The life books.

It seems the purpose of our visits to Earth in human bodies is to experience the many shades of this particular level of conscious existence. Our progress here is said to be monitored and recorded as a higher form of consciousness known as the Akashik Records. (I might write a blog post on that particular subject later, but cursory research suggests access to such information requires attunement to higher levels of consciousness than I can manage.) In the space between our material lives after death, we’re able to access those records as we’re guided through a review of our life on Earth using the life books.

Here are a couple more edited excerpts from Diary of my life after death relevant to the life books:

I catch Spiro’s thought that one short visit to the material levels would hardly scratch the surface of what I need to learn, hence my repeated Earth lives. He says the process of conscious refinement is eternal. No matter how painful or pointless a life might appear to human eyes, our soul is indestructible and learns from every experience.

Spiro says sometimes our review with the Elders involves replaying selected scenes from a previous life so we can re-experience them at soul level, uncushioned by a material body. He says this will help me understand the true motives for my behavior so I can appreciate what parts of me need more work. Feeling how I made other people feel is another aspect of the learning process. If I let myself or others down, I have to make amends in my next Earth life, or in subsequent lives if I’m a slow learner.

Today is my first experience with the life books. Spiro explains that I’ll use these to review my life as Laurie. The life books are housed in a kind of library, a building that at first sight puts me in mind of a huge hangar where they build airliners on Earth, but as I watch the shape changes and becomes more reminiscent of a cathedral. The mental echo of a peculiar odor stirs shadowy memories, except I was never anyplace remotely like this.
‘You’re recalling your previous visits,’ Spiro clarifies.
And now it begins coming back as I take in the scene before me: an endless space with people sitting at long tables.

We’re approached by one of the librarians who resembles a member of some ancient religious group in her long grey robe and sandals. I think she’s a she; it’s hard to tell with that severe haircut and immobile features. Maybe I just sense a female element of her soul.
The ancient librarian takes us into a small room and directs us to one of the life books. Some book! It’s more like a giant TV monitor and taller than I am, with a ‘screen’ that appears to be liquid and alive…not unlike that one in the stargate movie. It even has a similar setup in that I can step through and enter another kind of time and space.

I’m to use the life books to put myself back into the flow of events that made up the life I just lived. I’ll experience key scenes where I interacted with other people so I can take stock of the way I handled situations I shared with them. That way I’ll get to see missed opportunities and decide what I might do to put things right in a future life. I’ll even get to see a little way along lines of consequence that relate directly to me, seeing alternative choices I could have made.

The life books are something that everybody has to experience after each life on the material levels. As this is my first trip, Spiro explains that when I go through the screen, some of my energy becomes part of the scene and joins the flow of events; the rest of my energy stays outside. This way I can control how much of ‘me’ is in the scene. I can just watch myself, or if I want to really get involved and experience the full force of the actual events – with all of the accompanying sensations, emotions, memories and so on – I can do that too.

Good vibrations.

I can understand materialist scientists like Dennett or Dawkins’ contempt for ‘delusional’ spiritual beliefs. I imagine they must feel the same way about those as I do about Creationist ‘thinking’. (Though I’m the author of a book and blog supporting the notion of life after death, I consider most spiritual belief, like religious belief, as confused wishful thinking.) You might think ideas about Creationism and Intelligent Design are harmless enough, but when their advocates insist they receive the same credence as scientifically based facts, they become a problem. On the other hand, in asserting that all things spiritual or religious are nonsense, people like Dennett and Dawkins demonstrate the same evangelical narrow mindedness as Creationists and other religious fundamentalists who try to convert ‘unbelievers’.

Religious or scientific, it’s not a question of intellect, but of a refusal to consider ideas that don’t fit your model of reality. For people like Dennett and Dawkins, their reality model is built from materialist, if not to say reductionist, facts. Of course I’m using a couple of famous names to make a point about materialist science in general: namely, that I can’t imagine materialist scientists devoting much of their thinking time to metaphysical notions except to ridicule them. So their rationality makes them appear dogmatic.

To rational materialists, science and reality are entirely of the physical world. They’d like science to explain the conscious world too, but the plain fact is that it can’t, as most scientists and philosophers who deal with the question of consciousness would probably accept – with the proviso that sooner or later we’re bound to have an understanding of how the brain creates consciousness. Any other view just wouldn’t make sense in terms of what science tells us about reality.

Surely they’re just being realistic? Well yes, so long as you think ‘realistic’ means being convinced that everything in reality – consciousness included – reduces to matter. Trouble is, most people on the planet don’t think that, judging by the many millions who believe in a God or Gods. The thing about notions of God, though, is that they evolve right along with us, as our history shows. But then so do scientific facts.

