The Mystery of Cosmic Consciousness

Facets of God (Part 3)

FAITH AS A CHOICE

“I am really looking forward to seeing what faith choices they make.” These words, spoken by a colleague about his growing children, brought tears to my eyes. For him it was a simple statement about his family. For me it was a doorway into a completely new reality. I had been taught that there was only one true faith, only one choice that was right—which meant there was no choice at all. From that moment on I committed to make my faith a matter of choice.

Over the years I have discovered that many of us find our view of God unsatisfying. Lurking in the unexplored corners of our souls are questions about why, if God is almighty, things are as they are. We all harbour unanswered prayers and we all know the disconnections between what we say about God and what we know about the universe.

In my last article, I suggested that it’s way past time for us to release faith in a theistic ‘God in the sky’ and we should all become a/theists. This raises the question: what alternative pictures of God are available to us? There are a few that I find particularly compelling and in my next few articles I invite you to explore them with me.

THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

We live in a conscious universe. The very fact that you are reading these words proves that consciousness exists in our Cosmos. How this should have come to be is one of the great mysteries of science. Scientists, philosophers, and theologians have been wrestling for centuries with both the nature of consciousness—what exactly consciousness is—and how consciousness could have possibly emerged from unconscious physical objects and processes. But the answer to these questions remain frustratingly elusive.

The best we can do, when it comes to defining consciousness, is that it is essentially a subjective experience of awareness, of being. To be consciousness is to have the experience of being cognisant of one’s own existence. But how this capacity for awareness came to be in our universe is a mystery. To reduce the answer to “God made it so” is both simplistic and avoiding the importance of the question. But, in spite of the mysterious nature of consciousness, there is no doubt that consciousness exists and has a significant role in shaping the universe—or at least our own little corner of it. As Sam Harris writes in his brilliant book, Waking Up:

Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion. (p.52)

A CONSCIOUS AND CONNECTED UNIVERSE

While the existence of consciousness in humans and other living creatures cannot be disputed, there is still some debate about whether consciousness extends beyond the limits of living beings. Is our consciousness in some way ‘contained’ in our brains and bodies? Does it cease to exist when we do? Can our consciousness connect with anything beyond us that can be considered conscious?

While we may not be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that there is some kind of ‘meta-consciousness' in our universe, there are signs that consciousness exists in ways of which we are only now becoming aware. We know that the universe is deeply connected and all the parts are interdependent. We also know that our earth has ‘mechanisms’ in place both to utilise available resources from outside our planet—like light, heat, and star dust—and to defend against threats—like too much light, heat, or space particles.

All the organisms on our planet are verifiably connected and influence one another. Many animals know how to use tools and solve problems. Insects can do complex calculations and communicate in ways we don’t yet understand (or see this link). And, as Susan Simard explains, we now know that trees can communicate through the extensive underground networks of mycelium in the soil and that parent trees are able to channel resources and nutrients to their offspring.

These realities seem to suggest that we live in a conscious universe—not just a universe in which consciousness exists, but a universe that is, in some inexplicable, cosmic way, conscious in itself.

GOD AS COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

The consciousness of the universe—that is what we call God.

From the impact it had on my thinking, you would expect me to remember the source of this quote, but perhaps it’s not surprising that the words themselves were far more important to me than where they came from. Years of searching have not led me back to the original author, but I have repeated the idea more times than I can count.