The Mind Conspiracy

The Thread of Awareness in Chaos is a metaphor describing something real, but invisible. We can only be aware of it by observing its behavior.

We recognize and use the word "life" and know what a living being is. But when scientists are asked to define life, to separate it from the world of the non-living, they have a serious problem. We can all agree that a particular tree or a fish is alive, or that it is dead. We readily identify a fossil as something that was once alive even though it is made of rock. We can describe what life looks like, what it does, but not what it is.

Why should we have this problem? Life can hardly be something very complicated since even a bacterium can do it. Many scientists, who have worked on this issue, and the related issue of cognition, concluded that we are somehow programmed to avoid these kinds of thoughts. Sort of the reverse of our biological programming to think about  food or sex. Humans are clearly programmed to think and talk about sex. Every cell of our body experiences hunger and we can focus on, and discuss, food with no problem at all.

As soon as we start thinking about the issue of mind, however, we get diverted - our conscious minds lock up or slip aside (wouldn't you rather think about food or sex?). Control words like spirit, God, metaphysics, religion flare up, blinding objective thought on the issue. Our subconscious or whatever it is that controls these inner plots, will do anything to change the subject or confuse the issue. Look how long it took for anyone to figure out the perfectly obvious fact that the two hemispheres of the brain were different beings (still a confusing topic).

I have a theory about this difficulty. Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. Mine is this. We turn away from thoughts about life and mind for the same reason we cringe, turn away, and sometimes faint when offered a glimpse of human intestines or other interior parts of human bodies. We love to stare endlessly at skin and eyes, preferably of the opposite sex, but make horror movies by simply removing the outer layer of cells to show the interior systems of our bodies. Even a little blood makes some people shift consciousness into oblivion.

We are slightly more comfortable when the interior of a human is displayed by other humans in costume, performing as medical doctors, using arcane language known to just a select few. In the same way, we can allow professional psychiatrists to open up our minds - to a point, and as long as the findings are totally confidential. We even allow some thought about life and the deeper issues of spirit so long as these issues are dealt with by professionals - priests of various sorts - and the more costuming and confusing words the better we enjoy the performance.

It is not difficult to imagine why we have evolved a horror of viewing the interior domains of human bodies. When it happens, there is almost always something seriously wrong. Perhaps the same applies to observing the even deeper and more critical control systems describing life and awareness.

So my conspiracy theory does not require secret multidimensional beings, extraterrestrials, gods or goddesses (sorry). Just our own biology, our evolved control systems. We avoid the issue of life because - like our blood and guts - the fabric of mind and the thread of awareness creating it is off limits to our conscious minds.

The question of how limited our conscious mind is, and how aware our larger awareness might be, is something we need to know. Part of our mental system managed to construct us from a single fertilized egg and controls the way our 100 trillion celled bodies clump around and interact with the outside world. How extensive is this mind system? What's in our great unconsciousness that we are not supposed to know about? Or is our unconscious (sub-conscious) mind just a rubbish bin of old operating systems?

There is only one way to find out. Ask it.