Reddit mentions of Origins of Consciousness: How the Search to Understand the Nature of Consciousness is Leading to a New View of Reality

Video linked by /u/kraftwerkd:

Title|Channel|Published|Duration|Likes|Total Views

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The Science of Collective Consciousness | Roger Nelson | The Global Consciousness Project|metaRising|2014-07-09|0:20:15|147+ (98%)|17,771

> Is consciousness fundamental? http://amzn.to/2lm5HaI ...

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Yes, you could take the easy way and be lazy and enjoy the emotional satisfaction in the act of the dismissal, or you could relax your existing assumptions a bit and go do the digging into these matters yourself. I can tell you this much - no one else can open your mind for you to the wider aspect of our reality context, it will only arise from within yourself by your own concerted intent of seeking. Because ultimate or higher reality is consciousness-based instead of this presumed outer objective materialistic order of things, what we hold in our state of consciousness - our thoughts, our feelings (inclusive of altered states of consciousness such as meditation and lucid dreaming) - have a bearing or interaction with our reality context experience.

When one locks one self into an a priori state of mind, the nature of the reality matrix is that it tends to honor that intent. This applies to both the religious and the arch materialist (close minded dogma is close minded dogma under any stripe).

Why do people sometimes have these mystical experiences and other manner of paranormal experiences? It's probably a complicated question with no single answer, but I do see that one driver can be very, very intense emotional trauma. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell referred to this phenomena as the Dark Night of the Soul. It's a very painful process or avenue into these kind of experiences that then follow. However, in my case, I first had an astounding paranormal experience revealing the non material nature of perceived reality. The Dark Night thing happened the following year, and that is when things then became interactive - a kind of feedback loop between the so-called spiritual (non-material) and the waking state of consciousness of this everyday reality context.

I've since met other people that have come into these experiences from different avenues; most of the ones I know become kind of dedicated to this pursuit of trying to understand the deeper substrate. For instance, Bernard Kastrup was a CERN computer scientist - he had his initial experiences in around 2009, which is when I had my profound paranormal experience. He has since gone on to write a number of books on the nature of consciousness and reality and he is in a lot of YouTube videos.

Bernard is an experiencer (as folks label it) but he takes a decidedly philosophical approach and shores up with more rigor the epistemologies that are brought into play that people reason about. He doesn't go out to try and argue personal mystical experiences per se as a basis for forming one's world view. I on the other-hand, don't believe people can really internalize anything of profound significance until they have gone through the experience themselves on some level. So I just urge folks to not be so hasty to close their mind shut inside a self-imposed cage. That's the very first step of all is to not close the mind at the very outset of the journey.

http://www.bernardokastrup.com

Here's a recent book that is a survey of sorts on the consciousness field - there are so many areas of inquiry that have some bearing on the subject of consciousness that such surveys will always too limited and inadequate - but people need places to start:

Origins of Consciousness: How the Search to Understand the Nature of Consciousness is Leading to a New View of Reality