Ervin Laszlo - What is Consciousness?: Three Sages Look Behind the Veil

What Is

Consciousness?

NEW PARADIGM BOOKS OF THE LASZLO INSTITUTE OF NEW PARADIGM RESEARCH

Kingsley L. Dennis, Series Editor

What Is Consciousness? Three Sages Look Behind the Veil

(June 2016)

What Is Reality? A New Map of Cosmos and Consciousness

(October 2016)

The Laszlo Chronicle: A Global Thinkers Journey from Systems to Consciousness and the Akashic Field

(January 2017)

Copyright 2016 by Ervin Laszlow, Jean Houston, and Larry Dossey

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

This edition published by SelectBooks, Inc.

For information address SelectBooks, Inc., New York, New York.

First Edition

ISBN 978-1-59079-348-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Laszlo, Ervin, 1932

What is consciousness?: three sages look behind the veil / Ervin Laszlo, Jean Houston, and Larry Dossey; foreword by Stanley Krippner. -- First Edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Consciousness. 2. Human beings. I. Houston, Jean. II. Dossey, Larry, 1940- III. Title.

B808.9.L37 2015

128'.2--dc23

2015033786

Book design by Janice Benight

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

Contents

There were six learned sages,

To study much inclined,

Who met to discuss Consciousness

(About it each was blind).

Each hoped by observation

To satisfy his mind.

The first sage thought of Consciousness,

Awake or in a dream,

As an experiential flow

With rivulets that seem

To be so fundamental that

Consciousness is a stream.

The second sage knew of Consciousness

From his patients anguish;

Their problems stemmed from urges

They tried hard to vanquish.

So, this great sage proclaimed that

Consciousness is a wish.

The third followed Consciousness

Back to its primal lair.

He studied myths and legends

That led him to declare

A Collective Consciousness

Is something we all share.

The fourth said the term Consciousness

Is faulty in the West.

In the East it is luminous,

And that word says it best;

Hence Consciousness illuminates,

And also manifests.

For the fifth sage, Consciousness

Is entering a gate

By hypnosis, taking drugs,

Or pausing to meditate.

He concluded that Consciousness

Is something like a state.

The sixth sage said Consciousness

Is easy to explain.

Sight, smell, taste, and hunger,

Touch, sound and pain,

Are perceived, then Consciousness

Emerges from the brain.

Oft in academic wars,

The disputants, it seems,

Rail on in sheer ignorance

Of what each other might mean,

And while some dissect Consciousness,

It still remains unseen.

T HIS SPIN ON JOHN GODFREY SAXES NINETEENTH-CENTURY POEM The Blind Men and the Elephant describes the varying answers to the question: What is consciousness? The varying answers represent a significant development; however, that is often overlooked in contemporary discourse. After William James, arguably the founder of modern psychology in the United States, made consciousness a cornerstone of his investigations, the field was taken over by the behaviorists. For many decades, the prevailing dogma was that a phenomenon such as consciousness could only be discussed in subjective terms, and could not be properly studied by science with objective experimental methods.

This paradigm was dealt a death blow by the cognitive revolution, which introduced methods of studying thought and other inner experiences that passed the scientific muster of its day. Cognitive psychology, and later, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, opened the door to the investigation of dreams, meditation, psychedelics, and other manifestations of consciousness. Soon, the cognitive, affective, and contemplative neurosciences solidified consciousness as a respectable topic for mainstream science. Psychoanalysis kept the flame of consciousness studies alive, as did European schools of psychology that never subscribed to behaviorist dogma.

There were positive aspects to the emphasis on limiting psychology to the study of externally observable behavior, however. Other animals could be considered in the psychological domain, as could infants and nonverbal adults, such as those incapacitated by physical or mental problems. In the meantime, the first recorded maps of consciousness could be found in the Indian Upanishads, dating back to the sixth century BCE, predating the Greek philosophers who laid the basis for Western inquiry on the topic (e.g., Platos original distinction between sensory and abstract experiences).

The American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychologys definition of consciousness is twofold. The first describes consciousness as the phenomena that humans report experiencing including mental contents ranging from sensory to somatic perception to mental images, reportable ideas, inner speech, intentions to act, recalled memories, semantics, dreams, hallucinations, emotional feelings, fringe feelings (e.g., a sense of knowing), and aspects of cognitive and motor control. The second part of the definition speaks of any of various subjective states of awareness in which conscious contents can be reported, giving examples of altered states such as sleeping, as well as the global access function of consciousness, presenting an endless variety of focal contents to executive control and decision making.

This answer to the question what is consciousness? can serve as a useful introduction to the three brilliant chapters of this book. However, each of the authors uses the APA definitions, or aspects of them, as starting points for a much more comprehensive vision. Jean Houston places consciousness in the context of what she calls the quantum nature of our universe, a revelation that has transformed human history. Houston has played a major role in this transformation, both with the small groups she has mentored and with international programs affiliated with the United Nations. For her, consciousness is the quantum field of the cosmos, the basic reality of the world.

Larry Dossey has spent a lifetime contemplating and investigating consciousness. His chapter drives the nail in the coffin of the physicalism doctrine, i.e., that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. In his carefully documented chapter, Dossey refutes this doctrine, presenting unanswered questions about the so-called mind-body problem that should bring a sense of modesty to anyone who claims that the problem can be answered by conventional data from the neurosciences. In his words, empirical evidence shows that brains are separate, but minds are not. Developments in theoretical physics support Dosseys contentions, and he cites essays and articles by several Nobel Prize laureates.