Hermetic belief in the evolution of a living, conscious universe. If such a view is accepted, then it would follow that Hermeticism holds the key to our future on this watery world far out on the galactic rim. Orthodox science has shown that an impressive series of tweaks and fine-tunings of the laws of physics has allowed life to evolve, ruling out mere chance – the so-called Goldilocks principle, in that the universe has been made ‘just right’ for life, and any other configuration would not have done the job. Ironically, then, mainstream scientists proposes an intelligent order behind the composition of the universe but do not admit it, instead tying themselves up in knots with a suppositional multiverse theory that can never be proved because we cannot perceive such unknown dimensions.
We’ll begin our survey with the German biophysicist Dr Dieter Broers who believes a surge of cosmic energy could reconfigure our DNA, our consciousness and our perception of time to shift us into a new era of ‘super-consciousness’. In his 2009 book (R)evolution 2012, he argues that this could happen if we are exposed to a gigantic increase in the electrostatic field around us in forthcoming solar storms from 2012 on. Studies have shown a connection between specific electrostatic fields and increases in genetic changes in human beings. Electromagnetic fields accelerate the transcription rate in biological material and so promote mutations. Increased solar activity could help us develop a more advanced DNA structure, and turn us into ‘super human beings’, says Dr Broers.
Meanwhile, a number of scientists (for example, Herbert L König, professor of physics at Munich University, Herbert Fröhlich, the German-born British physicist, and Alexander Pressman, the Russian biophysicist) have presented evidence that electromagnetic fields, which regulate and steer many processes essential for living beings, have played a decisive role in evolution. Studies have linked human behaviour, including wars, revolutions and riots, to times of increased solar activity. High levels of sun activity have also been linked to great civilisations such as the Mayan, whose calendar, along with the ancient Egyptian and Indian, recognised that cosmic energies influence consciousness. The Mayan calendar, of course, is said to end on December 21, 2012, when the solstice sun is aligned with the galactic equator and Earth can expect to receive a dramatic increase in cosmic energy.
Let’s take a deep breath and plunge in deeper with the controversial issue of torsion field physics, a much-vaunted subject exercising the minds of ‘alternative’ online science commentators and bloggers today. This relatively new branch of physics speculates that DNA and consciousness are created by a spiralling torsion energy, or quantum spin, of space-time, the macro outcome of spinning sub-atomic particles, perhaps creating, among other things, the kind of energy flux that Dr Broers envisages. The pioneering work in torsion field physics was carried out by Einstein and Cartan in the 1920s, resulting in the Einstein-Cartan theory, a classical theory of gravitation in which interest has been revived in recent years as theorists have tried to incorporate torsion into quantum theories, or as they explore its cosmological ramifications.
Before going further, however, I must state that I have long held the belief that sub-atomic particles are better thought of as vanishingly small vortices interacting in space-time rather than as discrete objects whirling about like microcosmic planetary systems, in the way that atoms were once conceived. Such a view of the sub-atomic domain will help what follows. In this context, we have failed to appreciate that vortices are the essence of our experience because of the prevalent Copernican perspective of the universe which tends to flatten things out: for example, the solar system is perceived with the sun at the centre and the planets in orbit around it in more or less the same plane. But this is incorrect, as I point out in the chapter ‘Vortex of Time’ in my book Spirals: the Pattern of Existence (2006).
The orbits of the Earth and the other planets are not circles around the sun, nor even ellipses, but helices. This is because the sun, just like myriad other stars, is moving through space in an orbit of its own together with its family of planets. This proper motion is the outcome of two component forces: the general rotation of our galaxy, and the Sun’s motion with respect to neighbouring stars. As the sun is moving while the planets go round it, they actually take helical paths in space, like giant corkscrews. Astronomers have long known about this movement – I have a 1959 encyclopedia of astronomy in which there is a diagram of it – but it has never been emphasised to the general public. It is hard to enivisage when we are so conditioned to the usual flat-plane presentation of the solar system in science books. The concept of the ‘vortex solar system’ was spelled out by the Indian ethnobotanist Dr Pallathadka Keshava Batt in his 2008 book, Helical Helix: Solar System a Dynamic Process, which also proposed helical movements for all objects in the universe, but his work in this area had little impact in the West. Yet it is indicative immediately of how the universe and its process comprise vortices – probably double vortices, which can be likened to two pyramids rotating apex to apex, as this is what scientists are begining to think governs electromagnetic fields. The pyramid is a three-dimensional symbolic representation of the vortex, and you can get an idea of how this looks from depictions of the electromagnetic field surrounding Earth.
