Lent 2026: day 37 – diverse minds, diverse souls?

I base my theological worldview on the ground truth that consciousness is primary. I can declare with absolute certainty that no one other than myself can experience what it is to be me. My life is my own. It is built upon memory, my memories of myriad qualia going back to early childhood. Not memories of events, which are prone to fail, degrade or twist, but memories of feelings, conscious experience, awareness. Memories that resurface, either bidden, triggered (typically by smell or sound), or that pop into my stream of consciousness spontaneously. Congruent familiarities. And that, dear reader, is the essence of me.

And yet no man is an island. Cooperation has made Homo sapiens an unparalleled evolutionary success. Yes, as members of the species, we are all different, neurologically different, each with our own blend of strengths and talents. In the material world, we all have to cooperate to get by, working as a plethora of professions and service providers woven together into societies.

Today I want to ask what role does neurodiversity play in the way we respond to the metaphysical? Does our neurodiversity lead to diverse ways to define and find God? How do neurological differences affect our spirituality? After all, they affect our social, cognitive and emotional functions. But our faith in a supreme being – or belief in the lack thereof? And those of faith – how does it manifest itself in our lives? How do we conduct our search for meaning and purpose in life? How does it affect the relationship between our consciousness and our ego?

Some minds have an innate tendency to systemise how they see reality, with a preference for internally consistent frameworks. They crave order and neatness. Other minds, however, are stronger on loose associative thinking, and are able to detect novel patterns or connections across domains.

Just looking at the above pair of mind-types in the context of metaphysics, the first suggests a preference for ritual and doctrinal clarity; the second for imaginative immersion and symbolic/transcendent interpretations. In other words, I am postulating that some mind-types might innately seek exoteric faiths that set out their truths based on the received word.  For other mind-types, however, esoteric traditions are more attractive – engagement in a search for truth based on subjective experience. Here, I'd place exoteric faith as an equal and opposite to reductionist-materialist atheism: you base the faith on the Word of God or your atheism on the certainty of Science. No place in either for fluffy, woolly notions of first-person subjective experience of the Numinous.

Metaphysics – aspects of reality above or beyond the physical, the material –  is by its very nature underdetermined. Neurodiversity affects how people tolerate that lack of definition. Some minds have a high need for certainty, and are uncomfortable with ill-defined concepts unless formalised. They will strive to collapse metaphysics into clear doctrine. The Nicene Creed which I mentioned two days ago is a good example – the certainty-seeking mind aligns with religion as social control. Other mind-types have a much higher ambiguity tolerance, and are comfortable with paradox (something can be both true and not true at the same time), and are able to sustain open-ended philosophical tension.

We all have but the mind we were born with. But we can ask for more – we can learn, observe, extend our curiosity. Frequency and intensity of experiences vary from mind to mind. This imprints upon the consciousness in different ways. Ultimately, we must strive to understand ourselves, our biologies, our minds – and then to engage in open dialogue if we genuinely seek metaphysical enlightenment, to progress on the journey from Zero to One.

Lent 2024: day 37
Observer or participant?

Lent 2023, day 37
The Inner Hug: Contact with the Eternal

Lent 2022: day 37
Take it easy - or get rigorous?

Lent 2021: day 37
Dream insights into past lives

Lent 2020: day 37
Further thoughts on Reincarnation

Lent 2026: day 36 – time and the soul

The Ancient Greeks distinguished between elapsed time, perceived time and eternity.

Let's begin with chronos (χρόνος) – measurable, sequential time. This is the closest to elapsed time in the modern scientific sense. Chronos is quantitative, continuous, divisible time, progressing in a linear fashion from past through present into the future, measurable in years, seasons, months, weeks, days and hours. Chronos was used for tracking celestial cycles in astronomy, for marking events in history, and for everyday scheduling. Chronos is not an independent entity, but a measure of change, without change, there is no time to count. This aligns with modern physics – time is a parameter that indexes change in a system, in particular, entropy – the time it takes for example for an ice cube to melt, for milk to dissolve into coffee or a strawberry to decay into mush. The inexorable progression from order into disorder.

