A Very Real Theory of Everything, Part 1
What I call my home world is burning up. My family has lived in the region of Sequoia National Park since the 1850s and the family name is attached to features in the park. I have written two books set in that region and in one I explain how the ridges and whorls of my mind align with the ridgelines, peaks, and outcroppings of that section of the Sierra. Walking through that part of the world is experienced like walking through my own mind. My last book was set in large part in the region of Paradise Creek and the Middle Fork of the Kaweah River, near where the Paradise Fire started that has now become the KNP Complex Fire. It’s all incinerated now. The conflagration is burning away at this physical manifestation of my mind and I have to ask myself what it means to me and what I can do. The physical fire is a product of decades and centuries of ignorance and greed culminating in a warming world and drought. The real fire exists though, in our collective mind as we refuse to face all the demons, impulses, and suffering that exists in us all. We prefer to look away rather than change and we even codify our suffering. The only thing I can do is show you who we are and why we’re here and hope that a flash of illumination can seize us all in time to move us a bit further along the evolutionary path toward a full embrace of life and transformation.
We must start by understanding what the cosmos is and what the mind is. Basically, it’s all mind, mind all the way down. The cosmos is a conscious process. There is no “hard problem of consciousness” because consciousness always has been and always is everything. All life contains consciousness, the difference lies with each form’s biological constraints on expressing it. Several quantum physicists have stated this idea of the conscious cosmos, but they haven’t followed the notion all the way down to what it means to human beings, both collectively and individually, and created a full theory of being. Illumination, enlightenment, is nothing more than standing in the light of this knowledge and embracing it. We are part and parcel of the cosmos and if the cosmos is a conscious process, we are also part of that. Think of our minds as balloons filled with seawater floating at various depths in the ocean. I call the ocean the Great Mind. The balloon is like a semi-permeable cell membrane, a self, that regulates the information exchange between the Great Mind and you and me and defines our separateness. The ocean contains all the information it has ever gathered about being and without this membrane of self we would be flooded and overcome by too much information and not be able to survive in these bodies on this planet.
What’s the point of it all? All things are brought into being by observation. Though the Great Mind is always observing itself, evolution is the means by which the Great Mind develops ever more precise and self-aware means of observation and thus ever more varied and aware creations. Please don’t confuse this with Intelligent Design because there is no fixed master plan. Call this “guided probability” as the Great Mind explores all possible ways to be and observe and chooses among them. As for humans, our role is to develop into partners with the Great Mind and become fully conscious observers and creators. When you understand these things and become truly conscious there is a feeling of fullness and joy and there is no need for greed or acquisition of power to bolster the ego. You are already full.
I want to come back to the membrane of self in my next piece because the membrane regulates our mental states. We’ll explore why we think what we think and feel what we feel. I prefer to write about these matters in short pieces so the details can be studied and meditated upon bit by bit. The conflagration of ignorance and greed is racing through our collective mind and burning up our world. Are you willing to stop and change and become the counterfire of illumination that restores and enhances all in its wake? Open your mind beyond what you believe because everything we’ve tried so far hasn’t worked.
