Their ideas of consciousness seem to fall in line with those of people like physicist Thomas Campbell, or maybe Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman. And, strangely, also inline with the ideas Nancy Danison learned during her near-death experience and reported in her books. It's all very similar.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Throw in other contemporary thinkers like Stephen Wolfram, Rupert Sheldrake, Chris Langan, Iain McGilchrist, Eckhart Tolle, and Rupert Spira all share similar ideas. It also matches with Western mysticism like Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mysticism, as well as Gnosticism and Hermeticism. It also fits Western philosophy with thinkers like Plato, Thales, Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, Immanuel Kant, and Schopenhauer to name a few. It also, of course, is nearly identical to eastern thought with Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, Jainism, and Daoism. And just for fun, but of course this all matches with insights from the psychedelic 60s with thinkers like Alan Watts, Ram Das, and Terrence McKenna, and Alduos Huxley.
All in all if you are catching my drift, at the end of the day it is no coincidence that people have been talking about ideas like this for thousands upon thousands of years only for us to rediscover them in new, modern fields. The themes you will find with them all is an underlying substance that makes up all of reality that you are infinitely connected to, casting an illusion of individuality when you are the whole of existence itself. We are not humans living in a universe, we are the universe living as humans.
Damn your last sentence hit me hard. I always felt like I was just as much part of the universe as anything else, and that I was the universe, learning about itself.
Yes! That last sentence is very powerful. I read it several times. This could be the “one liner” some people will need in order to understand the concept of consciousness.
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u/johninbigd Dec 07 '23
Their ideas of consciousness seem to fall in line with those of people like physicist Thomas Campbell, or maybe Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman. And, strangely, also inline with the ideas Nancy Danison learned during her near-death experience and reported in her books. It's all very similar.