Then we have kairos (καιρός) – qualitative, experienced time. It cannot be measured with a clock; it is felt, not counted. This corresponds to the notions of perceived or opportune time. Kairos is not something to be quantified; it is entirely context-dependent. It can feel fast or slow. Floyd Dixon puts it like this: "We was having so much fun/Didn't know it was half past one/Turned round to have one more/Looked at the clock and it was half past four." On the other hand, after holding the plank posture for four minutes, the fifth minute takes what feels like an hour to pass. Kairos is also the moment when something ought to happen. In Greek rhetoric it was the right moment to present the clinching argument. In warfare, the decisive instant to strike. As such, kairos is linked in meaning to opportunity or decision – and the intuition to act. I would put this as the moment of aligned flows; when your flow and the Cosmic flow are congruent. It is the 'now-or-never' moment; the 'sliding-door' moment. Kairos maps directly onto modern psychological notions of subjective time dilation/ compression, flow states and the emotional weighting of moments.

And finally, the Greeks had the notion of Aion (αἰών) – eternal or cyclical time. This is unbounded time, associated with the lifespan of the cosmos. Aion is not sequential in the everyday sense, but is often cyclical or timeless, associated with permanence or totality. Plato defines chronos as “a moving image of aion”. Sir Roger Penrose uses the term Aeon to describe one cycle of endless Big Bangs, cosmic expansions and heat-deaths, from one Big Bang to the next. When the last atom ceases to vibrate, there is no vibration, nothing with which to measure time. Time ceases. Without time, there is no space. And at that instant, the next Big Bang pops up. An eternity of aeons. 

And so – where in time is the soul? Seeing 'soul' and 'consciousness' as the same concept but from different historical ages, I would consider the soul as belonging to the aion, the biological body as  belonging to chronos, and consciously experiencing kairos. Passing through the aeon, chronologically. One lifetime at a time.

********

This Sunday, the clocks go forward. The realm of chronos, the quantifiable. Yet what we experience is not an arbitrary hour on the clock, but is predicated by our biological reaction to the sun's rising and setting, and all points in between – our circadian rhythm. On Sunday morning, the sun will rise at 06:17, an hour and two minutes later than on Saturday. We will be robbed of an hour's sleep – and this has health implications (hospital admissions for heart attacks spike by 24% in the week after the time change – it was this time last year that my heart attack occurred). 

So to prepare for the spring time change, I have been going to bed early (as early as 9pm) for the past four evenings, and waking up shortly after 5am, in other words before sunrise, which today was at 05:27. 

The early start is wonderful. I witness the sun rising through the forest next door, and set off for an early pre-breakfast stroll. Early spring, so the young day is full of the year's coiled potential, still waiting to burst open. On an empty stomach (just the one black coffee!) I feel light-headed, alert and alive. An altered state. Quite something! It's sunny, though with a chill wind from the south, a wonderful feeling to be alive and soaking up the qualia. 

Kairos suggests that it's later than it is; my early-to-bed, early-to-rise pre-time-change regime has gifted me an additional hour and half of daylight that I could have wasted by waking at seven am. On Saturday night, I go to bed at 9pm and wake up at 6am, having had a normal eight hours' sleep.

In the balance between chronos and kairos lies the balance between quantity and quality.

Lent 2024: day 36
After death, what's next? (Pt III)

Lent 2023: day 36
Money and metaphysics

Lent 2022: day 36
Losing sight of God

Lent 2021: Day 36
One life is not enough

Lent 2020: Day 36
Accounting for talent

Lent 2026: day 35 – religion and social control

I am not sold on the idea of organised religions for two reasons. The first is that I firmly believe, I intuit, that everyone who seeks God shall find God in their own way. There are therefore as many paths to God as people who seek God. This is one of my primary principles regarding human spirituality. I believe that in essence faith is experiential rather than book-taught – esoteric rather than exoteric.

The second reason is that I see religions as all too often straying in their remit from the spiritual into the temporal realm. The temptation for spiritual leaders to appropriate humans' innate longing for the numinous, – the sense of awe – for the purpose of social control is too great. "Believe in what you are told to believe, live according to our precepts, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife" is a simple yet persuasive narrative.

