Alive and Awake

While growing up in the small town in the southeast of Serbia in the 1990’s, country that many of you would know as the one that once belonged to Yugoslavia, with the same capital, city of Belgrade, I was not surrounded by many external sources of news or had chances to be exposed to the ways of living in other countries. My country was fighting war after war, and parents were sacrificing everything for the future of their children, especially their higher education. My parents were professors, and even though that never paid well, there was an intrinsic passion in both, to transfer the knowledge to others and bring young minds to wonder further about things that surround us. Their main wish for my sister and me was to go to university, so we can possibly have better life afterwards, with a degree in our hands.

When internet came, many things started to change. New generations were impacted much more with external sources. For me, that happened a bit later in my life, in my adolescent years. So, until then, I did not have possibility to hear about questions that surrounded Consciousness or the outcast of scientists who believed in God. I only knew facts that were designed for middle school pupils in Serbia. But somewhere inside of me, I did not need to be told what is the mind-body problem, or do I need to believe in something. Life as I knew it back then, made me question the world and the views of others. Inside my head, long time ago, I have already started something that took me almost 3 decades to be able to openly talk about. I started to believe and to feel that huge change is coming for the humanity. I somehow knew that we cannot look at body and spirit anymore. And that all human beings are connected not only with each other but also with all the space that surrounds our planet.

My brain and your brain are wired differently. Your neighbour’s brain and your brain are wired differently. Certain circuits exist in all of us, because we share the same capabilities as human beings. However, some are present in certain individuals while practically non-existing in others. For example, some people are wired to be most of the time cheerful while others have deep sadness and dark thoughts from time to time. That said, how I see and feel life is not necessarily the same as how you do. Reality is subjective. And that is why many questions about our mind and conciseness, are still not being answered.

I believe that we are more than our body, more than our thoughts. Maybe the only thing that shows us that we are larger than our life is our capacity to feel so deeply and be aware of that. We have ability to feel a huge spectrum of emotions, willingly or not. We are most of the time aware of them and have an understanding when it is appropriate to show them and when it is better to keep them from the public eye. Being aware of our emotions is possible because we are being conscious of our mind, body, and soul. Science is able very well to explain our emotions, our feelings, how we feel, what is happening on our molecular level to makes us experience certain things. However, science cannot explain everything. We are still trying to figure the origin of consciousness itself. We do not have a clear scientific proof of what is happening with us when we are aware of something on an atomic level. What is consciousness? Why we, humans, as an animal species, can reach that state of mind and in what level other species can reach it too, if at all?

Consciousness is the main point where science and spirituality/religion are actually meeting and where science is aware that some things might not be completely experimentally explained and need help from other approaches that where discarded and diminished by scientists for so long. Maybe, consciousness can be that destined mystery that will connect people to work together for the same cause and not compete and achieve nothing. Lets not forget, scientists and philosophers, as well as spiritual leaders are working on this topic for decades, separately, and we are still not close to figure things out.  

Cogito, ergo sum “I think; therefore I am” was the end of the search by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1637). He concluded that he could not doubt that he himself existed, as he was the one doing the doubting in the first place. It is the only statement to survive the test of his methodic doubt (methodic doubt is described in Cartesian philosophy as a way of searching for certainty by systematically though tentatively doubting everything.)

If I am aware of my thoughts and my body, if I can smell, taste and touch, if I can observe the space that surrounds me, does that mean that I am conscious? But at the same time, if I am aware that I do not think, and that my senses do not pick up any triggers, and that it is dark and I do not register that there is a space around me, am I not conscious then too?

My theory lies in the possibility that consciousness is not only something that humans developed. Yes, we, humans, have higher brain development than other animals, but we are not the only ones that do have brain and/or nervous system. Yes, we, humans, are more aware of the possibilities that we encounter, we can solve complicated situations. But that does not mean that dogs, cats, bees, and so on, do not have some sort of awareness of their existence, and they use it and express it to other members of their species in their own way. What if consciousness is present in our world in the same, non-detachable way, as gravity or mass?

My belief is mostly connected to the philosophical term of panpsychism, which says – However mind is to be conceived, it applies, in some sense, to all things. Panpsychism is therefore defined as the view where all things possess mind, or some type of mind-like quality. There are several types of panpsychism, but maybe only panexperientialism is to be considered as true panpsychism; panexperientialism describes – everything experiences, or can experience. This term was invented by philosopher David Ray Griffin in the 1970’s. 

However, I cannot help but get intrigued with the view of Steve Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK, who favours the panspiritist approach, “where the essence of reality is quality that might be called spirit, or consciousness” (quoting his book “Spiritual science”). This quality is fundamental and universal and it might have existed before the universe, which could be its manifestation. This approach is so close to what I have been thinking but did not how to express it when I was a kid. The idea that we are all connected, living beings cannot be separated from each other or the world at large and that vast space that surrounds us, even though it might look empty, is actually full with the soul-like energy.

Nowadays, when we are able to have internet on the top of the high mountain hill and have a chat with someone on the other side of the world, we are exposed to so many sources of ideas and opinions. Science is achieving things that were unimaginable just a decade ago. Technology is progressing too, and soon it will be possible to bring humans to Mars. But, not only that. I believe that soon we will realize more fundamental truths about our planet and our existence. Soon, being narrowminded and exclusive will face survival of the fittest. What do you think? What the future holds? Are we going to be destroyed by capacities of our brains or are we going to allow ourself to discover the limitless force of our mind-body-soul connection? What waits for us when we expand our consciousness and are able to combine spirituality and science? Can we be limitless?

Until next time.

Many blessings,

Selena

1. Taylor, Steve. “Spiritual science”, (2018). ISBN: 978-1-78678-158-1.
2. https://iep.utm.edu/panpsych/#:~:text=Panpsychism%20is%20the%20view%20that,psyche%20(soul%20or%20mind).
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/methodic-doubt