Memories of the 28th Century

It's one thing to assert that the waking consciousness is just a user interface; it would be more interesting to give instructions for observing the actual operating system in action. The Gods could certainly do that, but I don't think that it would be easy for a human to know the operations of another's mind that well; although fMRA allows people to see what a brain is doing in reaction to certain stimuli, etc. Those brain researchers have also made arms move and so on, so perhaps they will eventually enter that level of godlike behavior. There has also been some progress into direct electric communications, but I don't believe that anyone has deciphered the brain's communication system. Well, maybe the brain will be known that well eventually. That is something that people have been working on for millennia, so maybe they have worked their way to that level of knowledge. That suggests that there might be something to be learned from what people learned in the past, when the only research tools were observation and introspection.

The search seems to have been going on long before there any books or records. I can imagine h. erectus wondering about the nature of consciousness, and we can infer from archeological finds that Neanderthals probably had spiritual ideas. I n the earliest times the same people were the spiritualists and the scientists, because they were the most intelligent. The earliest known bits of mystical traditions appear to have been complete and well developed when they were first written about, and that knowledge appears to have been very similar to the cores of Sufism, Kabbalism (both Christian and Jewish), Hinduism, and other traditions that exist now. Whether that means that they were on to something real or something else you may decide, but those traditions hold that what happens on Earth is determined by “energy” from on high. There are specific pathways over which the energy travels as it approaches the natural world from its source in the far distant spiritual realms. In effect, this energy is analogous to the light from a movie projector, and the natural world is analogous to the movie screen. We humans, the plants, animals, trees, buildings, stars, and everything else are projected images. Some scientists have also interpreted some data as indicating that the universe is a hologram, and others say that is not a correct interpretation, but it is interesting that some would interpret the data in a way that is what mystics have been saying for some tens of thousands of years.

The mystical view is that the energy intersects with the region where the natural world is after it has been adjusted and added to by various aspects of the eternal, the Gods, if you like. It is not clear that there is a single consciousness involved, but it is usually discussed in ways that suggest that there is a single entity that oversees everything, but various aspects are handled by specialists. In this model the energy is recycled after being stripped of information about events. That information is said to be stored in the Akashic records.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashic_records -
This model of the universe strongly suggests that time travel is impossible except for a limited time into the past. The future doesn’t exist except as undifferentiated light until it interacts with the region where the physical universe is.

I suppose that this model has substantial similarity to what is in “The Matrix”. Humans and other living things are not free operators and are plugged into an overall control system over which they have no control. But it has been suggested that there are a number of similar systems that may answer for the many worlds, or they may be less closely related than that. There may be no way to find out for sure.

In addition, this model states that there are four levels of human consciousness with "waking consciousness" being the lowest, or least complete, type of consciousness. I, personally, have experienced the other levels, but I didn't find them all that different from normal waking consciousness, but that may more about me than about anything else. Neuroscience seems to have found that humans think on at least two levels; there have been fMRI studies that showed that decision were sometimes made before the "waking consciousness" was even aware of the matter. As a general matter, people don't even notice the difference between that sort of thought and ordinary tossing ideas around one's mind sort of thinking. Dreaming may indicate a different kind of thinking and a different level of consciousness, but the research seems to have had results that were inconsistent. An additional type of mental activity, according to some, would be that which experienced during meditation.

It seems that science is again getting close to mystical ideas and adding details to age-old knowledge as that goes on. I wonder what will come next. There are mystical methods that would answer for teleportation and time travel, and there are stories of people spending a night under Puck's hill, or some such place, and coming back a century later. Maybe the faeries knew more than the storytellers put into the stories.