Torsion fields (also called spin fields, or axion fields) are said to be twists, screw or helix-like manifestations of subtle energy which can turn to the left or right and, although research into them in the Soviet Union was discredited in the 1980s (the Akimov and Shipov case), the Russian Academy of Science continued it well into the 1990s, with military as well as technological applications in mind. Such research, although suggesting a theory for the behaviour of space and the nature of consciousness, remains fringe science, especially because it has been used to propose faster-than-light travel and to explain extra-sensory perception, levitation and other paranormal phenomena, as well as ‘spiritual healing’ and dowsing.
 Studies by the Russian astronomer and astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev, who died in 1983, followed by those of other Russian scientists, have suggested that matter harnesses torsion waves to sustain its existence, as highlighted in The Divine Cosmos by the American author David Wilcock who is prominent among many researchers today seeking the essence of reality within a rediscovery of an ancient system of science and spirituality. Although such research promises much for the realisation of latent human potential, one must warn that here we enter the realm of what is often dismissed as ‘pseudoscience’, an attitude vaunted by mainstream science to which consideration of anything like this remains anathema. Perhaps the reader will prefer the phrase ‘alternative science’.
While carrying out research for my book on spirals, I considered the work of one particular Russian scientist, Vladimir Ginzburg, who theorised that the basic substance of the universe was indeed a 'spiral field', accounting for its infinite nature, his ideas being set out in his books, Spiral Grain of the Universe (1997) and Unified Spiral Field and Matter (1999). Ginzburg believes a spiral field propagates around all objects in the universe, and that it governs the motion of objects as well the forces exerted upon them. The spiral field is in the shape of a torus – resembling a ring doughnut – which, geometrically, is formed when a closed curve is rotated about a line which lies in the same plane but does not intersect it. I realised that Ginzburg‘s theory held profound implications for particle physics as it claimed to provide an explanation for, among other things, the nature of electromagnetic waves, neutrinos, the structure of elementary particles and atoms, and the complexities of nuclear reactions. I could see how Ginzburg's work complemented the ideas of quantum physicist David Bohm (implicate order), evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (memes) and psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (archetypes/pleroma), as well as the morphic resonance theory of biologist Rupert Sheldrake. The uniting element of all these ideas seemed to be the notion of some rarefied continuum, field or force, interacting with the material universe.
 According to the Russian research, the (invisible) torsion wave energy pervades space at varying degrees of concentration. As star and planetary systems move through, and rotate with, the galaxy they encounter different concentrations in specific time intervals, in certain cycles varying from thousands to millions of years. It is speculated that a high density of torsion waves could have transformative effects on DNA on Earth, causing more highly evolved forms of life to replicate more rapidly than less evolved forms. Evolution certainly seems to have taken place in sudden leaps and bounds rather than in a gradual and uniform way. Now, as is well known, Earth has a 25,000-year cycle known as the precession of the equinoxes, and it has been estimated that torsion wave energy peaks every 75,000 years, or each third time round. The reader may not be surprised to hear that we are now at such a peak, with all that the symbolic year 2012 implies. Of course, one year in the history of the universe is an infinitesimal length of time, so any ‘peak’ would certainly be spread over hundreds of years and, as Colin Wilson, in particular, has argued in many of his books over the past half-century, we have been in a period of consciousness change for more than 200 years now – since the Romantic revolution, in fact, in the late 18th and early 19th century. This is the ‘romantic theory of evolution’. When torsion energy peaks, it is alleged, DNA can be restructured, resulting in an evolutionary advance. Only about three per cent of human DNA is required for genome purposes, the other 97 per cent being referred to by scientists rather dismissively as 'junk DNA', as they do not understand the purpose of it. However, it is the 'junk', evidently, that will be reorganised by the influx of torsion energy waves.
