Chapter 12

Exploring the Mind of God

Is mind the mind of the brain, or is it the mind of God (or Godhead)? We can now deal with this question in some detail.

The neocortical part of the brain, supposedly the site of the mind, is a computer of sorts. So materialists ask, “Can we build a computer with a mind?” If we can, that would prove that the mind belongs to the brain.

Can a computer simulate mental intelligence? This question originated an entire field of study called artificial intelligence. The mathematician Alan Turing formulated a theorem purporting that, if a computing machine can simulate a conversation intelligent enough to fool someone into thinking that he is talking to another human being, then we cannot deny a computer's mental intelligence.

In the 1980s, there was a telephone number in Canada that you could call to talk to a computer simulation of a California psychiatrist. Many people talked to the computer and later admitted that they could have been fooled, so authentic was the machine with the touchy-feely psychobabble of the day.

So have computers passed the Turing test? A computer has beaten one of the world's greatest chess players in a game of chess, so maybe the computer is even more intelligent than the human being. After all, not only have we built a computer with a mind, we have built a computer with a mind better than one of our best.

“Not so fast,” said a philosopher named John Searle. In the 1980s, Searle constructed a puzzle called the Chinese Room to make an argument against the so-called intelligent computer.

Imagine yourself in a room, no doubt wondering what to do, when a card comes out from a slot. You take the card and see scribbles written on it that look like Chinese to you. But you don't know Chinese, so you don't understand the meaning of what is written on the card. Looking around, you see a sign in English telling you to consult an English dictionary, where an instruction is given for finding a response card from a pile of cards. You carry out the instructions, find your response card, and put the card in an outgoing slot as instructed.

So far, so good? But now Searle will ask you this: “Do you understand the purpose of this trip into the Chinese room?” When you admit to being a little puzzled, Searle explains, “Look, you could process the symbols inside the room just as a computer does. But did that help you process the meaning of what was written?”

So this was Searle's point. A computer is a symbol-processing machine; it cannot process meaning. If you think we can just reserve some symbols to denote meaning, think again. You will need more symbols to tell you the meaning of the meaning symbols that you have created. And so on ad infinitum. You need an infinite number of symbols and machines to process meaning. Impossible!

Searle wrote a book, The Rediscovery of the Mind, in which he suggested that a mind is needed to process meaning; the brain alone cannot process meaning, but can only make a representation of mental meaning.

Later the physicist/mathematician Roger Penrose gave a mathematical proof that computers cannot process meaning. The name of his book, The Emperor's New Mind, is equally provocative. Like the emperor's new clothes in the famous story, all the hoopla notwithstanding, the computer's new mind is imaginary.

What Searle and Penrose have accomplished is very good science, because their work completely negates the materialist biologist's contention that meaning is an evolutionarily adaptive quality of matter. If matter cannot even process meaning, how can matter ever present any meaning-processing capacity for nature to select, survival benefit or not?

So the mind does not belong to the brain; it is independent of the brain, being what gives meaning to our experiences. But how does it follow that it belongs to God, that it is God's mind?

We have no doubt that the brain and mind work together; memories are stored, right? But if they are totally different, brain being matter substance and mind being meaning substance, how do the two interact? How do they work together? They need a mediator.

So God is needed, a quantum God: God as quantum consciousness. If mind and brain both consist of quantum possibilities of consciousness, mind being meaning-possibility and brain being matter-possibility, then can you see that God can mediate their interaction? God-consciousness collapses the possibility waves of both brain and mind to experience mental meaning, at the same time making a brain memory of it (figure 12-1).

FIGURE 12-1. How a supramental context of meaning is represented in the brain through the intermediary of the blueprint of the mind.

You can still argue that this is just theory. Where is an experiment? In experimental science, the prediction of a negative result is often as good as that of a positive one. We have a negative experimental test here: computers cannot process meaning. It is a fact that so far no computer scientist has been able to build a meaning-processing computer to refute our test hypothesis. In the least, this is a prediction of the theory that will never be falsified, I guarantee you.

IS THERE ANYTHING PRACTICAL ABOUT MEANING?

There are other phenomena that provide proof that meaning is important to us, that processing meaning properly is good.

When we ascribe wrong mental meaning to our experiences, we feel so separate that it can make us sick (Dossey, 1992). For example, we may feel love in our heart (chakra), but think it is inappropriate to express it or not know how to express it appropriately. As a result of the inadequacy of our perception of meaning, we suppress our feeling. This meaning-induced suppression of feeling at the heart chakra can block the free flow of vital energy there, so much so that the correlated actions of the immune system (through the agency of the thymus gland) may also be blocked. And this has been known to lead to cancer. When we learn to love, giving it proper mental meaning, and are able to express it, the blocks lift and we are healed. This, too, has been documented. (See, for example, Goswami, 2004; see also chapter 18.) So this is one kind of practical data on meaning.