In The Republic, written around 375 BC, Plato (through his narrator, Socrates), engages in his famous mind-experiment of devising the perfect state. Having set up a hypothetical community of mutually interdependent craftsmen (farmers, builders and weavers), which is expanded to include merchants, artists, tutors and warriors, it becomes clear to Socrates and his interlocutors that some form of social control would be required to ensure that the unjust do not end up dominating the just. Socrates postulates the sort of religion that a just state would require to keep  the morale of its citizens high. He is critical of Homer and other authors who portray the gods as morally dubious, and so, introduces censorship to his republic. Strict control of cultural narratives is therefore essential: stories about the gods must be controlled, because they shape the character of the populace. “We must first supervise the storytellers. If they tell a fine story, we approve it; if not, we reject it.” Children absorb stories before they can reason; myths must be filtered at source. The state decides what is acceptable. Plato is saying that rulers need to have systematic control of cultural input.

Seven centuries later, in 325 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine – who had converted to Christianity eight years earlier – convened the Council of Nicaea, summoning 200 bishops from around Christendom to Nicaea (in modern-day Turkey) to hammer out what it was exactly that Christians believed in. After all, he reasoned, if this is to become the official religion of the Roman Empire, it's important to know what it stands for. And thus was hammered out the Nicene Creed, an imperially approved statement of what the Church believes (and by omission what it doesn't). Of course, this wasn't the end of the matter; debate would rage on for centuries – about the nature of the Holy Trinity in particular – but it was a crucial step in establishing Christianity as a global religion, rather than a loose collection of squabbling cults.

Theological debate in the service of empire-building, the Council of Nicaea highlights how the needs of church and state can overlap. And so they did for the best part of a millennium and a half. The Enlightenment led to a clear separation of secular governments from church authorities; the 'divine right' to rule was over. Theocracies are on the retreat (with a few stubborn exceptions).

Is church-going in general decline in the West because people can see through the social control aspects of religions? Has atheism – based on the notion that there's no God because everything is composed of matter – led to societies losing control? In balance, no. Secular laws by and large work effectively, keep trouble-makers in society from causing too much harm to the rest of us.

I have written about the rising numbers of people identifying themselves as 'Spiritual But Not Religious' (SBNR) in the US, as church-going and religious affiliation is falling. In Europe, this is reflected in the term 'believing but not belonging', with many people retaining spiritual beliefs, but disengaging from church participation and doctrine. And there are also the 'Religious But Not Spiritual', who go to church out of a sense of tradition, duty and order, without feeling any spiritual calling. 

I would posit that a fixed proportion of society has some kind of a spiritual calling; for some, there is the need to belong to a faith community and engage in regular spiritual practice (church-going); for others – this number is increasing as the former decreases – a self-authored worldview with an emphasis on spiritual experiences rather than pre-packaged teachings is preferred.

How will this look in the future? I suspect that the SBNRs will continue to grow in number, and this will be seen in a proliferation of YouTube channels and social-media accounts; a whole new stream of people searching for God in their own way.

Lent 2024: day 35
After death what's next? (Pt II)

Lent 2023: day 35
Into the Afterlife (Pt III)

Lent 2022: day 35
Altered states - caffeine and alcohol

Lent 2021: day 35
The science of coincidence

Lent 2020: day 35
Soul and Body

Lent 2026: day 34 – qualia, sensitivity and attention

Sunrise is getting earlier and earlier in the run up to next Sunday's time change. I woke up this morning at quarter past five*, fed the cats, then caught the sun rising through the trees of the forest next door. Some thin clouds in the sky, but the red orb shines through branches touched by a light overnight frost. Scrapper and Czester, sitting on the window sill, framed this picture. 

A sense of bliss becomes me. All is well. I give thanks. I give thanks for noticing the sunrise, and for being able to revel in it for a moment. After all, this dawn could have been overcast and dull. Qualia like this are to live for.

Our daily lives are a progress through a constant cloud of potential qualia, some of which come to our attention; most, however, pass by without notice. Unremarkable. What collapses the wave function to trigger a memorable qualia experience? Vivid sensory inputs? Or is it more emotional? Is paying attention the answer? 

If so, I have only really started paying mindful attention to what's around me in recent years – yet my mind is crammed with memories from childhood, youth and earlier adult years. 

What selects for the experiences we note, and those we subconsciously overlook? The warmth of the sun on my face on a bright spring day like today, a subtly changing cloudscape, the buzzing of an early bee around my front door, the crunch of dry twigs underfoot. These experiences are the qualia that form the raw texture of reality.

However, at any given moment, there are far more of them available to experience than we are capable of being aware of. The world does not present itself to us in neatly lined-up row of sensations to sample one after the other. We live in a sensation-rich environment, abundant and random, that at times can feel almost overwhelming. 

