Saturday, October 31, 2009

This is My First Post

I started this blog so that I would have a central location to collect and store my thoughts and notes pertaining to the study of consciousness. I have been a “student” of consciousness for more than 35 years starting with subjective experiences I had after learning Transcendental Meditation as an undergraduate in college. During meditation, I experienced a state of being where I could observe my own mental or conscious processes. It is a very powerful experience but almost impossible to describe on paper. I became aware of this as a unique state of consciousness which was different from waking, sleeping or dreaming. I am a skeptic by nature so I wanted to understand what could be causing this mental experience within the physical (or material) world. Was it just my subjective experience or was it a natural course due to the consistent practice of meditation?
I discovered that descriptions of this meditative state could be found in ancient spiritual texts and in the mythologies of a number of indigenous cultures. Again, my skeptic nature turned me to a more objective way to study this but I couldn’t not find an epistemology for the study of consciousness. So I started looking more into physics, organic chemistry and other areas of science as a way to gain a more objective way to think about a subjective experience.
I also began to “sense” a unifying presence in almost everything I studied. I noticed this in how the Universe behaved whether I looked at cosmology, astronomy, physics, chemistry or mathematics but, so far, I have not found any evidence of a correlation between the physical world and my subjective conscious experience.
Recently, I read Dan Brown’s novel, “The Lost Symbol” which examined concepts of power in the human mind. This tells me that there is a large enough collective consciousness about this topic that I can find kindred spirits.
So, as I said, this is just a place for me to collect and store my thoughts from the past 30 years and going forward but feel free read and to post if you’d like.