In this way mental meaning is not just theory. There are two other very definitive objectively testable pieces of evidence for the practicality of meaning and meaning processing. These are the phenomena of creativity and love. But these also involve the supramental in a major way, so I discuss them in separate chapters (chapters 16 and 17).

A substantial amount of sleep time is spent in an altered state of consciousness that we call dreaming; this is objectively documented by showing that the brain waves change between wakefulness, deep sleep, and dreaming. Although dreams are usually experienced subjectively, there are objective consequences of dreams that can be measured objectively. There are physical explanations of dreams that have been proposed, but they fall short because they cannot explain why dreams should make any tangible measurable difference in people's lives. I will take up the subject of dreams in chapter 14.

Although thoughts and dreams are ordinarily experienced internally, as private and subjective experiences, there are occasions when two people share thoughts, even dreams. This is the subject of telepathy, which is shared and therefore public, entirely subject to objective testing. There is now substantial data on telepathy, even dream telepathy. (See chapter 16.)

SYNCHRONICITY

Another phenomenon in which meaning plays a central role is synchronicity (Carl Jung's term). I have mentioned synchronicity earlier; it is an acausal but meaningful coincidence of one external event and one internal event. Is this meaning of the coincidence merely subjective, with no experimentally verifiable consequences? Often the perception of the meaning causes observable life changes in the perceiver that can in principle constitute objective evidence.

An example from Carl Jung (1971) will show how special synchronicity experiences can be. Jung was dealing with a client, a young woman, who was “psychologically inaccessible” with “a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably ‘geometrical’ idea of reality” and who did not respond to Jung's repeated attempts to “sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding.” Jung was desperately hoping that “something unexpected and irrational would turn up” to help him to break through the woman's intellectual shell. And then the following synchronistic event took place:

I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me the dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned around and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window pane…. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (cetonia aurata), whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.”

This synchronistic appearance of the “dream scarab” in this patient's inside awareness and the beetle/scarab in her outer awareness broke through the young woman's intellectual shell and she became psychologically accessible to her therapist, Jung.

Synchronistic events like this often happen to those in need of a breakthrough in connection with romance, therapy, and creativity, just to name a few contexts.

Now notice the most important aspect of synchronicity. The simultaneous occurrence of two coincidental events, one outer and the other inner, yet connected by meaning, could mean only one thing. The source of such events must lie in an agency (Jung called it the collective unconscious) that transcends both outer and inner, both the physical and the psyche. In the quantum view, this agency is consciousness or Godhead, of which both matter and psyche are quantum possibilities. You can see that Jung anticipated the quantum resolution of mind-body dualism long ago.

More explicitly, in Jung's thinking synchronistic occurrences can be traced to objects of the collective unconscious that Plato called archetypes. Jung realized that the archetypes have a psychoid nature, manifesting both outside in the physical and inside in the psyche. These archetypes of our collective unconscious are the contexts of physical laws and mental and vital movement that we have previously called the supramental. So Jung's collective unconscious is connected with the supramental domain in us.

If you want to incorporate quantum consciousness in your life, synchronicity offers you a viable means. Let me mention some examples of how creative people use synchronistic experiences.

Item: Hui Neng, the sixth patriarch of Chinese Chan Buddhism, was in the marketplace and heard somebody reciting what is known as The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text with the line “'Let the mind flow freely without fixating on anything.” He was immediately enlightened.

Item: Alexander Calder, the pioneer of mobile sculpture, was in Paris and visited the studio of Piet Mondrian, the abstract painter. In a flash he thought of using abstract pieces in his moving sculpture.

Item: When Albert Einstein was ill in bed at age five, his father brought him a magnetic compass. Seeing the needle of the compass pointing to the north, no matter how he turned the case containing the magnet, gave Einstein the sense of wonder that pervaded his scientific work.

Item: The Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore saw raindrops falling on a leaf. At once two sentences of a little verse rhymed in the original Bengali came to his mind. The verse can be translated thus: “It rains, the leaves tremble.” Later Tagore (1931) wrote about this experience as follows:

The rhythmic picture of tremulous leaves beaten by the rain opened before my mind the world which does not merely carry information, but a harmony with my being. The unmeaning fragments lost their individual isolation and my mind reveled in the unity of a vision. (p. 93)