What we define as 'our experience' is but a thin selection of all possible experiences that could potentially be experienced. So how do we allocate the finite resource of our awareness? Is it something that requires our active effort (attention)? Or is it something passive (sensitivity)?  Something we are born with to a lesser or greater degree? Is it something, that applying discipline to it, we can intensify? Should we sift through this firehose of sensory inputs looking for anything in particular?

One thing I learnt from my father is the importance of observation; to be observant, to notice, to be aware of detail. Attention can be trained, disciplined, refined. But as with talents, it is based on something that's already present. And that is sensitivity. Great artists have it, it opens their doors to perception.

Left to itself, attention drifts. It is captured by novelty, by movement, by threat, by desire, by commerce. It loops through familiar concerns. It returns, again and again, to whatever has most successfully hooked it in the past. In this sense, much of what we attend to is not chosen consciously at all, but inherited – from biology, from culture, from advertising, from habit.

What we notice, what strikes our inward eye to imprint itself on our long-term memory, accumulates over time to shape our inner life, and indeed to shape who we are. And with death, as consciousness passes on, I feel that the strongest of those qualia memories will resurface at some future time in another biological container.

A short walk before sunset; the air is getting chilly. Birdsong. A rising razor-crescent moon. The cats chasing each other down the drive. Qualia. And during the walk, a pleasant and familiar past-life flashback. Short, not particularly intense, but enough to provide me with continuity and assurance.

* While I mitigate seasonal affective disorder in autumn by ignoring the time change and going to bed at the same time relative to the sun, in spring, a different strategy is called for. In preparation for the spring time change, I start to go to bed one hour earlier relative to sunset, so when the clocks go forward at the end of March, I can wake up at the new hour and be up around sunrise.

Lent 2024: day 34
After death – what's next? (Pt I)

Lent 2023: day 34
Into the Afterlife (Pt II)

Lent 2022: day 34
A search for purpose

Lent 2021: day 34
The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson

Lent 2020; day 34
What goes round, comes around

Lent 2026: day 33 –talent and intuition

Imagine a blank canvas in front of you, a range of paint brushes, and access to paints in any shade you want to reach for. GO! Don't think, just feel yourself slipping into a trance-like state. Don't think: "Oh, it could do with a contrasting colour here, a splodge of white, maybe," rather let your intuition take control of all decisions. You have no previous experience, no 10,000 hours of practice, no theoretical knowledge about paint drying times and combinations of hue. Just go for it. Let it out; don't intellectualise, don't think: "this is starting to look like a city at night in the rain, so I'll steer it that way,"

What do you will come out? More than likely, brown sludge, slop; nothing, a distant approximation of what could be taken for abstract impressionism but lacking any redeeming qualities. Get 300 people in front of easels, however, and give them the same task, and a jury will have something to go on. Some curious quirk that catches the eye, there unintentionally. But importantly, some folk are better able to tap into the flow.

The early abstract impressionists knew exactly what they were aiming at; but daubing blank canvases seemingly at random – can it result in anything of interest?

You don't know until you've tried it!

Same with automatic writing. Put yourself in front of a keyboard, get into the flow and see what comes out. Imagine a higher entity, a separate entity, a strand of non-local consciousness, taking over your fingers, and letting words come out as they may. What are you getting?

This is certainly not going to work with musical instruments. The untutored, the unpracticed, will never manage a euphonious run of notes. Forget intuition alone serving as a guide to musical creativity! The 10,000 hours rule here is the rule that cannot be broken (though Sid Vicious had a good try). Having said that, the phenomenon I've noticed (and recorded) for some time now – waking up with an original tune going around my head – is very real (I have a phone's-worth of recordings), but these are typically short, two or three bars of music, certainly no Moonlight Sonata.

Mindfulness, meditation, altered states designed to enhance creativity – but not the creativity that comes from a thought process, rather a case of letting your consciousness reach for new quality.

Lent 2024: day 33
Time and spirituality, Pt III

Lent 2023, day 33
Into the Afterlife (Pt I) 

Lent 2022: day 33
The Search for Understanding

Lent 2021: day 33
Connecting with the Metaphysical

Lent 2020: day 33
"On my planet there is no disease"

Lent 2026: day 32 – what it is to be talented

The Parable of the Talents has puzzled me since I was a teenager. If the master or lord in the parable refers to God – where is God's mercy? Where is God's love? It was this parable that first caused me to question the authenticity of the Gospels. Were the Evangelists (who wrote the four canonical Gospels between 30 and 75 years after Christ's crucifixion) accurately recording the actual words of Christ, I wondered.

