The Genius Within Everyone
WHY UNIVERSAL ORGANIZING CONSCIOUSNESS EXISTS IN EVERYTHING

In this book, in which G.O.D. is a universal Guiding-OrganizingDesigning process, I am also implicitly saying that G.O.D. can be thought of as some sort of omnipresent, superintelligent “genius-optimizing developer” of the universe and everything within it. Given that science is leading us to some sort of a genius G.O.D. process, can science take us further and reveal more precisely what kind of G.O.D. process is God? To that question I also answer yes.

But I use the term “believe” in the same sense that, as mentioned earlier, the related word is used in the last line of the movie Dragonfly: “Belief is what gets us there.” And this meaning is important.

Again, it is not enough to know that crafting a sand painting and building a skyscraper are possible; you must believe that you can do them. It is not enough to know how to do these things; you must have the motivation to achieve them.

In a deep and accurate sense, belief is what ultimately leads people to create and to evolve. It is in this sense that I believe in science. In this book you’ve learned that I have come to believe science can provide definitive answers to fundamental questions about the nature of reality. My belief in the power of science is evidence-based. The history of science contains abundant evidence of its potential for discovery, understanding, and application. And because I believe in science, I am motivated to apply the methods of science to questions that are seminal, regardless of how controversial they may seem.

You’ve discovered in these pages my efforts to create the optimal experimental conditions for the chance explanation—the conventional, presumably correct explanation for the origin and evolution of the universe and its laws—to prove itself. My work has given the chance explanation every chance to prove itself. The bottom line is that when chance is given the chance to prove its assumed fundamental role in the creation of order in the universe, it ends up disqualifying itself.

My belief is that if chance were the correct answer, it would be revealed in experiments, and if chance were false, we would find the mistake in our interpretation. The fundamental mistake is explained in Chapter 10—that order does not occur by chance (it requires precise conditions); instead, chance gives the opportunity for creative orders to occur. So, returning to the G.O.D. question and the genius within, can science slowly but surely reveal the precise nature of the G.O.D. process? Can science someday answer Einstein’s question about the detailed “thoughts of God”? Again, based upon already existing evidence combined with straightforward reasoning, my answer is a qualified yes.

Cognitive neuroscience and computer science have made tremendous progress in exploring and understanding the nature of intelligence in both natural and man-made systems. Natural intelligence and artificial intelligence—the latter, of course, implemented by human intelligence—are both evolving at breathtaking speed. The process suggests to me the way the individual atoms of hydrogen and oxygen come together, and are modulated by outside fields (such as information and energy conveyed at room temperature—recall Chapter 11) to make the emergent liquid molecule called water, which under the right conditions can become snowflakes of many shapes.

In the same way, individual components (be they physical, biological, social, or informational, as in computer software code) can come together, be modulated by outside fields, and make emergent feedback systems termed networks—with uniquely new emergent properties that are inherently intelligent. The more complex the feedback network and its interconnections, the more complex and unique are the intelligence and the associated learning capacities.

Amazingly, we now take the existence of man-made intelligent feedback network systems for granted. The level of intelligence programmed into our contemporary cell phones is extraordinary and is growing in each generation of digital phones. These evolving intelligence-driven cell phones interconnect us and thus create ever more complex feedback loops between many of us on the planet. Intelligence begets intelligence. Feedback loops are a universal phenomenon at every level of nature, and their expression is evolving via intelligence.

One might wonder if consciousness is a universal phenomenon like feedback. And then we can wonder: Does consciousness exist only in humans? Does consciousness extend to dolphins, dogs, and African grey parrots? Does consciousness extend to butterflies, protozoa, and E. coli bacteria? Does consciousness extend to trees, cacti, and pollen? Does consciousness extend to mountains, rocks, and raindrops? Does consciousness extend to atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, or even mass-less photons that are infinitely small? Does consciousness extend to the earth, moon, and sun? Does consciousness extend to solar systems, galaxies, and superclusters of galaxies? Does consciousness extend to the universe and beyond? And does consciousness exist in all feedback network systems at every level of nature and the universe?

You must ask how you personally draw the line for consciousness. Is your opinion based upon your education and culture, emotion and wishes, personal experience, logic and reasoning, or experimental evidence? Philosophers hold vastly different opinions on consciousness, ranging from “There is no such thing as consciousness” to “Consciousness is the fundamental building block of everything in the universe, from nonphysical intention and information to physical energy and matter.” On the other hand, a nearly unanimous opinion is held by the founders of the great religions that an omnipresent and omniscient God has an infinite mind with Universal Consciousness.

