As long ago as 1978, Itzhak Bentov, the Czechoslovakia-born Israeli-American scientist and inventor, who became an innovator in the field of bio-medical engineering in the USA, suggested that consciousness is the common uniting element of all creation, and that through this link all things are in permanent contact.

His was a holistic model of the universe that encompassed not only physical, observable objects but also the distant universe and other ‘realities’ (Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the mechanics of consciousness, Itzhak Bentov, Wildwood House, 1978).

For most of the 20th century, consciousness was excluded from serious scientific research, but since the 1990s it has become an expanding arena of study, although findings remain far from conclusive about the nature of consciousness, frequently referred to as ‘the last great mystery of science’.

According to Bentov, who was killed, aged 55, in the American Airlines plane crash at Chicago in 1979 (the worst such crash in the USA), consciousness evolves to the ‘absolute’ which is the source of all consciousness. 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. Realities are relative, depending on the position and condition of the observer.

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 the whole spectrum of realities which are, in fact, different categories of consciousness. The goal of creation must surely be the evolution of consciousness to higher levels, with the opposing forces of good and evil there to encourage this evolution.

Interconnecting cosmic field

Mystics and sages have spoken for long of an interconnecting cosmic field behind everyday appearances — for example, the Akashic record, after the Sanskrit and Vedic term for space — that conserves and conveys information, and information is implicitly intelligible, otherwise we would not be able to perceive it as being able to ‘inform’.

Quantum science, meanwhile, has come up with the idea that we live in a holographic universe, the implication of which is that all information is everywhere at the same time, in a state of ‘zero separation’. A field of information as the essence of the universe has been posited by Ervin Laszlo, the Hungarian philosopher of science and systems theorist and, indeed, named by him the Akashic field, or ‘A-field’.

Laszlo (b1932) 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, holding the record of everything that has ever happened and relating it to all that is yet to happen.

How is such a record, such a higher consciousness, accessed? Most of us have no inkling of a higher ‘cosmic’ mind, except in moments of ‘breakthrough consciousness’, fleeting mystical experience, or during meditation or undergoing other altered states of consciousness (ASCs).

Such moments, says the English philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson (1931–2013) in Super Consciousness (2009), his study of the phenomenon, are capable of leading to a sustained experience of ‘sheer perception of meaning’ which for the human race would be ‘the decisive step to becoming something closer to gods’.

Myth of consciousness

The ‘gods’, of course, were and are the perceived laws, or design parameters, of the universe. Such a view returns us to Jung’s myth of consciousness, and the idea that the meaning of life, of existence, lies in the universal enhancement of consciousness, a gradual process over time, whether or not consciousness is the ultimate ground of being.

It was Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychologist, who gave us the concept of the collective unconscious, containing the instincts and memory of the human race, and comprising some kind of cosmic information bank which might be accessible to us. Intermittent communication with the collective unconscious, and perhaps through that the A-field, could explain the divinatory arts, such things as synchronicity and clairvoyance, intuition, and creativity and inspiration.

It could be why people develop ideas and inventions simultaneously but independently around the world without any contact with one another. Whether inspiration leads to artistic or scientific genesis or discovery, my theory is that we are all connected by an informational substrate which reveals a participatory structure of energy fields, including our individual conscious and unconscious minds, as well as the collective unconscious..

The Czech transpersonal psychologist Stanislav ‘Stan’ Grof (b1931), author of The Holotropic Mind (1992) and a pioneer of research into ASCs since the 1950s, believes consciousness to be an innate characteristic of the universe.

Mind and consciousness might not be exclusive privileges of the human species but could permeate all of nature, existing in the most elemental to the most complex forms, he said as long ago as 1975, in his book Realms of the Human Unconscious. The universe and the human psyche have no boundaries or limits, and each of us is connected with, and is an expression of, all existence.

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958), the Austrian naturalist, philosopher, inventor and forest caretaker, thought that the creative processes of nature worked consistently to refine, diversify and produce higher forms of organic systems so as to raise consciousness — consciousness being regarded as the integration of higher levels of connectedness. It is my belief that the creative, or authentic, use of imagination is to work with intellect and intuition to create new consciousness.

Uniting human experience

So if consciousness is thought of as a fundamental property of nature or, indeed, as the very ground of existence, then its participatory nature becomes apparent: human evolution has increasingly participated in it. Consciousness then ceases to be seen as a function of the brain, and instead becomes a gestalt, a uniting human experience rather than one subjective only to the individual.

It also does away with the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness — how it could possibly arise from inert matter — which has materialist psychologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists running around in ever-decreasing circles in attempts to find a solution.

Theoretical nuclear physicist Dr Amit Goswami (b1936), of the University of Oregon, inspired in part by ideas taken from Hindu philosophy, notably the Advaita Vedanta, and theosophy, and famous for stating that ‘consciousness is the ground of all being’, believes that the universe is self-aware, and that it is consciousness that creates the physical world. His theory, which he calls ‘monistic idealism’, not only explains the basis of all religions, he says, but also provides the correct philosophy for contemporary science.

Under such a scenario, consciousness — an all-embracing and unified field pervading the entire universe — emanates from as yet unperceived aspects of reality (torsion fields, perhaps) and the brain acts as a ‘receiver’ of it, or a participant in it, if you prefer. This (intelligent) field not only could form all of the matter in the universe, but also provide the information to organize matter into functional systems, such as DNA and living cells.

Russian scientists have advanced torsion field theory, a branch of physics which speculates that consciousness arises from a spiralling torsion energy, or quantum spin of space-time, an outcome of the attribute of spin intrinsic to all sub-atomic particles, planets, stars and galaxies.

Theory of gravitation

The seminal work in torsion field physics was carried out by Albert Einstein and the French mathematician Élie Cartan in the 1920s, resulting in the Einstein-Cartan theory, a classical theory of gravitation which has led some physicists to try to incorporate torsion into quantum theories.

If it turns out torsion fields and consciousness are inter-related, then it is of great significance for the various field theories of consciousness which, in my view, offer the best explanation of the nature of consciousness in the current state of our knowledge.

So, strong echoes, emulations even, of the ideas of Schauberger, Bentov and Grof have occurred in important areas of science and philosophy since the 1970s.

The idea that consciousness, and not matter, is the ground of all existence, and that our minds participate in it as a universal informational continuum, rather than enfold a small part of it discretely, is persuasive. It is the standpoint of the ‘new mysterians’, who regard an understanding of consciousness as being beyond the scope of physical theory.

Consciousness, after all, is the point of intersection between the cosmic dimension and the human dimension, between timelessness and time, where we receive the numinous and the ‘life-force’.