Let us begin with asking what is a 'talent'. In Biblical times, it was a monetary unit, expressed as the value of 30 kg of silver, equivalent to 6,000 denari, one denarius being a day's pay for a labourer, so therefore one talent represented the equivalent of about 20 years' worth of work. In modern terms, this would be somewhere around 1.1 million złotys or £200,000 at the national minimum wage. That's one talent. Now, the master gave his servants each five, three and one talent respectively. Those sums would have been understood by those who listened to the parables of Jesus as inconceivably vast amounts of wealth.

In the Middle Ages, the meaning of the word 'talent' came to be used figuratively in Latin as "a gift from God", "a marked natural skill or ability" and thus into our modern lexicons.

So let's read from the Gospel of St Matthew (chapter 25, verses 14-30)

14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. 15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey. 16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents. 17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two. 18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money. 19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. 20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more. 21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. 22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them. 23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. 24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: 25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. 26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: 27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. 28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. 29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. 30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I find these words harsh, and in all honesty, unGodlike. I have reflected upon the parable of the talent over the decades, but if we look at it through a Gnostic perspective, we can imagine the lord not as the loving Jesus, but as the Demiurge, the Archon that created the material world, more interested in what his servants can do for him materially than in what makes each one different, and maybe take account of the innate risk-averse nature of the third servant. The lord is extractive, profit-driven and punitive. I see not a trace of Jesus about him. More the 'rank-and-yank' corporate CEO with an eye on Q4 earnings and a big year-end bonus for himself. So why the inclusion of this parable (in two versions) in the New Testament? Certainly, there's not a trace of the Sermon on the Mount here ("Blessed are the unprofitable servants, for they too shall have abundance").

But age and experience has told me that the evangelist Matthew (who wrote his Gospel some 50 years after Christ's crucifixion) was merely being perceptive of the human condition. Verily, those that have shall get more, while those who have little shall have even that snatched away from them. Matthew posits this notion earlier in his Gospel (Chapter 13, verse 12): "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." From this comes the rather harsh 'Matthew effect' in economics – advantage begets further advantage. Wealth inequality has a natural tendency to increase over time.

OK, that's life, it doesn't sound particularly Christian, but Matthew puts these words into Christ's mouth. Matthew is backed up by his fellow synoptic evangelist Luke, writing on the same theme. "For unto you I say, that to every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that little he hath shall be taken away."

There is but one charitable interpretation that I can hold with – that the talents are neither money, nor indeed innate gifts or talents in the modern sense, but God's love. The servants that accept God's love and spread it in the world are rewarded, and the one who ignores it, burying it instead, is punished.

[If you are keen for a comparison with the Gospel of St Luke, here it is (chapter 19, verses 15-26):

15 And it came to pass, that when he was returned, having received the kingdom, then he commanded these servants to be called unto him, to whom he had given the money, that he might know how much every man had gained by trading. 16 Then came the first, saying, Lord, thy pound* hath gained ten pounds. 17 And he said unto him, Well, thou good servant: because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities. 18 And the second came, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained five pounds. 19 And he said likewise to him, Be thou also over five cities. 20 And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I have kept laid up in a napkin: 21 For I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow. 22 And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant. Thou knewest that I was an austere man, taking up that I laid not down, and reaping that I did not sow: 23 Wherefore then gavest not thou my money into the bank, that at my coming I might have required mine own with usury? 24 And he said unto them that stood by, Take from him the pound, and give it to him that hath ten pounds. 25 (And they said unto him, Lord, he hath ten pounds.) 26 For I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.

* The 'pound' used in the King James Version of Luke's Gospel is also known as a mina, a Greek coin that is one-sixtieth of a talent, and rather than the servants being entrusted with five, three and one talent respectively, each gets just the one mina, a significantly smaller sum all round.

More on talents as gifts tomorrow.

Lent 2025: day 32 
[No post, the day of my heart attack]

Lent 2024: day 32
Time and spirituality Pt II

Lent 2023, day 32
The Practice of Gratitude

Lent 2022: day 32
The Search for Perfection

Lent 2021: day 32
Meditation

Lent 2020: day 32
Divine Intervention

Lent 2026: day 31 – what do you want from life?

