Consciousness as a condition of life

DeMarco, Frank. Rita's World: A View from the Non-Physical (Kindle Location 1986). Rainbow Ridge Books. Kindle Edition.

(Q)  So, Rita, Bob asks what consciousness is.

Bob Friedman's question:  "What is consciousness, what is it made of, and how does it work, that allows it access to all six dimensions (or however many there are) at once?  Is this 3D consciousness a piece of that larger consciousness, and if so, can she describe it?

"From what she says, we are all part of that larger being that Frank draws.  And this larger being is part of even larger beings, and presumably it all is part of what Seth call All That Is, which is the totality of consciousness (which some call God) and all it 'creates'.  It's well-known that all our materialist scientists together can't explain the nature of consciousness. Maybe Rita can give it a go, with information that some of these more open-minded materialists can explore further.  What would they look for?  Is it ever 'provable' or even describable in 3D, since it is so much more than 3D and the physical brain?"

(A)  Every language describes the world differently.  In effect, each one describes a different world, psychologically, because the assumptions of the language are built into it, and then they feed these assumptions right back to the users.  Some are better at describing these things than others, because of the level of the people who developed them to express their view of the world.

We aren't going to explore linguistics here, but I want you to be aware that language makes you, or tempts you, to consider things as real and definite, which in fact belong to an entirely different order of things.

Thus, the word "consciousness".  It is natural (at least in English and in many Western languages) to think of consciousness as a condition rather than a relationship; or even as an object (if a nonphysical one) rather than either a condition or a relationship.  This is inappropriately concrete.

I need you to understand this point, or anything I say about it will be a waste of words, time, and effort.  Those of you who are familiar with other definitions, please, suspend what you know and consider this as if you had never pondered the problem.  After all, if previous answers satisfied you, why continue to look; but if you keep looking, why bother if you are only going to say, "That isn't what I read here, or was taught there"?  After you ponder this, is the time to relate it to previously absorbed ideas.  Otherwise, you are just going through the motions.  Sorry to sound so directive, but I need you here, now (whenever you read this) if you are to get anything at all from this work.

...  And, parenthetically, that is the value of our minds once we have left the body - we can serve to translate 3D experience accurately because we know first-hand what it is like to function in those conditions.  You also find it hard to remember the context we have been creating, which - if you disregard it - results in your attempting to cram new explanations into old, inadequate, contexts.

(Q)  Aha.  New wine in old wineskins!

(A)  One aspect of what Jesus meant, yes.  There was more, but that is not our subject today.

Suppose - this is not a diversion - suppose you were to ask me what gravity is, what it is made of, how it works.  Or love.  Suppose we tried to find a way to make it provable to those who doubt what it is or that it is.  Suppose we tried to do so for the aether.

You know the story of the man who was looking for his lost keys where the light was brightest rather than where he dropped them.  One point of the story is that you can't look for something where it is not, no matter how favorable the conditions.  That is, you can look, but you will not find!

Consciousness is a condition of life, no less than gravity is a condition of life on Earth or than love is a condition of separated elements feeling their essential unity.  You won't find life without consciousness any more than you will find anything in creation that is somehow not alive.  The form of the consciousness will vary according to condition, just as the form of life varies according to condition, but the one is as universal as the other.

It might be theoretically possible for a fish to scientifically investigate what water is, but it isn't very likely.  And even this is an inadequate analogy, because water is to a fish what air is to a scientist, and scientists can study air.  But how can scientists study consciousness when they cannot see it in contradistinction to unconsciousness, because nothing exists without consciousness any more than anything exists without gravity?

They don't understand this, of course, but that is the nub of their difficulty.  Not realizing that everything is alive and conscious, they cannot realize that there is no place for them to stand outside of consciousness to measure it.

This world is made up of certain essentials and cannot in any way, at any place, for any time, exist without them.  We keep coming back to it - you can't have height and depth without width.  You can't, any more than you can have a system of numbers without a gap in it (regardless of nomenclature; I am speaking of the unbroken unity of the reality).

Can you see that all the background you have been given to this point is not only invisible to your hypothetical scientist but actually antithetical to the context of everything he has been taught?  You cannot expect very many of them to welcome such an upheaval, any more than medieval scientists welcomed Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and for the same reason.  Their system had been worked out in great detail and had great precision within its range of competence, and the new system seemed to them a flight of fancy.

If a scientist were to examine this question of consciousness from the starting point of a 3D world created out of the non-3D, however, he or she would quickly see that consciousness, love, and other essentials were the framework on which 3D reality was constructed, hence were built into it, hence could nowhere not be there, hence could not be studied in any way that assumed it as an element that could be studied from the outside.  Qualities of consciousness, yes.  Conditions of consciousness, manifestations of consciousness.  Not consciousness itself.

...  The study of how consciousness manifests in different conditions (among plants and minerals, for instance) is possible.  The contraposition of consciousness and a hypothetical unconsciousness is not, because the hypothesized conditions contradict the conditions of existence.  Again, try to imagine the world without love, or without gravity.  You can sort of do it, in a science-fiction-y way, but not really, because it can't hold together.

(Q)  I know readers will pose the question, so I'll do it for them.  Love?

(A)  You see cruelty or indifference, and you think, "we know what absence of love looks like", but you don't, because it (that is, absence of love) does not, and can not, exist in the 3D world.  What you observe is love restricted to too small a circle by various people - at an extreme, the circle being confined to themselves only.  But even here, and even when they also hate themselves, without love there could be no existence, because it is the air you breathe, know it or not, approve of it or not, conceive of it as even a possibility, or not.