When we are whole, the world will become whole. That would be an amazing change, because, as things stand, we are divided and so is the world. This state of affairs goes beyond the never-ending conflicts that make the news. There’s a deep fracture at the very core of being human. We call ourselves mammals, and yet most people believe they have a soul. We set ourselves apart from Nature, exploiting it without considering the consequences. As caretakers of the planet, we are also its worst threat.
A shift is already being sparked in collective consciousness, however. One of the most heartening signs of this is seemingly trivial, an online video about a grateful octopus, now seen by almost twelve million viewers. It begins on a beach in Portugal with a man, Pei Yan Heng, strolling along the sand. He spots a small octopus stranded out of the water. Pei takes out his smartphone to film the creature. Presumably tossed onshore by a large wave, the octopus looks shriveled and near death. In a kind gesture Pei gathers the octopus into a plastic cup, carries it back to the sea, and releases it.
The octopus immediately begins to revive. Its eight arms spread out (experts tell us that tentacle isn’t the proper term), and it changes to a healthier color. Typically, an octopus is shy and scuttles away from any approaching threat, a necessary tactic for such a baggy, soft-bodied animal. But instead of fleeing, the saved octopus approaches Pei’s boots and places two arms on them, resting for several seconds before moving away without haste. Soon the “grateful octopus” entered popular culture when the video went viral. You might suppose that this was an example of human sentimentality, but then, there is no proof that the rescued octopus wasn’t grateful. Is there any way to tell?
The conventional answer is no. This can be a hard no or a soft no. The hard no holds that only human beings are conscious. The soft no holds that humans are the only fully conscious creatures. This leaves a little wiggle room for big-brained mammals, like porpoises, elephants, and the great apes. The soft no has held firm for a long time. But once you understand that consciousness is the source of creation, the road to yes—an octopus can feel gratitude—is opened.
From the perspective of metahuman, nothing is alien, however. There is only one reality, governed by one consciousness. There is only one life, too, despite our distinctions between smart chimpanzees, stupid lizards, and totally unconscious bacteria. An urgent need at this moment when the Earth is in peril is to evolve to metahuman for the sake of all living things.
In a January 2014 article in Scientific American, the highly regarded neuroscientist Christoph Koch made inroads against the “no” position by asking if consciousness is universal. He is very persuasive when he points out that animal intelligence isn’t primitive. Not only that, it isn’t correlated with brain size or even possessing a complex nervous system. “Bees can fly several kilometers and return to their hive, a remarkable navigational performance,” Koch points out (not only remarkable, I would add, but something human beings lost in the woods are incapable of). “And a scent blown into the hive can trigger a return to the site where the bees previously encountered this odor.”
Koch links this trait, called “associative memory,” with the famous moment in French literature centered on a cookie known as a madeleine. The massive seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), by Marcel Proust, begins with a flood of memory occasioned when the narrator dips a madeleine in a cup of tea, a gesture from his childhood. This experience of associative memory Koch also ascribes to bees, a lowly form of insect life. But we can find a wealth of other examples. Staying just with bees, Koch points out the following:
[They] are capable of recognizing specific faces from photographs, can communicate the location and quality of food sources to their sisters via the waggle dance, and can navigate complex mazes with the help of cues they store in short-term memory (for instance, “after arriving at a fork, take the exit marked by the color at the entrance”).
The upshot, Koch says, is that consciousness cannot be walled off in arbitrary ways just because a life form looks biologically too simple to be conscious. With arms wide open, he declares, “All species—bees, octopuses, ravens, crows, magpies, parrots, tuna, mice, whales, dogs, cats and monkeys—are capable of sophisticated, learned, nonstereotyped behaviors.” This gets us a long way from “no,” only human beings are conscious, to “yes,” consciousness is universal.