A tough question to have to face up to. Doesn't it all depend where you are in life's cycle? "Get into a good university." "Get a good job." "Get married and buy a home." "Pay off the mortgage, get the children off to university."  "Inherit the family fortune." And then we'll see. Usually this means buying something you've always wanted, ticking off bucket-list destinations, boosting one's position in the status hierarchy, chasing honours and fame.

What do you want from life? Something material? Or something intangible? Is there an ulterior purpose?

It is useful to consider the Aristotelian notion of teleology (from the Greek telos, aim, purpose, end goal, design, final cause), the study of where we're heading to and why. This is about the fulfilment of your human potential. Making the most of your talents, temporal and spiritual. But reductionist materialists would argue that we are nothing more than stochastic products of emergence (evolution) existing in an indifferent and meaningless universe, and our only purpose is survival and reproduction, and there's nothing more. The race to own more stuff and to show off achievements is a vestigial remnant of sex drive; peacock feathers.

Personally, my own quest is for a higher level of consciousness; for greater understanding; transcendence; participating in something more than the ego; coherence. I am aware that I am destined never to get anywhere near grasping intuitively the wholeness of Cosmos, of which we are such a tiny part; nevertheless, each insight, each step nearer, is significant. Hence – one lifetime at a time.

Joy I seek, rather than pleasure. Comfort; not reaching out for luxury. Conscious experiences, rather than ego trips. So, I am (eventually, over time) to observe the Universe unfolding, as it experiences itself (Big 'C' Consciousness). And integrate my own small 'c' conscious experiences, my qualia, with those of the Universe. Over time. This is not (and this notion is central to my beliefs) something that can be achieved in a single lifetime! In feeling the sun and wind on my face on a sunny day, in reflecting upon triggered or unbidden memories, in experiencing simple joys, I am doing this. Physical reality is but a substrate for conscious experience; the biological layer (consciousness requires a container, a platform, from which to observe the unfolding Universe). Health is important, bodily aches distract consciousness from being aware of anything other than the source of the pain.

I asked Google Gemini for its distillation of  the purpose of life, and the answer astounded me: "Be at the interface where chaos becomes meaning". Wow! Very good. And ChatGPT? Slightly more prosaic, but instantly relatable. "To become more conscious, and to use that consciousness well." Yes, I'd agree with that too. It's a search, a journey – in the form of daily rural walks, a starry night, the changing seasons, cats, good food, good music, interesting conversations that share new ideas and refine old ones. The framework is complete.

Lent 2025: day 31
Hope and hopelessness

Lent 2024: day 31
Time and Spirituality

Lent 2023, day 31
Science vs. the Paranormal

Lent 2022: day 31
Consciousness – fundamental and universal?

Lent 2021: day 31
I'm better than you – no, really, I am!

Lent 2020: day 31
Divine Inspiration

Lent 2026: day 30 – how do souls migrate?

If we accept consciousness being immaterial and persisting beyond bodily death, rather than a phenomenon tethered to neurons and synapses of the brain – how does that signal bind, unbind and rebind to new biologies?

Over the years in this blog, I have considered possible vectors (or metaphors for mechanisms), from brain waves, quantum effects and gut flora to music. Today, I'll dive in deeper.         

Let's start with the metaphor of consciousness as a broadcast field. Our brains act as receivers, picking up signals from the field. At death, the receiver fails – but the field, the signal, persists; a new brain with compatible structure locks onto the same frequency or pattern. The question here is that of compatibility; is this purely a biological factor? Is it random? What of karmic affinity? The 'broadcast field' metaphor also explains atheists who do not feel the numinous, who have no spiritual attunement; for they are like computers, able to think, logically, quickly – but are not connected via wi-fi to the Cosmic Consciousness, to the Eternal Whole. Then there is the idea of the brain not so much as a receiver but as a transmitter, generating electromagnetic fields that might imprint on the environment and later be reabsorbed, but no there are no hypotheses as to storage or retrieval mechanisms.

Acoustic / vibrational models begin with the notion that reality is fundamentally vibrational, and that consciousness is a frequency pattern. At death, the pattern dissipates but does not vanish; it can be congruently reconstructed under the right conditions via resonance. As I wrote, this echoes Pythagoras's 'music of the spheres', as well as the Vedic concept of Nāda Brahma ('universe as sound'). Whether your physics is field-based or wave-based, this is intuitively powerful; and while lacking a concrete encoding mechanism for memory/identity, it could be that music somehow acts as trigger.

