Consciousness, Individuality, and Immortality

I'm currently about half-way through polishing up version 1.0 of 'The Fifth Element.' What follows are additional excerpts from that first half:

27
Individuality,
or the unique identity
of a particular mode of matter,
is neither a faculty of the meaty flesh
nor the spiritual substance
of an immaterial soul.
(The psychophysical ‘ego’ is itself
but a memory-encrusted distortion
of the inherently translucent locus.)

Individuality can be recognized only
by perceived continuity of pattern,
personhood by the distinctive inscape
localized by the cybernetic feedback loop
of matter and mind.

“The individuality of the body
is that of a flame
rather than that of a stone,

is that of a form
rather than that
of a bit of substance.” ***

Mind is encountered only
in the formative synaptic firing
that manifests where
the meaty matter of the brain
and the streaming life of the world
convene and interface.
Personhood (with all its memories
and desires, its aptitudes and tastes)
is but the ephemeral outgrowth
stemming from this intimate interactivity.

All in all,
human neurobiology is
a noosynaptic apparatus
that transceives the incoming waveform
of the simulcasted Cosmic Mind
into the manifest images,
sounds, and sensations
of the material world.

___________________
*** Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings.

28

The whole content
of personal consciousness
is
the “I.”

The “I”
is synonymous with
the collected fragments of the world
locally transceived out of the holographic flux
by the individual’s noosynaptic neurochemistry.

Without the unfolding ingression
of the cosmogenetic Wave
the machinery of the mind would lie dormant,
the senses unresponsive,
the body unanimated.

Dissolved by death,
the apparatus fails indeed;
but the animating spark
of conscious activity
that formerly sustained the material body
in its brief semblance of personhood
rushes onward and outward
in its original pristine radiance,
a momentary flash of explicate light
winking out
in the dark dazzle of the implicate Beyond.

-- Thus, there can be no soul
peculiar to each individual node,
but only a personal modulation
of the communal Soul
shared equally by all.

An individual is separated
from his or her fellows
only by the characteristic phase-modulation
that distinguishes his or her spatial-temporal embodiment,
and its continuance as a recognizable pattern.

....................................

35

The evolution of matter
is the gradual building up
by growing complexity
of the primary atomic elements,
arranging itself in particle groupings
of ever-greater volume
into organisms ever more highly organized
and ‘consciousness-ready.’

The whole history of physical
and chemical life on earth
has been, in effect,
the effort of Consciousness
to ‘raise up’ Matter
-- to create in Matter
a supracognitive machine
that would in time triumph
over the mere mechanism
of genetic phylogenesis.

-- And that machine is
Humankind.

“Man is nothing but
evolution become conscious
of itself.” ****

Evolution is thus the progressive unveiling
of the indwelling Spirit in Matter
towards ever-greater heights
of complexification and novelty.

It is the joyful outpouring
of the creative urge of Being;
it is the slow but gradual objectification
of the Divine Spark
that lies submerged and involved
within us all.

“As there is no screen or ceiling
between our heads
and the infinite heavens,

so is there no bar or wall in the Soul
where man, the effect, ceases,
and God, the cause, begins.” *****

36

In this light, material evolution
may be rightly regarded as the advancement
of ever more complex
and ever more ‘consciousness-ready’
prototypes of the One Consciousness.

"If God is here,
everyone is here:

if God is not here,
no one is here." ******

Phylogenic speciation
affords each gradient class of Matter
with similarity of form,
to which sexual selection then provides
he seed of a unique personage.

In humankind,
that hint of individuality
is further augmented and expanded
through one’s formative years
into a noosynaptic web of selfhood.

This is the inception
of an individual pattern identity,
one’s own characteristic augmentation
of the omnipresent Waveform.

Our own particular self-identity
is our unique interface with material reality.

Being a particular modulation
localized in a particular place and time,
we are more or less identifiable
by the particular patterns of memory
and psychological association
with which we qualify
our own little cupful
of the omnipresent Ocean.

37

Thus it is that
the Oversoul of the starry cosmos
inhabits each and every one of us the same,
but is uniquely and unequivocally manifest
through each of us individually
according to the particular noosynaptic structure
of our perceptual physiology.

As the cyberneticist intuited –

“We are not stuff that abides,
but patterns that perpetuate themselves;

whirlpools of water
in an ever-flowing river.” *******

Or better still –
we are as sieves through which
the cosmic stream of Consciousness
manifests a particular continuity
of flow.

Our own personal sluice
grants a unqiue shape
to the out-flowing egress --
and that particular shape and flow
is what we are,
our psyche,
our destiny,
our innermost sense of self.

38

Human neurobiology is
the filter that regulates
the shape and constancy of
our psychokinetic flow.

And should our flesh be
someday re-imagned
by nano-artisans in silicon,
the omniversal flow shall pour through
our little sluice once more
-- and we shall find ourselves
duly resurrected.

Personal immortality can be therefore assured
only by the continuance
of one’s noosynaptic embodiment,
or its translated perpetuation
in a more evolved substrate.

Eternal Life is a rudimentary attribute
of our inhabiting Soul.

Personal immortality (on the other hand)
is solely dependent upon
the sustainable association
of one’s own unique
psychokinetic locus
of flow.

______________
**** Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine.
***** Emerson, The Oversoul.
****** Rabbi Hillel, attributed.
******* Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings.

******************************************(to be continued .......)

Posted by Upwinger at July 14, 2005 02:50 PM