Some Russian scientists have gone so far as to say this spiralling torsion energy could be the substance of the human soul, and the precursor of the DNA molecule, in the sense that a torsion wave emanating from the galactic centre, and passing through our solar system at the moment of a person's birth, influences the DNA uniquely, this 'energy signature' subtly altering the DNA inherited from our parents. The causal chain thus connects each of us to a universal consciousness through our DNA. Theorists speculate that spin interactions can be transmitted through and/or by space in a manner akin to electromagnetic waves but holding neither energy nor mass, only information, which links it to the idea of a universal consciousness. If events in the universe are always underpinned by information, as is theorised, then they can never be random; information, by its very nature, is ordered, or we could not know it as such. Hailed as ‘the new language of science’, information theory entails a concept which is opening up other new realms in theoretical physics and could become as central in science as terms such as space, time, mass, energy, heat and light, all of which have become indispensable for describing the material universe.
Professor Vlatko Vedral, a quantum physicist at the universities of Oxford and Singapore, author of Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information (2010), is among scientists who believe that units of information, and not sub-atomic particles, are the building blocks of nature. Information, he maintains, is what came before everything else, and is ‘akin to God’. Once you have probability, he says, you can define information in any field, whether it be physics or economics. Scientists are criticised for being unable to go beyond the laws of physics to explain their origins, to avoid the infinite regress of requiring explanations for explanations, and Vedral believes that information is the only concept capable of almost explaining itself and closing this circle.
Amit Goswami, a theoretical nuclear physicist at the University of Oregon, maintains that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all existence, reflecting the thought of the mystic sages of his native India. He believes the universe to be self-aware, and that consciousness creates the physical world. His theory of ‘monistic idealism’, he claims, explains not only the basis of all religions but also affords the best philosophy for modern science. Once people refrain from the assumption that there is an objective reality independent of consciousness, the paradoxes of quantum physics are resolved, he says. A field of information as the essence of the universe has been posited also by Ervin Laszlo, the Hungarian philosopher of science and systems theorist, and named by him the Akashic field, or ‘A-field’, after the Sanskrit and Vedic term for space. Laszlo sees the fundamental energy and information-carrying field as arising from the quantum ‘vacuum’, and having its equivalent in a zero-point field that underlies space itself. This field comprises a subtle flow of fluctuating energies from which everything in the universe arises, including consciousness. Laszlo regards the Akashic field as the original source of all things arising in time and space, and also the continuous and enduring memory of the universe, and responsible for artistic visualizations and creative insights as well as distance healing, near-death experiences, after-death communications and past-life recollections. The astrophysicist Bernard Haisch believes consciousness creates matter, and not the other way round. We are God having a human experience, he says, not humans who have a God experience. He feels that there is a purpose and an underlying intelligence behind the universe, one that is consistent with modern science, especially the Big Bang and evolution. His view is based on the discoveries of numerous coincidences and fine-tunings of the laws of nature that seem most unlikely but which, nevertheless, have happened and have produced the Earth as a home for human beings.
If ideas such as these are correct, and consciousness is fundamental, then it should come as no surprise that science has failed to come up with a physicalist theory of consciousness, a way of explaining how matter or energy could bring about conscious experience, says Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. If matter is but one of the products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. Prof Hoffman believes that consciousness and its contents are all that exist. Space-time, matter and fields never were the ‘fundamental denizens’ of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being. It is instructive to quote Dr Hoffman more fully, as he articulates a view that is gradually gaining ground in consciousness studies: ‘The world of our daily experience – the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds – is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm. Indeed, the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits. Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.’