Now I’m going to talk about energy, a well understood scientific concept and a tried and proven consequence of the laws of physics. In one interpretation, energy is a measure of a physical system’s ability to do work. My understanding is that energy is also physical ‘things’ in the sense that energy and matter are interchangeable. 

But is consciousness energy too? ‘Spiritual’ people seem to think it is, but a more refined kind of energy then matter. Materialists and reductionists on the other hand think that both matter and consciousness boil down to the same as-yet undefined but fundamental stuff – a notion that would probably satisfy the spiritual in one interpretation. For scientists, the fundamental stuff would be the basis of matter, and essentially insentient, but somehow able to give rise to consciousness in a brain. For spiritual people, it would be the basis of consciousness from which everything else, conscious and material, emerges.

As the basis of physical matter, atoms and molecules vibrate. In fact the universe is in constant motion on every measurable level, and that means our bodies are too. At the level of atoms, the electrons that orbit the atomic nucleus aren’t stationary, but exist in a kind of cloud, meaning they could be anywhere within the bounds of that cloud. Even inside the atomic nucleus itself, electrical repulsion of the protons, and angular momentum of the protons and neutrons, means they’re never still either. Down at quantum level, protons and neutrons in the atom’s nucleus are made from quantum particles called quarks held together by more quantum particles called gluons. And sometimes the quantum particles are just particles, while other times they’re waves – it all depends on how you try to pin them down. (Hence their being governed by the Uncertainty principle.)And according to superstring theory, if you went down a few million times smaller that quantum particles, you’d find tiny vibrating strings. This theory says that the precise frequency at which each string vibrates creates a different quantum particle.

Given all of that, it’s not such a great leap to the notion that consciousness must also be composed of, or produced by, vibrations of energy – maybe to make thoughts, perceptions, anything.

In Diary of my life after death, Laurie, the diary’s writer, has her guide explain that everything in her current location (between Earthly lives) is conscious energy, while everything on the material levels is made from denser matter energy. (Energy shaped into physical stuff.) Her guide is, in fact, telling her that consciousness and matter resonate in many different frequencies. As with superstring theory, the lower frequencies ‘make’ all of the so-called materially real things, while the higher frequencies are non-physical experiences. Laurie is told that to be on Earth, her conscious vibrations make an interactive interface with the far lower vibrational frequencies of a physical body. In doing that, both kinds of vibrational frequencies interact to decide the ‘realness’ of everything she sees, hears, feels and experiences. This creates her view of ‘reality’ while she’s on Earth. She’s told that between physical lives there are many different layers and levels of consciousness; the one you come to depends on your own mental level – your personal sphere of conscious awareness. (Laurie’s ‘sphere of consciousness’ is also her personal view of reality, just like on Earth.)

NOTE: In the space between material lives we’re guided through a review of our life on Earth using the life books: screens of energy that allow us to either watch or interact with key scenes from our Earthly life. (I’ll enlarge on the life books in a separate post.)

Here’s another excerpt from Diary of my life after death outlining how vibrational frequencies work:

