A notion of upward consciousness

Over the summer I was invited to the 21st of a chap I had only just met. While there I had a brief yarn to his uncle, a very nice guy, who spoke to me about his interests in consciousness. In particular, he was certain of the existence of a downward consciousness in the universe, and was interested in any streams of research that might shed light on this conviction of his.

As much as I disagree with the notion of downward consciousness, I do not want to say anything against this man here. In my limited experience he was quite an amiably fellow, and I wish him luck in his endeavours. I do, however, want to explore, very briefly, the notion of upward consciousness.

From the outset, I would like to stress that I despise mysticism and all the other ‘spiritual’ hocum that the West has recently become fascinated with. I recently saw a picture of two individuals, one a young white man in business attire, the other an Indian Fakir, seated on yoga mats meditating. Above the white man’s head was written: ‘10am meeting, 11 am presentation, lunch with client, report due at 2, pick the kids up from school at 3, read the report, cook for Liz’ etc. Above the Indian man’s head was ‘...’. This is supposed to represent some sort of transcendental truth. I am not going to go into why I think annihilating the will or even quieting it are stupid endeavours. I have written about them at some length here. I merely bring up this photo as an example of the superficial, quick fix, proto-spiritualism that a great many Westerners occupy themselves with because they are too lazy to do the hard yards.

The notion of upward consciousness is the only quasi-mystical idea that I will permit myself at the moment, and that is only because I don’t take it very seriously, I merely find it curious.

Upward consciousness is the idea that rather than having an overarching consciousness—i.e. God—that created the universe or else set it in motion—Aristotle’s ‘prime mover’—you instead have a situation where the universe is gradually coming to consciousness. Consciousness here represents a gradual coalescence. The Universe starts out as dispersed matter, mostly gases and the like, energy and heat. Slowly, due to various forces and thanks to a variety of accidents, things slowly come together and form denser bodies, like planets. Sometimes these planets have favourable chemical conditions for life and you get organic matter. Randomly, some item of organic matter develops consciousness. It breeds. Huge numbers of conscious creatures operating within a collective consciousness or collective unconscious produce some other, higher level of consciousness. Consciousness then, represents merely another step in the coalescence of the universe--its taking form; its expression.

This final step has been explored somewhat in the fantasy literature of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. There, when psychic energy reaches a kind of critical mass, a psychic entity is born that is a manifestation of that energy. If the energy is purely racial then the entity will be a manifestation of that race’s excellence (e.g. the human emperor). If, on the other hand, the psychic energy is comprised of malignant things, like sadism, the resulting psychic entity will be all about that (e.g. Slaneesh).

One of the reasons why I am curious about the notion of upward consciousness is that it would fit well with the idea that man invented God as a goal—an image of what man wanted to be. This is much healthier than God creating man, and would figure quite well with man slowly elevating his consciousness to a galactic level and his desire to be better. It would also sit well with our feeling our being lost in the void but gradually finding tethers with which to hold ourselves in place. It would also work well with the scientific project and our rapacious thirst for knowledge.

In any case, allow me to underline again that I believe in upward consciousness almost as little as I believe in downward consciousness, though it is a hypothesis that I could consider in 50 years time if some new and interesting data becomes available. I merely wrote this article as a kind of think piece because I thought maybe other people would find the idea as interesting as I do.

Stay tuned for the introduction to the book I am writing and chapter 1 on Kierkegaard.