The grateful octopus was acting out a human gesture. To see this isn’t sentimentality or fantasy. Koch believes that if we weren’t so prejudiced, we’d see that animals behave constantly in ways that would be called conscious if the same activity were displayed by a person. A dog’s look of love toward his master, his distress if his owner is absent, and the grief he feels if his owner dies are conscious traits being expressed through another life form. Yet our prejudice is hard to overcome because it serves our selfishness. Homo sapiens has ancient hunting stock in it. We kill and eat a great many animals, and it salves our conscience to see them as lower life forms, deprived of mind, will, and freedom of choice.
Everything that makes other life forms alien in our eyes is arbitrary. No creature looks more alien than an octopus. Among the three hundred octopus species, which first appeared at least 295 million years ago according to the oldest fossils, the largest types resemble the smallest in having two eyes, eight arms, and a beak centered where the arms meet. Blown up to a large scale, as in the giant Pacific octopus, which can reach a weight of up to six hundred pounds with an arm span between fourteen and thirty feet, those eight arms and snapping beak seem monstrous. But like Tyrannosaurus rex or a great white shark, the giant Pacific octopus isn’t a monster in its own eyes. In the play of consciousness, the octopus occupies the same cosmic status as Homo sapiens. It is alive and aware of itself and its surroundings.
There’s abundant evidence to support this claim. In her 2015 book, The Soul of an Octopus, naturalist Sy Montgomery closes the gap between people and mollusks in startling ways. In a section that begins, “Octopuses realize that humans are individuals, too,” she relates how distinctly an octopus can make friends and enemies. In the mildest example, one keeper at the Seattle Aquarium was assigned to feed the octopuses while another touched them with a bristly stick. Within a week, at first sight of the two people, most of the octopuses drifted toward the feeder.
But their ability to relate to specific humans grows much more mysterious. A volunteer at the New England Aquarium earned the dislike of a particular octopus named Truman for no apparent reason. Whenever she came close to the tank, Truman would use its siphon (a funnel on the side of an octopus’s head that propels it through the water) to spray a blast of cold seawater at her. The volunteer went away to college but returned months later for a visit. Truman, who hadn’t squirted anyone in her absence, immediately soaked her with a blast from his siphon at first glance.
Montgomery relates in depth the idiosyncratic behavior of octopuses in captivity named Athena, Octavia, Kali, and others, making them almost as individual as people. Her argument for their similarity to humans is ultimately physical. After all, she writes, we share the same neurons and neurotransmitters. But even though octopuses have unusually complex nervous systems for an invertebrate, their anatomy doesn’t resemble the human nervous system. The majority of octopus neurons are located in their eight arms, not in their brains. Each arm can independently move, touch, and taste (the suckers that line each arm are locations for the sense of taste) without needing to refer to the brain.
Anatomy cannot explain how octopuses recognize people and remember their faces. Disliking a bright light at night that disturbed its sleep, one octopus aimed a jet of water at it and burned it out through short-circuiting. Dissecting an octopus’s nervous system doesn’t explain how such a tactic was devised (in the wild octopuses don’t squirt water above the surface of the seas). It would seem to be an act of creative intelligence.
My contention is that existence is consciousness; therefore, no animal ability is astonishing (except in our one-eyed view), because every life form expresses traits that belong to pure consciousness. These traits wake up, as it were, emerging into the physical world according to each creature’s evolutionary story. The grateful octopus wasn’t being like a human. We could say with equal justice that when we are grateful, we are being octopus-like. Both views are one-eyed.
This book has been making the case for waking up, but being awake isn’t the end—ahead lies cosmic consciousness. I am using the term the way others use supreme enlightenment (known in Sanskrit as Paramatma). If metahuman is the awakened state, think of it as crossing a threshold. There is a vast new territory to explore beyond.
