Myths and Fairy Tales About Consciousness

Pieces of what consciousness creates linger and form a kind of landscape. A person consults it, as if it were a guide, over and over, until his life wears out, feels old, bores him to the point where he wants something new.

He can linger and grow old staring at this landscape painting, or he can imagine and invent novel things.

(Unfinished manuscript, The Magician Awakes.)

In view of the response I received to my article, “Proof that attributing consciousness to the brain is absurd,” I’m adding a few remarks.

Take this “scientific” assertion: if you have the complex concentration of particles known as the brain, who knows what they might produce? They might bring about consciousness.

Who knows? An ant hill might produce a full-size limousine made out of raspberry jello. A box of burner phones in a police evidence locker might give rise to a new moon orbiting Jupiter. Who knows?

The “who knows” and “might” argument is a far cry from the claim of conventional physics that consciousness HAS to arise from the brain because that’s all we have.

Then we have the ever-popular “consciousness is a mystical entity” proposition. In this case, not only is consciousness a vague cloudy thing, the statements about it are also vague and cloudy.

Therefore, anything goes. Consciousness exists in the 18^th dimension. Consciousness was born in the roots of a tree centered in a black hole three trillion light years east of Hoboken.

Many fairy tales spring from the idea that consciousness is a Something. The Something usually ends up being energy. What kind of energy? Take your pick.

There are many errors that derive from the fact that people like to label whatever they can with a noun. Consciousness, a noun. Therefore, a thing. Well, suppose consciousness is a situation.

And the situation is: people are aware. They know they’re alive. They know they’re looking and talking and thinking and doing—which, by the way, is not the situation of a machine.

This is why the technocratic blather about connecting the brain with computers for the purpose of infinite enhancement is a joke. It’s all on the level of mechanical process.

A machine can assist human choices, but it can’t think, and it isn’t aware.

You’re aware. I’m aware. That isn’t a thing and it isn’t “energy” and it isn’t a mystical cloud.

Neither is it restricted. What the conscious-you can become aware of is unbounded.

Being conscious is a non-material situation. Physics isn’t equipped to talk about it, because physics explores matter and energy, time and space. Consciousness isn’t any of those things. It’s, again, non-material.

Various elites don’t want to admit that, because “non-material” implies “can’t be externally shaped and controlled.”

Unfortunately, most people, when confronted with “unbounded” automatically go to “mystical.” This has resulted in numerous problems, including the hypnotic power of various priest-classes down through history, who have ruled societies with iron claws.

At its philosophical root, consciousness has been warred over by both materialistic and mystical forces, each claiming ownership, for different reasons, over that which belongs only to each person.

Fascism, Communism, scientism on one side assert their “consciousness=brain” absurdity, while on the other side, various heavily organized religious institutions promote their elite and exclusive keys to mystical consciousness.

Neither side is the slightest bit interested in individual freedom or the fully independent conscious human.

They’re dogs fighting over a piece of meat that isn’t even meat.

Here are several more quotes from The Magician Awakes:

“Scientism undermines consciousness, or tries to, by disparaging its essential poetic nature. Consciousness can revolutionize the lunatic consensus we call reality by forging it into poetry.”

“Suffering and pain and isolation keep giving themselves up to art and artists, to be transformed. The paradox is, if artists (which means everyone) took that offer in a full-blooded way, we would all rise to another level of life in which much of the suffering would no longer be necessary.”

“What consciousness can invent is, in terms of mystery and joy and complexity, light years beyond what is said about the nature of consciousness…”

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon Rappoport was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com