How Can Meaningful Shifts in Human Consciousness Occur?

“Within the next 20 years (perhaps sooner), we will witness three tightly inter-related, gigantic revolutions in our understanding of reality"

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Joe Martino recently wrote a piece about how “The Loudest Deceptions Provide the Greatest Evolutionary Potential,” suggesting that when such truths are revealed a profound shift in human perception is possible.  An obvious example might be Copernicus in terms of science and Watergate for politics.

It brings to mind how Einstein is often quoted as having said “you cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it.”  (He may or may not have said it).

Here at the Pulse and Collective Evolution we have also felt that some sort of major “shift” in some fundamental beliefs was necessary for humanity to survive, and that we have been lost in a fundamental delusion of some kind for a long time, especially regarding the very nature of consciousness.

A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet Bernardo Kastrup, a European philosopher known for his fierce defence of Idealism (as opposed to the current belief in Materialism). 

Kastrup argues for an idealist ontology in which the mind is the sole fundamental reality, rather than matter. According to Bernardo, the cosmos is rooted in a universal consciousness. Space, time, matter and energy are experiences within consciousness, not external or independent structures.

These are radical ideas even today but if they were to be widely accepted, conventional reality could truly change.

Bold Predictions from a Modern Philosopher

Recently Bernardo posted a prediction on Facebook that I found fascinating because it provides three specific examples of what a shift in consciousness might represent and offers some tantalizing specifics of how it might arise.

Here is what he wrote:

“Within the next 20 years (perhaps sooner), we will witness three tightly inter-related, gigantic revolutions in our understanding of reality:

1- The official recognition of the presence and role of non-human intelligence (NHI) throughout our history;

We can see some of this happening around us today as more and more people are drawn to ideas of Oneness and have begun to notice what Stephen Hawking famously suggested when he said that he did not need a God as an explanation – the laws and mathematical perfection of this incredible universe are enough.

So where else might there be evidence of NHI?

Project Ceti is an interesting scientific effort on the island of Dominica to use artificial intelligence to interpret the clicking language of whales and perhaps communicate with them.  (The Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project Ceti for short. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.)

“Ceti represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.”  (New Yorker)

John C. Lilly, subject of the film “Day of the Dolphin” was a rogue scientist years ago who attempted a similar experiment with dolphins, but the military took it over.

As a neuroscientist who also worked with deprivation tanks, Lilly seemed to have zeroed in on an approach to consciousness that points to nonhuman and perhaps nonlocal intelligence.  He was apparently focused on the very nature of awareness, and what exactly IS aware.

I had my own epiphany about nonhuman intelligence several years ago when I saw TED video about DNA that compared it to a computer disk that executes “code” in a specific way that suggested to me that like our own software, it must be the product of intelligence, although clearly not our own.

Francis Crick, one of the geneticists who discovered DNA later adopted the theory of “Panspermia”  or life having been seeded somehow from elsewhere in the universe to account for our “organic operating system.  I set my ideas out in a book, “If DNA is Software Who Wrote the Code?”

Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle famously said: 

“The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

Of course, the most obvious clue to the existence of nonhuman intelligence is now the universal acceptance of UFOs and aerial phenomena that clearly exist, move intentionally, that we cannot explain.

This may be the sort of presence that Bernardo posits has existed throughout our history.

And of course, there is the new nonhuman intelligence that we ourselves have created and called “Artificial”.

2- The rejection of physicalism and embracement of idealism as the only plausible metaphysics;

Almost everyone is convinced there is a “solid” world “out there” from which they are separate.

But what if the world truly was, for each of us, simply a set of perceptions arising in our awareness?

The participation of an Observer at the core of phenomena is one of the puzzling paradoxes of quantum physics, but each of us can probably point to experiences that shook our belief in an external objective universe – even if we didn’t drop acid.

Plato made a case for the primacy of “thought” in his theory of Forms, suggesting that every imperfect material object that we experience is based on a perfect mathematical and geometric “Form”.

Eckhart Tolle sort of expands on this idea with a different use of the word Form, saying that it is Being or Consciousness that has evolved and lost itself in Form, and we are just the universe awakening from that dream.  This notion of course is part of much of eastern philosophy.

As I pointed out in my article on ‘Biocentrism’ an understanding that there is a deep intelligence at the heart of the Universe itself, which is also Bernardo’s contention, would irrevocably change our relationship to the planet, and to all sentient beings.

3- A new understanding of the nature of time that will revolutionize the ontological status of past and future, as well as our understanding of the meaning of birth and death.

Time is one of the great mysteries because we take our understanding of it for granted.  The traumatic urgency of time is at the heart of capitalism along with the urge to achieve.

But a simple look inside amid stillness yields the comprehension that we create the experience of time in our minds.

With an interesting book, the time waiting for your doctor is no big deal.  With an anxious mind-set every minute can be torturous. 

I suggested an alternative concept of time that was embraced by some ancient people, notably the Maya, in a piece titled “Does Reality Operate on Cyclical Timelines?”

Of course, Einstein introduced the notion of “SpaceTime” as a function of the geometry of the universe which gave rise to a lot of science fiction about time travel.  And today much of the conversation about the possible propulsion systems of UFO focuses on some gravitational power to bend spacetime and create “vortexes” that would allow travel over what seem to be vast distances to our perception.

And with the rise of mindfulness and meditation, we have seen how seeing the present moment as the only actual reality can bring experiences of peace.

Imagine a world in which everyone was conscious of the present moment as all there is without the baggage of a horrific past and an uncertain future.  Such a world is hard to imagine today.

It might be one where Life is seen as all pervasive – just another term for consciousness, God or Being – and therefore death is viewed as integral to Life, and not the “opposite” of Life.  The opposite of Death would simply be Birth and a big shift in our perception would be honoring death instead of living in fear.

Bernardo’s Summary

Bernardo wrapped up his fascinating Facebook predictions with the usual warning. But, like Joe Martino, he also saw a reason for optimism if the veil of truth is pulled back on many of our current unknowns.

An entirely new reality would be revealed which humanity will have no choice but to accept. Joe is one of many who believe, for example, that revelations as to the cause of 9-11 could precipitate such a shift.

Here is how Bernardo ended his Facebook post:

“Concurrently, these same 20 years will be the most dangerous in human history, when we will have to survive the highest risk of civilization collapse since the end of the Roman empire, due to a coalescence of simultaneous environmental and geopolitical threats.

Good luck to us. If we make it, the reward will be unfathomably handsome.”

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(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.)