Cosmic consciousness doesn’t give a little bit of itself to an amoeba, more to bees, still more to octopuses, and finally the grand prize to Homo sapiens. In a hologram, a fragment of a laser image can be used to project the whole image—with only Mona Lisa’s smile, the entire painting can be projected. Hologram technology can even simulate a statue or a living person in 3-D from a laser image in two dimensions. Cosmic consciousness does this on a huge scale—the entire universe—using merely the possibility of a cosmos. Therefore, it’s not quite true that something is created out of nothing. The physical universe sprang from a conception in cosmic consciousness that unfolded in material form. Pure consciousness is not nothing.
This capacity has been inherited by human beings. If I say, “Imagine the Eiffel Tower” or “See the Statue of Liberty in your mind’s eye,” it only takes the name of those monuments for you to see them in totality. A name doesn’t have three dimensions; in fact, it has no dimensions, being just a verbal tag for a concept. The Statue of Liberty is the concept of freedom transformed into a work of art. But liberty can also produce completely different manifestations, such as revolutionary wars or an antiwar movement. Concepts are constantly shaping and reshaping events, civilizations, and the human world in general.
You are living in a world that consists of ideas blown into three dimensions. As usual, the great minds got there before us. More than two thousand years ago Plato argued that everything in the world originated in abstract universal ideas, which he called “forms.” Leap ahead two millennia, and here is Werner Heisenberg: “I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”
If the elementary building blocks of matter and energy are conceptual, then the universe itself is bubbling up from a set of ideas or forms, too. This particular set of ideas that became our home universe could have other variations, some of which would be inconceivable to the human mind. One feature of the multiverse, if it actually exists, is that billions of other universes may be operating on totally different laws of Nature from ours. A law of Nature is simply a mathematical model, and mathematical models are concepts.
Let me interject a personal note here. When I first encountered the quantum, which led to a book, Quantum Healing, I was thrilled that physics was in accord with profound insights from India. Maya, the Sanskrit word usually translated as “illusion,” refers to virtual reality, and the doctrine of Maya holds that the illusion is merely a concept. The parallels went even deeper. Heisenberg held that Nature exhibits a phenomenon according to the questions we ask of it—in other words, the qualities of time, space, matter, and energy are extracted from the quantum field by the observer. In ancient India, Maya originates through the participation of humans seeking confirmation of our inner beliefs. In both cases Nature is showing us what we want to see.
I was thrilled by the prospect that the inward path of the ancients and the outward path of modern science had arrived at the same reality. So it came as a shock to discover that contemporary physics has largely turned its back on the inspired quantum pioneers. As a professor at Cal Tech told me, “My graduate students know more about physics than Einstein ever did.” This advance in technical knowledge has been tremendous, but does it justify throwing out what the quantum pioneers understood about reality?
Einstein at least recognized the danger when he remarked, “So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest.” To correct this short-sightedness, Einstein advocated that scientists acquire a broad outlook from philosophy, which he considered the mark of “a real seeker after truth.” In the twenty-first century, alas, fewer forests are being seen today than ever as every science becomes more specialized and fragmented. You can spend an entire career in physics focusing on a single concept like eternal inflation or a single elementary particle, like the Higgs boson.
Cosmic consciousness sounds like something very far away from how we use our minds in day-to-day life. In reality, however, each person’s mind is projecting cosmic consciousness all the time. Your mind is a fragment of cosmic consciousness, yet, as in a hologram, a fragment is enough to project the whole. The following exercise will help bring this insight home.
Close your eyes and imagine that you are standing on a beach, watching the surf roll in. When you have this image firmly in your mind’s eye, start transforming the waves in various ways. See them become bigger, swelling into the monster waves that world-class surfers ride. See them shrink to small chop. Make the waves turn different colors—red or purple or neon orange. Place yourself on top of the waves, balancing without a surfboard as you ride to shore. If you wish, you can invent your own transformations. Perhaps a mermaid emerges from the waves, singing her siren song. You get the idea.