Throughout recorded history, philosophers have viewed God as purportedly “Conscious” with a capital C. Their God is Consciousness. If God is Consciousness, and if God has omni-awareness, then everything that exists in the universe has God or divine consciousness within it. Because if “the All is in the Small” and the G.O.D. process (that is, the All) equals consciousness, then consciousness is in the Small and everything has consciousness expressed to various degrees.

If consciousness is the foundation of all that there is, then part of our awakening as an evolving species is our capacity to discover this potential fundamental truth about nature and the universe. However, the question must be asked if science can determine whether this logic actually matches reality. Does any existing scientific evidence lead to the conclusion that the G.O.D. process reflects a universal organizing consciousness whose omniscient genius is beyond anything we can imagine?

APPRECIATING ANOMALIES IN SCIENCE

A growing body of scientific evidence, dismissed by many contemporary scientists as being anomalous if not impossible, is slowly but surely emerging to support such a G.O.D. presence. Because this body of scientific evidence inherently integrates science and spirituality, it is resisted if not rejected by many authorities in our contemporary educational and religious institutions. Fortunately, this era of denial and rejection is coming to an end.

Professor William James, M.D., deeply appreciated the importance of anomalous and “irregular” phenomena that may seem to be impossible and “unimaginable.” He wrote at Harvard almost a century ago in the English of his era:

“The great field for new discoveries,” said a scientific friend to me the other day, “is always the unclassified residuum.” By that curious term, he meant that around the accredited and orderly facts of every science, there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

The passage goes on to argue that “each one of our various -ologies seems to offer a definite head of classification for every possible phenomenon of the sort which it professes to cover.” And he found most men “so far from free … that, when a consistent and organized scheme … has once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme is unimaginable. No alternative … can any longer be conceived as possible.” Anything that didn’t fit would be seen as “paradoxical absurdities, and must be held untrue.”

When exceptions are demonstrated, they are “neglected or denied with the best of scientific consciences.” Only the born geniuses, James wrote, would become “worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no peace until they are brought within the fold.” And he pointed to scientists like Galileo and Darwin, who, he maintained, were “always confounded and troubled by insignificant things.”

Instead of being stuck with old ideas and unwilling to accept anything new, James wanted to see a scientist be able to “renovate his science.” He would want all of us to be willing to renovate our ideas, as well.

EVIDENCE THAT POINTS TO A CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE

Dean Radin, Ph.D., wrote a pathbreaking book titled The Conscious Universe. This book provides a readable and careful review of a large body of scientific research in what is often termed parapsychology. Radin reviewed hundreds of carefully conducted experiments documenting the existence of what others have called the extended mind or the nonlocal mind, and Radin calls the entangled mind. This research not only demonstrates the capacity of one person to sense the thoughts and feelings of others—even if they are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles—but it documents the capacity of one person’s mind to influence the behavior of quantum events such as electrons in electronically and magnetically shielded devices.

Research my colleagues and I have conducted on the organizing mind, presented in Chapter 15, replicates and extends this body of knowledge in an important manner. It is possible to demonstrate that either individual minds, or groups of minds working together, can have unintentional and unconscious effects on the quantum behavior of electromagnetically shielded electrons. In a word, our minds can organize the physical world at the quantum level. Now, if consciousness is indeed universal and omnipresent (in other words, is not limited to humans), and is primary (in other words, universally creates information, energy, and matter), it follows that everything that exists in the universe may ultimately be interconnected and organized via consciousness.

Certain states of consciousness may invite resonance if not unity between individual systems in the same way that musicians can play together in an orchestra or singers sing together in a choir. When people enter different states of consciousness, trillions of electrons in our brains synchronize in definable ways; we can measure this synchrony as brain (EEG) waves or fields.

Apparently, electrons that are electromagnetically isolated in a shielded device can nonetheless resonate with our brain’s synchronized electrons under certain conditions of consciousness. But does consciousness itself show emergent network properties? Does consciousness show novel properties that emerge from individual electrons to individual brains to groups of brains to a global brain? Is there such a thing as emerging global consciousness? Does the earth have consciousness, and are we—both individually and collectively—components of this consciousness?