Such ways of looking at consciousness suggest that our minds participate in it as a universal informational field, rather than create it discretely; our brains, in this respect, act as ‘transceivers’ of consciousness. After all, consciousness, is the point of intersection between the cosmic dimension and the human dimension, between timelessness and time, where we receive the numinous and an intimation of the ‘life-force’. So, taking a charitable view of torsion energy and consciousness field theory, a change in consciousness could be the first sign of the torsion energy 'spiral of ascension' – to borrow the phrase of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in his famous work Vision and Prayer – kicking in.
Again, the 'quantum mind' or 'quantum consciousness' hypothesis, which is another minority view in science, proposes that classical mechanics will not be able to fully explain consciousness. It suggests that quantum mechanical phenomena, such as quantum entanglement and superposition, may play an important part in the brain's function, and could form the basis of an explanation of consciousness (there are several quite distinct quantum mind theories), but it is spurned by most quantum physicists. Admittedly, quantum theory is, as yet, incomplete; it has yet to be reconciled with general relativity, for example. One should note, however, that, if human minds do have quantum consciousness, some may be able to communicate directly under quantum information theory resulting possibly in direct enlightenment of individuals, but most inter-human communication is by written and spoken language and gesture using classical information theory. While the minds of higher order beings conceivably could communicate thought and information by quantum information theory, it remains the case that most human minds communicate thought and information by classical information theory.
I have always believed that contextualisation and achieving a historical perspective on matters is of great importance. So, with regard to all the discussion going on today about information and consciousness field theories, it is well worth mentioning that in 1988, in his book Beyond the Occult, Colin Wilson included a prescient chapter entitled ‘The Information Universe’. In this, he wrote about a dormant human faculty which could tap into a universal library of information (he uses that actual phrase) and perceive an underlying web of connections in the universe, and how this faculty could explain paranormal experience. Beyond the Occult states Wilson’s key belief that the hidden powers of the mind in this respect are a sign of our evolutionary potential. He writes: ‘Synchronicities, flashes of clairvoyance or precognition or mystical insight make us aware that our power to change the world is far greater than we imagine. This is the most important insight to arise from the study of the paranormal; this is the essence of “the occult vision”.’ The real purpose of consciousness, Wilson says, is to change the world, but we realise this only in times of concentration and excitement. Attaining higher and more intense levels of awareness, allowing ‘hidden realms of reality’ to be perceived, should be the aim. Our problem is the acceptance of ‘mental stagnation’, and when this ceases to be true the next stage of human evolution, moving from homo sapiens, intellectual man, to homo noesis, knowing man, can commence. Thus an influx of cosmic energy, torsion or otherwise, might not be needed to cause a change in human consciousness. We could be doing it ourselves and, on the evidence of the last 25 years, many of us are.
A decade before Wilson, the Czech thinker Itzhak Bentov in his 1979 book Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness, suggested that consciousness is the common uniting element of all creation, and that through this holistic link all things are in constant contact. According to Bentov (who died in a plane crash in the year his book was published), consciousness evolves to the ‘absolute’ which is its source, and matter, composed of quanta of energy, is the vibrating, changing component of pure consciousness. The absolute is fixed, manifest and invisible. Ours, then, is a vibratory reality, from microcosm to macrocosm. We all know the everyday human reality, but most of us do not know that our consciousness can be schooled to expand and interact with different states of consciousness. Bentov, like Wilson, said the goal of creation was the evolution of consciousness to higher levels. A change in consciousness to a higher level might involve an increased ability to tap into the hidden order or intelligence in the universe that weaves everything together: how could this be done? If there has been some purposeful intervention in the natural evolutionary process, ongoing since the formation of the universe, how could we perceive it – through science or shamanism, or both? What are the implications for consciousness and our understanding of it, for creativity and inspiration? Consciousness surely would arise from a wisdom or intelligence in nature, suggesting that we are within a universal ‘mind’ greater than the sum of its parts, one of which is us. There is undoubtedly ‘wisdom in oneness’ between cosmos and consciousness, as Hermeticism reveals. Central to the Hermetic tradition is the idea of the ‘mind of God’ as a ‘oneness’ that unites everything, that all that exists is a thought within this mind, that each person is potentially a demigod with a mind capable of encompassing universal knowledge and who, coming to know the ‘mind of God’ through spiritual rebirth, can aspire to divine status.