When you made these creative changes to the surf, reflect on what was happening. You didn’t thumb through a catalog of possibilities. You were free instead to let your imagination roam. Two people doing this exercise would come up with different creative choices. The possibilities are unlimited and not bound by any rules. Nothing stops you from turning the Pacific Ocean into pink Jell-O. It makes no sense to claim that these creative possibilities are stored in the atoms and molecules of your brain cells. You made conscious choices without precedent, building a unique chain of creative thoughts.
But even if all seven billion people on the planet performed this exercise, they would be doing only one thing—transforming possibility into reality. This one thing is occurring all the time, and it is enough to create the universe. In the spring of 1940, one of the most far-seeing physicists in modern times, John Wheeler, telephoned another far-seeing physicist, Richard Feynman.
“Feynman,” Wheeler exclaimed, “I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass.”
“Why?”
“Because, they are all the same electron!”
This startling notion, which became known as the One-Electron Universe, sank into Feynman’s imagination, although, as he recalls, he didn’t take it seriously enough at first. When we look at the physical world, a huge number of electrons exist—trillions send electrical charges through your household current every second. Each electron traces a path in time and space, known as a “world line.”
Wheeler proposed that a single electron could zigzag all over the place, creating a tangle of world lines. It’s a fascinating alternative to many electrons creating many world lines. Now let’s translate this into human terms. Instead of many electrons, substitute many observers, each with his own eyes. On planet Earth there would be over seven billion observers. However, those billions of observers express the ability to observe, which is one thing. So it’s entirely plausible that we inhabit a “one-observer universe.” It’s like saying “All humans draw breath” without having to count how many humans are breathing. Such is the perspective of cosmic consciousness. I didn’t choose the image of waves pounding the shore by accident. The ancient Indian seers pointed to the sea and said, “Each wave is an outcropping of the ocean without being different from the ocean. Do not be fooled by your individual ego. You are an outcropping of cosmic consciousness without being different from it.”
Homo sapiens is the only creature that can choose which perspective to take. We can be separate waves of one ocean. The only difference between a one-electron universe and a many-electron universe is our perspective. Both are as real as we decide they are. Or, to put it more strongly, both are only as real as we decide they are. Standing at the pivot of making this choice, we stand at the pivot of creation. Only one thing is happening: possibility is becoming reality. John Wheeler was also responsible for saying that we live in a participatory universe. I’m only expanding on the same idea. A participatory universe offers infinite choices; the one thing you can’t choose is not to participate.
Once you are in the game, how you play it is entirely open to you. Humans can look upon creation and explain it any way we choose. Why are there cold viruses, elephants, sequoias, and mice in the world? Some may say God created them on purpose, while others believe that they emerged from the quantum vacuum through random processes that took billions of years to come to fruition. The most radical explanation is that Homo sapiens added everything we desired to our virtual reality. Each explanation is simply a different story. Beyond stories, cosmic consciousness is creating from within itself. Stories are postcreation; cosmic consciousness is precreation.
Our role as creators of reality imposes a heavy burden if we view it from the limitations of human nature. For many centuries the whole thing could be left to God. The medieval mind, for example, made God the origin of everything in Heaven and on Earth—Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of medieval theologians, presented God as the “first mover” (primum mobile in Latin). God alone had the knowledge to create the universe.
Because perfection is a divine attribute, God must have set creation in perfect motion, while in the fallen world everything that is in motion, even a beating heart and surging ocean waves, is an imperfect representation of God’s work. When Adam and Eve fell, so did Nature. The first humans were driven out of a perfect natural world into an imperfect one. The Garden of Eden gave way to a hostile wilderness.
In the Divine Comedy, which stands as the most complete reflection of medieval cosmology in literature, Dante reached for a visual image of divine perfection that his readers could grasp. As the website Danteworlds describes it, “In the Primum Mobile (‘first mover’)—the swiftest, outermost sphere that imparts motion to the other spheres—Dante sees nine fiery rings whirling about a central point of intense light.”