    In a flash we’re at the library, watching the screen of a teaching Book. I see a woman’s body and recognize her as an idealized version of me so I don’t mind her being naked. (As a matter of fact I look pretty good.) Superimposed on her is what looks like a living rainbow cloud.
“Energy fields,” Ed answers my thought. “In a human body the energy of your mental and physical selves resonates on different frequencies and in multiple dimensions. Put simply, the elements of your physical body are energy resonating at lower frequencies, while the energy of your consciousness resonates at higher frequencies.”
I watch the colors in the rainbow cloud flicker like an aurora borealis as they swirl and intermix inside of her.
“As evolving consciousness, you climb slowly through the frequency bands of your aura,” he says. “You become each of the levels of conscious energy in turn, experiencing a different ‘reality’ on each level. In the process your relationship with your body changes. You become less of a body and more of a mind. You come to represent a more complete and refined expression of Love.”
Ed tells me the physical feelings I experienced as a human being – the ones I based many of my major decisions on – were just side-effects of my body looking out for the genes that built it. In other words, I assigned a world of conscious meaning to a stream of chemically induced sensations. My body had no mind of its own, yet millions of years of blind evolution had built a nervous system and brain able to commandeer my visiting consciousness. Without even knowing it was doing it, my body was controling me just to help it get its genes copied and reproduced.
“You lost your own conscious identity and assumed that of a genetic organism.”
“But those urges and sensations were what made me human!”
He reminds me that I became human only to learn that I’m infinitely more than a collection of blind chemical interactions. My extra consciousness was all that made me different from other animals, but being more conscious was pointless if I chose to behave like other animals.
“What about all of the complexity my human mind brought to my relationships?” I ask. “Surely that made me different from other animals!”
“Did your ‘complex mind’ give your reproductive urges, or your subsequent behavior, more ‘meaning’ than for other animals? Did you have a different motive for reproducing than other animals? Did you act out your urges in a different way?”
We both know the answer, despite the excuses I might have come up with.
He says souls experience physicality only to realize it’s not what they are. We all start out perceiving reality as a physical experience, and on that misunderstanding we build history, social structures, values, morality, ideas and religious beliefs. But as our consciousness evolves, the material reality that once seemed so irresistibly real begins to change. Later we recognize that reality as fleeting patterns that form in matter-energy.
Those patterns only seem to have permanence to us as human beings because our consciousness perceives them via nerves and a brain made from the same matter-energy. In occupying a body, all of our perceptions become attuned to the lower, slower frequencies of the matter-energy world.
Ed says that by misinterpreting bodily sensations and biomechanical impulses as my pains, joys, emotions, loves and fears, I develop habits, neuroses and psychoses, delusions, insecurities and fantasies. From this confusion of physical and mental experiences I fashion memories and compelling ongoing scenarios that shape my view of who and what I am. All of this registers as ‘patterns in my personal energy’ and becomes part of the baggage that I, as a conscious soul, take with me through a succession of lives; baggage that I offload as I gradually learn what’s Really going on.

The monkey suit.

My interest in life after death is nothing to do with religious belief. For me, accounts of the near-death experience and hypnotic between-life regression offer more convincing and relevant evidential support for conscious survival after physical death than religion does. In the context of a much broader reality, the notion of life after death joins up many loose ends and answers important questions about our existence. So why isn’t there a more enlightened attitude to the subject?

Granted, death isn’t everyone’s favorite topic for all kinds of reasons – fear of the unknown and loss of loved ones being just two – yet those who report these experiences give detailed descriptions of events after death that could offer comfort and reassurance in both those areas of concern.

The problem is that second hand reports of an afterlife where the miraculous is normal, can’t compete with the hard physical reality that our senses and brain have been telling us our survival depends on for a couple of million years of evolution. Not surprisingly, most of us are only interested in the physically real world; we’re programmed to be motivated by own personal interests and concerns, which necessarily center on thinking of ourselves as genetic organisms. We’re probably unaware of that fact on a conscious level, but there’s no denying that our thoughts and behavior are those of genetic organisms. Our entire understanding of reality, our deepest urges and instincts, are intrinsic functions of what genetic organisms evolved to do: survive long enough to reproduce their own personal genes. These most basic – and fundamentally mindless – functions have shaped us and our society, our beliefs and understanding of reality at the deepest levels.

A consequence of this basic imperative to survive and reproduce as genes are gods, religions and versions of an afterlife with their origins in the need to survive in this life, where an uncompromising physical reality dictates the terms of existence.

There’s ample evidence for that in the way our concept of God has changed as we’ve evolved – from worship of the forces of nature, the sun and a pantheon of planets, through a wrathful Old Testament God, to whatever deity reflects the way we think of ourselves now.

More evidence that religion is about physical survival is in the way religious faith demands our unquestioning acceptance of its version of God, and a specific set of rules and beliefs, over alternative ideas and dogmas. Limiting our ideas and the freedom to consider alternative explanations is central to the concept of religious belief, but only a fool would deny that ‘truth’ tailored to suit human ideas of God has stifled progress and open minded inquiry. Instead it breeds closed minds and intolerance. Religion’s original role was to protect the interests of rival tribes in their squabbles over resources. This same motive has been all too evident throughout human history, and still applies today. We can only refute the claim that man makes God in his own image by deluding ourselves that we don’t evolve. But then self-delusion is one of our most basic traits.

Of course, accounts of near-death experiences and hypnotic regression could simply be more self-delusion; It all depends on what we choose to believe. But given the physical foundations for our understanding of reality, a belief in the metaphysical should make no sense, and yet millions of us still hold those beliefs, along with notional promises of an afterlife, and instructions on how to attain it.

So is the idea of life after death all in our mind? An intriguing thought, especially when, for us, everything is in our mind, including our understanding of reality, and even our conscious selves. Without conscious awareness there can only be oblivion.