Physics (bless it) has not yet detected neither such fields nor such vibrations. (Note the word 'yet' there– as I wrote yesterday, should it? Will it ever detect them? Or is science destined never to nail down the numinous and ineffable as a mathematical formula?)

The next mechanism is quantum information transfer. This posits that consciousness as a quantum state (or information pattern). Consciousness is encoded in quantum information, potentially in microtubules (the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory of Sir Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff) or some deeper quantum substrate. At death, quantum coherence collapses the information of consciousness, which disperses into the quantum vacuum or entangled states; it then recoheres in another system. This theory provides a technical framework for non-local persistence. However, there is no evidence that personal identity can survive decoherence.After 30 years, Orch-OR has neither been proven nor falsified. Sir Roger has often stated that he does not believe consciousness to be computational.

However, if we think of our consciousness as operating system software, and our thoughts as the apps run on that operating system, the brain being the biological hardware, then we can think of a computational continuity model of reincarnation, with old software being copied over into a new computer. A wave pattern of information reforms in a different medium, recreating the consciousness of the deceased person. This model is favoured by those who believe in a simulation hypothesis. But the question remains: what's the transfer mechanism? Pen-drive or wi-fi?

Biological carriers are also worth considering. Genetic memory links consciousness to DNA patterns. This can explain 'atavistic resurgence', whereby a memory from an ancestor re-emerges via blood lineage; however this can't explain non-familial cases of reincarnation. This could explain the strong feeling of familiarity I got in May 2010 while cresting a low hill outside Mogielnica, unaware of the fact that my grandmother was brought up nearby. Then there is the microbiome (gut flora). The gut-brain axis has been proved to influenced cognition; it could be  hypothesised that microbial ecosystems carry 'memory markers' from one human to another. This, however, is thought to be highly implausible as a carrier of identity and complex personality; at best microbes can influence mood.

The panpsychist and idealist models, towards which I lean, are based on the core idea that consciousness is primary, rather than derived. There is no migration of consciousness, only localisation (life), delocalisation (death), and relocalisation (rebirth); a whirlpool forming in a river dissolving and reforming elsewhere Advocates include three of my favourite philosophers, David Chalmers, Bernardo Kastrup and Phillip Goff. Idealism, which gets away from the primacy of matter, sidesteps the transport problem entirely, but is hard to reconcile with personal identity continuity that we see in those cases where one dead person's identity seems to inform the consciousness of another (which I experience).

If we want to abandon any pretence of scientific rigour, we can seek non-mechanistic answers in karmic or causal continuity, as propounded by Buddhism. There is no migrating entity here, only a causal chain, with one life conditioning the next, as a flame passed from candle to candle or a wave propagating on a calm surface of water. In Buddhism (unlike Hinduism) there is no permanent self, but continuity of tendencies. While philosophically rigorous, it doesn’t satisfy intuition of a persisting 'self'

So... what persists? Memories? Certainly. Personality traits/behaviours? Possibly. Physical traits (birthmarks etc). Personally, I can't see why. Causal chain (karma – learning lessons, undoing past-life wrongs), yes, I get that and appreciate this argument.

Any viable mechanism must explain memory continuity (rare but claimed cases), identity persistence, selectivity (why one body, not another), and ways whereby energy and information are conserved. The answer lies in a blend of the above. Perhaps.

Old Souls and New Souls: some people report the feeling of having experienced many previous human lifetimes. Others few, or just one. But most folk – none at all. My thinking here: humanity is expected to peak at ten billion sometime in the mid-2070s before settling back to a more sustainable and stable number in the middle of the 22nd century. More and more human beings will become inhabited by old souls, who will have experienced many lives and therefore become wiser, gentler, understanding the notion of win-win rather than looking at life adversarially. A stable population will mean lesser pressure on natural resources. Less greed. So – is the number of souls finite? Still so many questions remain.

Lent 2025: day 30
Getting On With It (Pt II)

Lent 2025: day 30
The Divine in your life

Lent 2023, day 30
God/No God

Lent 2022: day 30
Let the Spirit guide you!

Lent 2021: day 30
On being perceptive

Lent 2020: day 30
Time – religion and metaphysics