Roger Nelson, Ph.D., and colleagues from the Department of Engineering at Princeton have been conducting research termed the Global Consciousness Project (see http://noosphere.princeton.edu). Here is how Nelson et al. describe the nature of global consciousness:

Research on human consciousness suggests that we may have direct communication links with each other, and that our intentions can have effects in the world despite physical barriers and separations. We are compelled by good evidence to accept correlations that we cannot yet explain.

Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project speculates that fields generated by individual consciousness would interact and combine, and ultimately have a global presence. Occasionally, the Nelson team explains, “global-scale events … bring great numbers of us to a common focus and an unusual coherence of thought and feeling.” To study the effects of a possible global consciousness, the Princeton group has “created a world-spanning network of devices” and believes the data they have collected so far appear to correlate with events “that may evoke a world-wide consciousness.” The events they list “include both peaceful gatherings and disasters: a few minutes around midnight on any New Year’s Eve, the first hour of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, the Papal visit to Israel, a variety of global meditations, several major earthquakes, and September 11, 2001.”

When science combines this evolving body of experimental research with contemporary laboratory research on the topic of survival of consciousness after physical death, we discover compelling evidence that leads to a notable conclusion: that the brain is not required for conscious experience, intention, and intelligence (recall our discussion of the mind-brain relationship question in Chapter 11). Furthermore, as summarized in the last chapter of The Afterlife Experiments, the totality of the evidence leads inexorably to the conclusion that the answer to the question “Which comes first, brain or mind?” is “Mind first, then brain.” Brain becomes a physical tool of the mind, not the other way around.

William James was a proponent of the “mind first” thesis. Probably the most forceful contemporary proponents of this position are Stanford professor emeritus William Tiller and his colleagues. In their book Conscious Acts of Creation, they begin by saying: “This book marks a sharp dividing line between old ways of scientific thought and old experimental protocols, wherein human qualities of consciousness, intention, emotion, mind and spirit cannot significantly affect physical reality, and a new paradigm wherein they can robustly do so!”

I admire the use of that term “robustly.” Their book gives evidence not only for the organizing power of the human mind, but for the intimate interconnectedness of all things via universal organizing consciousness. And support of this concept is assembling from many sources.

FROM THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE TO INTELLIGENT EVOLUTION AND G.O.D., THE ULTIMATE EXPERIMENTER

Most scientific researchers never mention the G-word in the context of their science. Unfortunately it is even more taboo in the research laboratory than it is at most dinner parties. Nor is the G-word listed in the index of books like Conscious Acts of Creation or The Field, or mentioned, except briefly in passing, in books like The Genius Within or The Conscious Universe. However, the avoidance of the G-word reflects the politics of science, not its essence. For when the emerging body of consciousness research is “seen with new eyes,” it portends a spectacular paradigm change.

Professor Rustum Roy describes the work of Tiller and his colleagues as follows: “For the first time, in the language of physics, very solid and very extensive data on ‘Spirit>Mind>Physical Matter’ interactions have been provided.” Science and spirituality are becoming two sides of the same coin. Science is not only helping to solve the mystery of mysteries, it is serving the mystery of mysteries. In fact, we are beginning to see the G.O.D. process as the Ultimate Experimenter, an intelligent, creative, and caring intellect that we can come to know and serve—if we are willing to ask.

QUESTIONS UNANSWERED

My evidence-based faith is that if we stay willing to continue asking challenging questions with an open and discerning mind, and then we creatively apply the evolving tools of science to address these questions, definitive answers will be revealed in time. It is the nature of science that when one question is answered, more questions present themselves.

And so, as the end of this book approaches, you are left with many unanswered questions, such as: Is what we term the G.O.D. process an expression of a Universal Organizing Consciousness—an awareness and intelligence in everything? Is the G.O.D. process perhaps conducting a great experiment? Is the ultimate outcome of this grand experiment already known (and is it possible that the G.O.D. process has a bag of cosmic tricks up the sleeve)? Or is G.O.D., the Ultimate Experimenter, continually discovering new things just as we are? And is the G.O.D. process itself evolving along with the evolving universe?

And a question we all share: Is there a universal co-creative process of which we, individually and collectively, are a part?

Hopefully we’ll receive the answer. I am sure it will be provided if we become mature enough and wise enough to apply our knowledge and science in a way that is even more compassionate, healing, and transformative. I personally am committed to continuing this work for our species and our precious planet. The future is in the hands of all of us.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.