According to Dr David Yurth’s Y-Bias, Angularity and Self Organising Criticality, the Universe exists inside a sea of consciousness that is holographic, unbounded, all- encompassing and is the underlying foundation out of which space, time and all the other attributes of the real matter Universe come into being.

 

On a slightly more personal level, Dr Arthur Janov’s Primal Healing p 207 defines consciousness as the maximised interaction among neuronal groups and different levels of the brain.

 

Two separate definitions of consciousness, or are we talking about one and the same thing?

 

Janov's The Biology of Love p 146 – We need love to create the synapses to create a brain strong enough to dampen pain. We need a parent to look into the eyes of his baby, to responds to her moods, is sensitive to her discomfort, and empathic to her pain and discomfort.

 

I like to romanticise the experience and suggest that we also need that particular pair of eyes for something a little more esoteric.

 

Somewhere along the line, it seems to have got itself in a mess.

 

Quantum mechanics seeks to explain how the act of observation can transform a wave-like possibility into a particle-like actuality. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle ensures a degree of flexibility (freedom) in the outcome.

 

Though when you think about it, the significance of bringing the act of observation into the equation is really rather peculiar. Suppose several observers are willing a different outcome. What then?

 

Thus, built into the fabric of the Universe are the combined characteristics of potential, possibility, observation and actuality but with a bit of uncertainty thrown in for good measure, keep us on our toes so to speak – how quaint is that!

 

To discover truth, we have to go back in time and return to the moment (if indeed there really was such a moment) when we were first able to look deeply into our mother’s eyes, and then we must ponder why we spent so long gazing into them.

 

To achieve this however, it might be necessary to as it were, temporarily suspend our adult brain activity by fabricating a kind of hypnotic journey into our dim and distant past.

 

Primal healing would seek to achieve an unimpeded flow of feeling and insight through and across the brain from the brainstem to the limbic system and finally into the prefrontal neo cortex – thereby allowing these three levels of consciousness to merge into one.

 

Feeling is the vehicle that fuses the three together.

 

Of course, the really scary part is that Feeling in its current context is a tightly bound self-contained entity that has somehow separated itself from the rest of us, and if felt would result in the experience of excruciating Pain but only during the time it takes to pass through the nervous system until it reaches its target. A little perhaps like having a pin stuck in your foot. At some stage you are going to have to pull it out. Of course, since we are suffering symptoms that developed millions of years ago, the method needs to be a little more subtle.

 

It appears that life has served to fracture or dislocate the process of integrating thought with feeling. Opportunity now to affect a timely reversal! However, in doing so, life would appear to be on the verge of discovering what consciousness might actually feel like, and that might be something worth dying for.

 

Indeed, we almost feel compelled now to find out exactly what consciousness does feel like. And once we know the answer to that, might we not perhaps think up ways of hitching a ride and getting it to take us to places we never dreamed possible.

 

Dear me, what the combined insights and revelations of Primal Healing and Y-Bias suggest simply beggar belief.

 

In Primal Healing, some of statements Janov makes are so innovative and meaningful that I reproduce them here (my comments in italics):

 

p.92	Love is the major painkiller for a young child (as is breast feeding)
p.104	To relive pain and need fully, is to produce a physiologic system that functions as if the need had always been fulfilled [mind blowing]
p.172	So where’s the bull’s eye, the target that lower-level centres of the brain need to reach in order for real connection to occur? It’s the right orbito frontal neo cortex.
p.183	One wonders that, if human evolution makes so much sense, why doesn’t it provide for access to ourselves naturally as we grow up? Well, evolution got as far as repression and then stopped …
p.191	That better day is when we are older, when the critical period is long gone, and we are able to tolerate the previously unacceptable [such sweet words]
p.197	The brain is so good at disguising its pain that most of us don’t even know we have it; even if we did, we don’t know what it is or where it comes from, or worse still, what to do about it.
p.198	One reason for the evolution of the left frontal cortex was to produce a brain system that could distance itself from the other areas of the nervous system.. Plus it evolved with the use of tools – hammering a nail, throwing a hand grenade…
p.207	Mind you, those systems would be naturally integrated were the force of the feeling not so overwhelming. Now that’s the really scary bit.
p.216	To become conscious, the more aware parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, must recede. When it really matters, we must leave the adult brain behind, but only temporarily I hope. I kind of like my prefrontal cortex; generally speaking, it’s been very good to me. However….
p.265	We must remember that one evolutionary raisin d’etre for the development of the prefrontal cortex was to produce a lie machine, one that could make us deceive ourselves and thus keep us out of pain.

 

So, what is it about Mankind that somehow allowed him to become saddled with this most mysterious of ailments i.e. dislocation of feeling from thought, and why is the time now ripe for confronting head on the scourge of our own self made deception?

 

Take a fresh look at the faces of mammals, insects, birds, fishes, reptiles, snakes and any genus I’ve omitted, and correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it the case that the positions of the eyes, nose, mouth and ears relative to each other are pretty much the same, with the eyes positioned above the nose positioned above the mouth, and two ears either side?

