One of the problems with scientifically studying consciousness, is what instruments or tools would we use? Through brain scans we can see areas of the brain and how they “light up” when accessed. And we can see areas that are damaged and may affect waking consciousness. Consciousness, in this sense, means awareness of what is going on around us.

Studying the brain is not enough. The brain itself is merely the vehicle through which consciousness expresses itself. And if one area of the brain is destroyed, other parts of the brain will be recruited to make up for this loss. If the whole brain is destroyed the human may not have physical awareness but could still have cosmic consciousness.

Cosmic consciousness is something that Science has tried to approach through recording the brain waves of devoted meditators and observing the pattern of the calming, ecstatic and deeply reverential Alpha wave state. But just measuring and recording Alpha waves is still missing the point of the essence of cosmic consciousness.
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All we can do is listen to the ones who have achieved this state of consciousness. You will feel it when the words they speak ring true to you. Or, they may not even speak. Sri Ramana Maharshi held all his classes in silence for many years. People came from miles around to feel the cosmic consciousness in his presence. Can any instrument measure or record such a phenomenon? No. Therefore, it is beyond Science.

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Religions of the world preach to us that we must love each other. But does preaching really work? Just because someone wearing priestly vestments tells me I must love God, does that mean I can or will do it? And if I must be kind out of fear of going to hell, how true is that kindness really?

Kindness implies that it is unforced. I am kind because it feels good, I care and don’t want to hurt people, I love them—not because the preacher told me I must be kind. Yet when I look at the inquisitions, the holy wars, the atrocities committed in the name of religion even to this day, it makes me wonder about the hypocrisy being spouted from the altars and shrines of the world.

If morality is based on such tenets as the Ten Commandments, and we see “holy men” embezzling, cheating, killing, molesting children, then we can question whether religion has contributed anything towards kindness and morality.
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If you listen to the words of all the great ascended beings, you will see that they had nothing to do with the organization of any religion with rigid, punitive belief systems. They are truly about kindness and morality but are without the power-based structures that have evolved in our history.

The fastest way to finding your soul is to sit in the presence of a guru or an ascended master who is already living in that vibrational field. Instead of trying to do this on your own, be humble enough to accept the pointers of this enlightened being and you will eliminate a lot of trial and error.

Yes, you can leave attachment to all worldly things, too. But it must be done from the consciousness that they are not real and they are not eternal. If you approach this from the point of view that you are buying yourself into heaven, it will not be an effective way. It all must take place in the Now and not be put off to some future event.
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Finding that silence within, unperturbed by the ceaselessly chattering mind, is the path to discovering your soul. There are many paths that lead to this state of Unity. You may even find it by reading the words of an inspired yogi who is speaking from the heart.

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Integrative complexity is about how people process information. Some people see things in simple terms (all pigs are dirty), and some may view them in more complex ways (given the chance, pigs like to be clean too). In this way, integrative complexity involves being able to:
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1. See that there is more than one way to look at things.
2. Create links between these disparate things and to bring them into a coherent overall resolution.

Most great business leaders, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk (including Nobel Laureates) have demonstrated integrative complexity skills. They each have shown, in their own way, that they can develop and entertain opposing values and ideas and then integrate them into larger creatives wholes. Things are not simply black and white to them—and they make the most of the gray areas.

Other examples of this skill are:

• The ability to see the big picture, the tiny details, and all levels in between, and merge the views gained at those different levels.
• Being creative, systematic, and practical all at the same time.
• Being assertive and open-minded at the same time.
• Doing things that people assume don’t do together. For example, being wildly creative yet highly organized with intense attention to detail and precision.
• Having a mental map of how things need to be done for highest efficiency—yet being open for improvement.
• Being both humble and intelligent, willing to ask questions and satisfy their curiosity.

In short, integrative complexity skills are the key to our future creativity on this earth. Being tied into rigid rules and narrow prejudices is not the path for our evolution as a species.

Before the dawn of human consciousness, we were like all other animals on the planet: Concerned mainly with survival, eating, and reproducing. Most people are still in this pre-conscious mode. They operate according to the dictates of their culture and never question their purpose or their existence. They are willing to turn others into victims to fulfill their own biological needs, without awareness of the moral implications of their actions including the pain they cause others.

When human consciousness arose, we were taken beyond merely surviving and brought into a state where we wanted to know more and understand more about the great questions of life, such as: Who and what am I? Simply surviving for the sake of surviving is not satisfying to anyone who has the capacity to think, because we know that tomorrow we may not make it anyway—then what?

When we became conscious, we became attuned to that part of us that is immortal: Our Souls. Advanced beings pointed the way. For example, the Buddha saw that suffering was all around him. He sought a path out of this suffering. He found higher consciousness through peaceful meditation. He experienced and was attuned to the forces of the Universe that operate through us. And he saw that this is the way out of misery. He brought this message, but even to this day, few people are able to assimilate it.
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Attuning to this higher consciousness is the only salvation for this planet. For if we go on plundering, pillaging, and depriving each other of health, happiness, and freedom, we will destroy this globe. Or it will reject us for its own health and we will be an experiment in nature that just didn’t make it. By evolving our consciousness and awareness beyond mere survival, we are actually ensuring our survival but with the addition of peace and joy.

Memory consciousness is not efficient because, simply, we forget a lot of things. It would not be efficient if we retained the memory of every little thing that happened to us, every little thing we thought, and every action and reaction. So we have evolved to retain memories that help us survive. Or, we think they help us survive.

But memory is subject to failure. You might remember what you were doing on 9/11 when the disaster struck but do you remember what you were doing all day on 9/11? I mean every minute of that day and night? Of course, that would be inefficient and your mind would be burdened with useless material.