These nine fiery rings are angelic orders, because in Dante’s religious worldview there had to be perfected beings assigned to keep creation going. Otherwise, God would have to be engineering everything, an impossibility when he was the Unmoving Mover by definition. (He is archaic and not correct in Hebrew, but I’m resorting to the masculine for convenience, since he/she/it is cumbersome.) When referring to God, the medieval Christian mind couldn’t violate—or escape—divine perfection.
That obsession survives today, but in a different guise. With no perfect creation to dream about, we are left with our own imperfections. We feel as bewildered and confused as the biblical Adam and Eve. We feel guilty about despoiling the planet and yet cannot help ourselves, even as Nature crumbles before our eyes.
This book has proposed that creation unfolds from pure consciousness. There is no divine artist with a picture in mind. There is just creation evolving without end. The process has no one story line; it embraces all story lines. It has no morality. Tragedy is as fascinating to the human imagination as comedy, which is why we keep creating both. (Shakespeare presented the whole panorama to his audience standing in the pit of the Globe Theatre, and Hollywood keeps the show going.)
The evolution of consciousness is the only explanation for creation that holds everything together. It has the advantage of no boundaries. The miraculous stands on the same level playing field as the mundane. At this point I am going to go out on a limb. If you go to YouTube and enter three search words, Lourdes levitating Host, you can watch a filmed miracle that occurred in Lourdes, France. As one informed online commentator explains it:
In 1999, during a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Billé, then archbishop of Lyon, the Host began to levitate just above the paten [the plate used for Eucharist] from the moment of the epiclesis until the elevation. The prodigy was filmed for broadcast and a clip of it is making its way around the internet. At the time, the French bishops decided to keep it quiet. Recently, it was brought to the attention of a cardinal in the Curia, who took it upon himself to verify the origin of the clip and ask the current archbishop of Lyon for the position of the French bishops on the matter. This cardinal in turn passed it on to the Holy Father. He is concerned that certain bishops were too quick to put the lid on what seems to be an authentic sign.
The existing video is blurry, but it shows what the commentator describes. During this Mass a large Host was used, about the size of a dinner plate. The levitation, which lasts several minutes, ends with the elevation of the Host, when the archbishop lifts it up to display to the congregation. The levitation, if that is what we are seeing, raises the Host only an inch or two into the air.
I don’t know who is in a position to rule the footage real or a clever digital hoax, but for me the issue isn’t about miracles. It is about what human beings are willing to allow into the acceptable picture of reality. To date, millions of people have seen the video of the levitating Host, and their responses cover the spectrum. Most people I know are momentarily impressed; others question the blurry images. A few get a strange expression on their faces, as if they were Horatio and Hamlet had just said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
You could say that Hamlet is accusing his friend of not dreaming deeply enough. Miracles are similar reminders. The levitating Host may be explained away one day—after all, antigravity exists in theoretical physics. It might be exposed as a fraud or simply sink into the morass of forgotten experience. Even so, something important happened. A bit of strangeness was allowed to enter our collective dream. It takes only a spark to burn down a forest. You never know which strange bit will dispel our collective dream.
The time for waking up never grows short. Waking up takes you beyond the bounds of time. Yet it’s hard not to feel the pressure of disaster the closer it approaches. There is such a thing as a storm so powerful it occurs only once every five hundred years, but by the reckoning of meteorologists, twenty-six such storms have occurred in the past decade. If we are going to make cosmic consciousness matter, we cannot wear rose-colored glasses. Those storms, and the human misery they generated, were allowed into virtual reality. Many things have entered virtual reality to make life nightmarish.
The average person isn’t prepared to accept responsibility for the spell/dream/illusion we are entangled in. The accumulation of greenhouse gases can be explained as divine retribution, or as the outcome of a series of very unfortunate events, or as human imperfection screwing up one more thing. Self-destruction is part of our nature, but self-creation is infinitely more powerful. By waking up, metahumans can make right what humans have done wrong. Waking up happens only one person at a time. Reality isn’t a numbers game. It’s a one-player universe, and you and I are enough to move creation itself.