 

As if all life sprung from the same strand of DNA, or whatever might be the fundamental building block of life, that somehow appeared on earth 3 to 4 billion years ago, either from meteorites or deep down in the ocean, and that it was evolution, and evolution alone through adaptive radiation, that has been responsible for the myriad varieties of animals according to whatever species managed to successfully adapt through Natural Selection to changing ecological, geological and climatic shifts.

 

Natural Selection means if you burn your hand when you put it in boiling water, then don’t do it again.

 

We learn that 8 million years ago when apes ruled a planet that was covered primarily in forest, over the next 2 million years fundamental shifts in earth’s geographic terrain and seismic characteristics caused much of the forest to be replaced with grassland causing mass extinctions of existing animals and the emergence of new creatures who were successfully adapting to the changing conditions on the surface of the earth.

 

Once upon a time, the spines of all animals entered the skull at the rear forcing them to walk on all fours. In the case of some of the new creatures however, the spine entered the skull, not from the rear, but underneath, an evolutionary mutation of about an inch or so, but one having profound implications; the creature could now comfortably walk upright.

 

Walking upright meant it could transform its front limbs into arms with hands made up of fingers and thumbs and even more importantly, sensitive finger tips through the development of finger prints. One of these creatures ever so slowly developed and acquired intelligence, consciousness, awareness, language, and mysteriously, philosophies embodying the notion that a supernatural entity somehow intervened in our evolution.

 

Noticing that birds sing might be what got our ancestors aware of music, another hugely important factor in our evolution. Our two hands, eight fingers and two thumbs made it possible for us to design, build and play musical instruments. Music, especially classical music, speaks to us in a language that helps us raise our awareness and curiosity of the mystery of existence, and with it the ability to think more eloquently in abstract forms.

 

Another unique feature of homo sapiens not shared with the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to engage in sexual intercourse facing each other, not otherwise possible when the female is forced to remain on four legs. This may well have acted as a catalyst to more subtle ways of communicating as it became possible to observe the facial expressions of one’s partner, making it possible to distinguish real from artificial love.

 

And more conveniently perhaps, to be able to convince your partner why you were unavoidably detained and therefore unable to keep your rendezvous with her the previous night.

 

Mythology has it that all living organisms started off as hermaphrodites i.e. single sex creatures able to reproduce themselves without the need for a partner. Hermaphrodites possess both male and female sex organs thereby making redundant the question – what came first, the chicken or the egg?

 

For the moment, let’s stay with the mythology and call this species HerMan

 

It is not unreasonable to postulate that early HerMan was in all likelihood hermaphrodite, and while able to reproduce and deliver offspring singlehandedly, nevertheless may well have gone around in pairs, with one of the partners predisposed towards hunting and the other to caring and rearing their young.

 

In this sense, a sort of male and female distinction based on role, and not sex, within a family environment could well have been the norm.

 

It is also not unreasonable to speculate that each individual would be endowed with a uterus and a vagina from which new born could be expelled.

 

Early HerMan could walk comfortably on two legs. Partners could face each other during periods of intimacy. One would have been the aggressive hunter, the other the submissive female. Over the aeons, the couples would be cuddling and facing each other and communicating love and tenderness through facial expressions and sounds and eventually words, as well as discovering and homing in on areas of pleasure in the genital regions where they would have been drawn to fondling and touching and in general making a big deal of it. Over time, the dominant male homo sapiens eventually became endowed with a sexual organ – the penis.

 

Thus, individuals became separated according to sex. NewMan was now endowed with a sexual organ, while the existing creatures who tended to give birth to the young would still essentially be the original female variety as they already had, and always had, the orifice from which the new born could be ejected.

 

NewMan must have discovered that a new dimension had now been added to their life – pleasure during sex. Not wishing to be left out, NewWoman eventually developed a visible clitoris – a tiny miniature penis – to the vagina entrance and is what would have itentified her as a woman as well as distinguishing her from the creatures her ancestors used to be. The apple in Genesis sounds to me like a veiled reference to the clitoris – the forbidden fruit. The serpent, too, sounds like a reference to the penis. In those days, the creatures would have walked naked meaning the clitoris and penis were always visible.

 

The point about having the clitoris at the top of the vagina (rather than its lower point) suggests its subsequent visibility to be a step up the evolutionary ladder, indicating that such a creature could enjoy pleasure through intercourse while facing each other;  in other words, a desirable add-on to one’s hands that were also free to give pleasure.

 

This must have alarmed the Authorities because amongst other things it would have interfered with work schedules. Sex was no longer simply the business of procreating. New Man and New Woman now had something they could both enjoy for its own sake – and it is not unreasonable to postulate that the resulting unions may have been so intense and prolonged that there was a very real danger of the lovers starving to death; hence the instruction for them to both wear clothes so they would not get excited every time they saw each other.

 

In this context, it is irrelevant who you have sex with but not so unimportant when considering who is going to be the father (or the mother) of your children.

 

At heart, God was a family man.