Albert Einstein

At a physics meeting last October [2004], Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. Nestled among queries about black holes and the nature of dark matter and dark energy were questions that wandered beyond the traditional bounds of physics to venture into areas typically associated with the life sciences.

One of the Gross's questions involved human consciousness.

He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature is an example of a phase transition.

Politicians constantly evade the truth. Why can they get away with it? According to a recent study conducted at Harvard University, it’s because people have such terrible attention spans.

Behavioural scientist Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy School and Michael I. Norton of the Harvard Business School conducted a simple experiment to see when and whether people can detect a dodge. They recorded a speaker answering a question about universal health care (a controversial issue in the US). Then they attached the same answer to three separate questions: the original question about health care, one on illegal drug use, and a third about terrorism. Amazingly, subjects found the speaker just as trustworthy when he gave the response about health care to a question about illegal drug use – a related but different subject – as when he responded to the original question about health care. Moreover, when quizzed immediately afterward, almost none of the subjects could remember exactly what question had been asked.

This article explains the system of “densities”, “Service-to-Self”, and “Service-to-Others” as discussed in the Ra Material and Cassiopaean Transcripts and shows how they relate to the occult concepts of the etheric and astral planes. Instead of summarizing what’s already been said, my aim here is more to provide new insights and resolve some common misunderstandings.

It is one of the most familiar and reassuring lines in scripture:

• The Lord is my shepherd.

But when you think about it, the metaphor is a disturbing one.

It’s true that a shepherd looks after his sheep. But he also shears them and kills them and eats them. Does the God we adore act totally with our best interests at heart, or are we a species of livestock that he uses for his own ends?

Many regard consciousness as the final frontier of science. Although science has produced a great deal of knowledge about the brain and the nervous system, it did not (yet) produce a viable theory of consciousness.

• There is the seemingly intractable problem that consciousness cannot be measured, detected, or quantified in any way.
• To further complicate things, consciousness is about inner (first-person) experience and its subjective qualities, whereas science relies on ideas and experiences that can be observed and verified by third parties.

The investigation of inner phenomena involves subjective, idiothetic accounts, whereas the investigation of outer phenomena involves objective, verifiable accounts. It would seem that the scientific method, which relies on repeatable experiments to test a hypothesis, reaches its limits when dealing with consciousness. One must therefore ask whether science is able to explain consciousness at all.

The molecular origins of our species wide insanity
The fundamental causality of our self inflicted suffering

Solving the mystery of human evolution using Darwin’s basic theory required no more than a simple reinterpretation of existing data and the application of basic biological principles.

The same approach simultaneously resolves several other major enigmas in disciplines rarely considered within the same context. By following in the footsteps of William of Ockham taking the path of least resistance leads to a simple, coherent and elegant explanation for our unique physiological traits and sheds much needed light on the state of our mind.

Humans are alleged to have consciousness. I say “alleged” not because I doubt the assertion but because the term “consciousness” is, in my opinion, terribly misused. It has many meanings, and people employing the term don’t usually make clear what meaning they are using; instead they simply assume that others know what they are talking about. A great danger of this approach is that one can use the same term in different senses and thereby assert things that actually make no sense. I prefer to speak of being conscious rather than of consciousness. “Consciousness” is a noun and implies a static thing, while “being conscious” is a verbal phrase – still a noun (a gerund), but implying some activity.

The term “consciousness” connotes a kind of fixity or substantiality that is not in fact found in experience. One’s experience is not a static thing; it is ever changing, a process. When one examines one’s experience one finds no thing that is consciousness. Nevertheless, the term is widely used, so we must make some sense of it. We can say, if we need a noun phrase, that consciousness is the state of being conscious or the capacity for being conscious. But what, then, does “conscious” mean?