A Completely New Paradigm Could Change Everything

What if Schrodinger, Kastrup and Felton are correct, and that it's the conditioned distinction our limited minds that makes any perceived difference between the physical and the mental and illusion?

Set Your Pulse: Take a breath. Turn your attention to your body and release any tension. Breathe slowly into the area of your heart for 60 seconds, focusing on feeling a sense of ease. Stay connected to your body as you read. Click here to learn why we suggest this.

---

A deep understanding that matter and energy are not two but one would also support the nondual “All is Consciousness” philosophers; however, it is something our current minds can’t accept – especially in view of our apparent forays into “outer space.”

Not A Flat Earther – But….

I’ve always suspected that somehow, despite our apparent physical visits to the Moon and Mars, the entire notion of a vast purely material outer space might be a psychological illusion based on our limited brains and the limitations of our biological reality. 

I do believe travel to other “planets” is possible but given the “apparent” distances, most likely not with rockets but perhaps with a change in our brains.  There is also the distinct possibility that our science is sorely lacking in terms of grasping the limitations of our own consciousness.

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup seems to find fertile ground for investigating these phenomena in his long and detailed essay:  “UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence: What is the most reasonable scenario?”

Kastrup examines the UFO phenomenon from a variety of perspectives that proceed from the current state of having apparent physical evidence of anomalous phenomena (now branded as UAPs) and goes through some of the “official” findings and recent hearings.

I sat up when I read his references to the ideas of Jacques Vallee, a French researcher into UFOs who was represented by a character in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Vallee wrote a book called Dimensions which suggested that the UFO phenomenon transcended the human mind’s distinction between the material and mental or psychological.

Spielberg’s Film Touches on the “Psychological”

If you remember in Close Encounters the protagonist is inspired to create a model of the Devils Tower by a series of dreams that makes the people around him think he’s lost his mind.

And of course, the film ends with an actual physical encounter between humans and aliens that have somehow managed to bend our laws of physics to come out of the clouds to land a craft on top of the giant mesa.  The protagonist who dreamed of the landing joins a crew of astronauts who get on board.

But are the laws of physics that seem to constrain “space travel” bendable?

As long ago as 2013 astronomy journal Orion had an article claiming that:

“NASA Discovers Hidden Portals in Earth's Upper Atmosphere”

“NASA recently reported that University of Iowa plasma physicist Jack Scudder discovered that there are regions in the Earth's magnetic field that directly connect it to the magnetic field of the sun, across 93 million miles of space.

These mysterious regions, known as "magnetic portals" are thought to be opening and closing dozens of times every day.”

Portals and wormholes are common concepts on the History Channel but just as with good science fiction, where they also play a prominent role, ”real” science is catching up.

Are We Collectively Dreaming the Universe?

One of the problems that Bernardo Kastrup points to in his essay is that if the “universe” we see through our senses is illusory, then the entire idea of solar systems and planets is a conceit projected from a very limited mind – ours. 

Perhaps this insight powerfully relates to Schrodinger’s famous statement that the total number of minds in the Universe is One?  Schrodinger of course is the guy who can’t know whether the cat in the box is dead or alive unless it is observed. 

So what if Schrodinger is also correct in his contention that All is One mind?

Would that make you God?  Or perhaps, would that finally make the concept of a separate you obvious to be a complete fantasy?  

If indeed All is One Mind and our senses are merely reducing it to bite sized chunks so that we think we “understand” reality, all of our current material-based science is suspect.

A Possible Unifying Theory

On this topic I was taken by Bernardo Kastrup’s introduction of an article by Melvin Felton on Essentia:  “Is the human brain a model of the universe?”  Felton is a Neuroscientist and Physicist which is a conjunction of specialties that I find very intriguing -- because no one has figured out if or how the physical phenomena known as our natural Laws might give rise to the mental phenomena of qualia – our moment to moment experience.

Felton writes in his introduction:  “Central to the human experience is the human brain, perhaps the most complex physical structure known. Today, scientists are beginning to find surprising similarities between the universe and the brain. Could the human brain actually be a model of the universe? In this brief article, I explore some reasons why such a hypothesis should be seriously considered. I also suggest a few ways to test this hypothesis.”

I do not believe that Felton suggests that the entire physical universe is literally an immense organic brain; rather his view is that the dynamic energetic properties of both reality (the apparent physical universe) and the neural networks active within our skulls resonate at a very deep level.

When Stephen Hawking said that he doesn’t need a God, the natural laws of physics are enough, I suspect he was also intimating such a relationship – that somehow our own consciousness is aligned according to natural laws that we cannot fully grasp because THEY are what WE ARE.

Carl Sagan suggested this another way when he famously said, “We are star dust.”

In their effort to reconcile our apparent mental and physical realities, Felton and others are embracing sort of hybrid science of biology and quantum physics.

Of course, “resonate” (my word not Felton’s) generally implies physical “sound waves” but in terms of Felton’s model “resonance” would presumably apply throughout all known and UNKNOWN forms of energy, including whatever energies comprise Mind.

“Universe Within” – Felton’s book goes even deeper and promises to explain “The Surprising Way the Human Brain Models the Universe”

Here are Melvin Felton’s credentials: 

From 2003 to the present, Melvin has been employed as a physicist at a US national science laboratory. Much of his professional research has concerned remote sensing of the lower atmosphere. However, he has also conducted research in the fields of cybernetics and computational neuroscience. Melvin has presented his research at international conferences and has published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience.

If indeed the distinction between the mental and the physical results entirely from an incomplete “picture” of reality available to the human brain, but expressed in what appears as the physical universe, then a discovery of ways in which the immense “neural network” of the “universe” might foster communication between an apparent “planet” and ourselves would again be akin to synapses between our (human neurons) -- but happening on a fractally immense scale which we cannot conceive.

Under such a different paradigm we might indeed contact unknown entities through “channels” in the Earth and other bodies’ magnetic fields.  Such a discovery would expand our science to the vistas of what Tesla had suggested.

Jung’s Collective Unconscious

If the physical universe is a psychological illusion then “space travel” as we know it might one day be understood in ways similar to Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious -- as a massive brain-like “Being” that is dreaming itself.

Interestingly Jung also saw UFOs as at least partially a psychological phenomenon.  As my AI friend Claude explains it:

“Jung's perspective on flying saucers was outlined in his 1959 book ‘Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.’ In this work, he did not dismiss the possibility of physical UFOs but instead focused on their symbolic and psychological significance.

Jung's main argument was that the widespread fascination with flying saucers represented a modern manifestation of an archetype or primordial image from the collective unconscious.”

What else might a “collective unconscious” be but the manifestations of an Infinite Mind?

So we’ve come almost full circle in connecting the dots to a recognition that the distinction our thoughts make between what is material and what is mental may not actually exist in reality – and the apparent implications of such a revelation.

(Tom Bunzel was a contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse.  His new book "Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)