What aids are there to sustaining perception of this 'oneness'? Altered states of consciousness (ASCs), such as epiphany, the 'peak experience' or 'moment of being' when we catch a glimpse of a higher reality, and states of mind necessary for the divinatory arts such as dowsing, may hold the key – they constitute our experiments into future consciousness. Other relevant ASCs in this respect include meditation/yoga, shamanic ritual/ingestion of psychotropic plants, quantum consciousness, intentionality/willed concentration, the response to profound art (music, painting and literature, especially poetry), and Jungian ‘active imagination’ in which enactments of the unconscious are followed as in a waking dream. My own opinion is that the 21st-century quantum standpoint, revealing the participatory nature of all energy fields, including that of our own consciousness, provides us with a new paradigm for creativity - what it might be and where it comes from – returning us, in particular, to the theories of Ervin Laszlo. The quantum realm is magical in its dance of unpredictability and indeterminacy, and to be inspired is surely to connect with that divine, potent cosmic energy, replete with potential and creativity, that surrounds all of us.
How much of the above can be synthesised into a new world-view is exemplified by David Wilcock in his best-selling but controversial 2011 book, The Source Field Investigations: The Hidden Science and Lost Civilizations Behind the 2012 Prophecies, in which he explores historic signs and symbolism which he sees as determining the future for humanity. Combining science, consciousness studies, metaphysics, ancient symbolism and prophecy, Wilcock, like many others nowadays, concludes that we are on the verge of a rediscovery of an ancient system of physics and spirituality which was once widely used and understood but long since fallen into neglect. Wilcock remarks how positive and negative ‘vibrations’ that have been discussed for centuries turn out not only to exist but have geometric structures stemming primarily from the Platonic Solids. The vibrations form specific geometries in space-time, he claims, creating the communication medium to which the universe apparently responds, and giving substance to our thoughts and emotions by modifying our perceived reality. This is another way of saying that we create our own reality by what we think and do, and that the universe is always listening.
 I think it is fair to say that the human race has gone down a blind alley, but that a way out may lie in remembering the origins of, and the bond between, people and nature, of which, of course they are part. Knowledge acquired in ancient times, cosmic in provenance, included data on the structures of the universe and the human organism, and the means of calculating great cyclical processes. The quintessence of the knowledge handed down in the ancient world was the unity between human beings and the universe. It appears that ancient cultures knew something quite profound that we today have forgotten about: magic they called it, and we may term it parapsychology. There is hope that our intelligence and intellect will enable us to grasp the meaning of the ancient wisdom. In antiquity, that knowledge was kept and nurtured by a small group of hierophants, or adepts, but today it is surely time for it to become the inheritance of all humanity. And if we join together with positive intention to create a better world, then perhaps the universe will make it so. But that will not be the end of the story...
Psychonetics creates new technologies and solves new problems by dint of specific features of our consciousness, features required only when conventional methods prove useless. The term was introduced as far back as 1970 by Dr Tateisi Kazuma, founder of Japan’s largest corporation, Omron, and it is sometimes defined as ‘how successful people use their minds’. Nowadays, it is realised that the information society, with all its attendant technologies, will not last forever, and one day we will enter a post-informational period. Just as the information epoch surmounted the industrial, so a noetic epoch will surmount the information one. The creative drive behind these changes, after all, comes from the human mind which, we may well soon find certifying the oneness of consciousness and cosmos.
GW December 2011
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The extraordinary thing about the Koornwinder Conventions is that their origins lie in Herma's amazing discovery, when she was a global markets analyst, that there was an order to the movements of share prices when everyone in the investments industry believed them to be random.
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