Do you remember anything at all on 9/1 even of this year? We think we have childhood memories, but how many of them are what our relatives told us about?

Visionary consciousness is not efficient either. Efficiency implies getting things done in the most timely and least costly manner. Visionary consciousness is not interested in getting things done. It sees the perfection in all just the way it is. However, if you want to be a creative force in this world, then visionary consciousness is the way to go.
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Memory is about something that has already happened. Visionary consciousness is about the endless possibilities of all that could ever be. It frees us up to create something new and this kind of growth is the innate pattern of the universe.

I have talked to people who have clinically died and later revived. They share certain experiences up to a point. Depending on if they have been raised with Buddha, Christ, or other enlightened beings, they tend to see that being at the very end of the process. This is because the mind is still with us and it needs to place a label on the transcendent feelings that are flooding the consciousness.

If you ask a buddhist monk, such as Geshi Tashi Tsering, he would explain what happens in the afterlife in terms of karma and the emotions we go through when we are actually in the stages of death:

“If one is going to take a lower rebirth, very strong, fearful appearances will appear to your mind during the dissolution of the four physical elements. Conversely, in a fortunate migration, more gentle appearances occur and there is a happiness in the mind. During the radiant white sky, red sky, etc, visions there are no particular fears because the coarse conceptions do not arise.

“The way of dying affects your emotional state at the time of death and this determines which karmas are activated. For example, if someone was killing you, you might become angry, and this would activate a negative potency, a condition for a bad rebirth. It would require a very strong practice of tolerance not to get angry. In general, we should make efforts to help the sick, elderly and dying to generate a very healthy, positive state of mind before and during death. This, in turn, will benefit us, helping us to continue our work towards helping others.”

But as far as people’s personal beliefs about heaven and hell—they are just that. Nothing more than beliefs (have not been proven) and personal (based on their fears of the dissolution of the person they believe they are). No one whom I’ve talked to, who has ever had a death or near-death experience, has ever mentioned hell. Particularly the version of hell with the devil poking them with a flaming pitchfork.
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Conversely, no one mentions the bland version of heaven, with angels playing harps all day in the clouds, that certain cultures indoctrinate into their people. So, despite people’s beliefs that they have “earned” this sort of heaven, anyone who has returned from the grave has not vouched for this depiction of the after life. It is a much more dynamic process that goes beyond the petty conjectures of the human mind.

People who describe near death experiences are “near” but not “at” death. Therefore they are still operating at a level of consciousness that includes the sensorium, perception of time passing, and other thought constructs that allow us to navigate through, and communicate about, the physical world.

In the physical world, it looks like things occur in a linear sequence. And so it goes with the process of leaving this world. First we see a tunnel of light, then we see loved ones greeting us from the Other Side. Then the light gets stronger as deeper feelings of peace and wonder enfold us. Finally we “see” God and become absorbed into the blissful One.

But once we are free from the constraints of the body and the way the mind categorizes and organizes reality, we are free from time as well. We see that everything is all happening at once in the vastness of it all.
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The human mind is limited by so many variables—our conditioning, our DNA, and its natural propensity to seek order and patterns in a logical sequence for the sake of our survival. Once we are free from its mechanisms and the need to get things done, we are part of the Cosmic Consciousness that cannot be expressed in words.

Every part of the world interacts with every other part of the world. So the world would be different without me from that point of view. But otherwise, the trees will go on tree-ing, the birds with go on migrating, the oceans will keep on in their fascinating patterns and the traffic will keep whirring by.

The human ego makes us think that we as individuals are extremely important. It can’t imagine that we are part of an immense totality that all fits together perfectly and that death is part of it. So it thinks we need to strive to differentiate ourselves by attention-getting acts and accumulating treasures and fighting against death as hard as we can. But deep down, anyone who has the slightest powers of observation, or the ability to think, has concluded that the world will go on very nicely without us.

It was going on well before people appeared on it. A case could be made that it would have been better off altogether before people ravaged its resources and did not renew them.

Part of the perfection of the world is the process of birth and death. But the ego can’t face death. It fears it because it cannot comprehend the eternality of the Soul. So it creates a scenario that it must fight against. “I will make a name for myself so others will remember me long after I am gone.” If you examine history books you may observe that most of the people who insisted on changing the world were the tyrants and mass murderers of their age.
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The planet was designed to function, without many of its components in tact. None of the dinosaurs exist today but the planet is still here. Volcanoes spewed their ashes and created large die-off of plants and animals. Yet the planet survived. It will be here even if people, in their spiritual blindness, exterminate each other from it.

I would put it this way, “Enlightenment is the understanding that occurs when you see the world.” I would not say the world is a simulation, I’d rather say that it is an illusion. It seems real, like a glistening mirage on a hot summer day. But it is an illusion created by the interaction of a number of forces and energy fields.

This illusion is all the contrasts, the black and white, up and down, good and evil, happiness and sadness, all happening in one immense simultaneity. In an unenlightened state, we cannot see the unity behind it. We believe the illusion and will run to the glittering pool of water on the road, believing it is real.

All the things that we see are not real in the sense too that they are perishable and keep changing. Enlightenment contacts that field behind this constantly changing landscape. It takes us to the origin of it all, where nothing changes.

What we see in the world is a combination of our optic nerve and its interaction with light, heat and a number of other variables. Yet if we walk into a door, we feel it and it hurts. The world does not feel like a simulation in such cases.
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Enlightenment takes you into the unchanging background, where sensations of pain and pleasure are purely sensations, without all the psychological or fearful thoughts attached to them. You might feel the actual physical pain but without the fear, it becomes another cry of the body for attention. And you gladly comply with its needs. But you do not believe you are this body.

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