Is that all we have to look forward to when we die? Those who report the existence of another reality after physical death tell us that by leaving behind the restrictions imposed by a physical body, our consciousness is free to experience more of its essential self, allowing us entry to near boundless dimensions of heightened awareness. They say it’s precisely by being part of a material body that our consciousness is constrained, damped down by physical matter. It seems that while we’re in a human body with a nervous system and brain, circumstances simply don’t allow us to comprehend a reality that’s not dependent on three material dimensions plus a linear concept of time. (The ability to postulate the existence of more dimensions does nothing to erase our delusions, or the fact that the genetic parts of us were created by the origins and circumstances of this particular designer ‘reality’; while our consciousness is inhibited by it, we have little choice but think, feel and behave as reflections of it.)

There’s also the small matter of an instinctive conviction that we can only continue to exist by surviving and reproducing as genes. This conviction built our psyche; little wonder we can’t envisage a conscious, post death reality free of chemically induced urges, emotions and sensations. For many of us, these are the very things that make life worth living; why would we want to be free of them? (No less pointless a question than asking why we’d want to evolve from single celled organisms.) But perhaps for many of us it’s enough to exist merely to help genes replicate and reproduce themselves.

Here’s another clip from Diary of my life after death:

‘I know the notion of an afterlife – heaven, Valhalla, paradise, the happy hunting ground, whatever – is core to human culture. I also know that many folks on Earth think death is about gloom, misery, tombs and loss.

‘One of the tuition programs I looked at gave the impression that neuroscientists on Earth think notions of an afterlife are an evolutionary design feature to make us feel better about the inevitability of death while we’re alive. They say near-death experiences and out-of-body trips happen when a brain is starved of oxygen, or maybe when the part where emotions happen gets flooded with feelgood chemicals. They say the euphoria, visions and memory reruns during a near-death experience are all just a result of one kind of brain activity or another.

‘To atheists that must sound pretty plausible, and yet scientific plausibility wouldn’t recognize itself if it traveled back fifty years, or forward just a few.

‘From up here it’s obvious that scientists know as much about an afterlife as most other folks do: zip. They’d have you believe consciousness is made by a brain built from star debris dumped into space by old suns. (It did feel that way to me some days.)’

Right and wrong.

In Diary of my life after death, Laurie, the narrator, is introduced to the major role that genetic bodies play in determining the human concept of morality.

In the chapter on the difference between right and wrong, the thought is communicated to her that, in genetic terms, good for survival and reproduction is RIGHT, and bad for survival and reproduction is WRONG. She’s told by her guide to note that survival and self-interest play a major role in helping human beings decide whether their behavior is ‘right or wrong’. In spite of human consciousness, physical survival is still a primary factor in the human understanding of morality.

Here’s another excerpt from the book:

I’m at the library to do some gap-filling in my learning program. Spiro says the Elders have decided that before I return to Earth I need a refresher on the major role that a human body plays in helping us decide our morality.

The old librarian takes us to my assigned tutorial screen where I receive the thought that, for genetic organisms, whatever is good for survival and reproduction is RIGHT, and whatever is bad for survival and reproduction is WRONG.

What’s more, this ‘survival morality’ is reinforced for each generation by parents, TV, educators, religious indoctrinators and everyone else that young minds are influenced by.

I’m shown a developing brain with cells and their connections; I watch this brain become more densely packed as the organism grows.

I know that a visiting consciousness arrives in an Earthly body with experiences from previous lives in the form of patterns in its personal energy; the consciousness then has to choose a brain with suitable potential and insinuate these energy patterns into the developing neural network of brain cell connections.

When information begins feeding into this consciousness/brain collaboration from the outside world, I watch a multi-dimensional graphic of this individual’s mental abilities, talents and predilections growing inside their brain.

The incoming information decides how pathways form between brain cells, and how the cells work together. (The earlier and more persistent the incoming information, the deeper and longer-lasting its impression on the brain/mind.)

3.5 billion years of good for survival and reproduction being RIGHT, and bad for survival and reproduction being WRONG, built human bodies and brains from the ground up. This survival ‘morality’ ensured that a growing consciousness had a series of physical hosts through which to learn.

As the most fundamental driving force in our life, the struggle for survival shaped our body, brain and mind, and made us determined to understand ourselves and our environment. As the main driver of our intellectual development, the survival imperative naturally evolved into the need to explain everything scientifically.

Yet the fear of getting eaten isn’t only the bottom line incentive behind our need to figure things out; it’s actually our reason for living. Everything we are and do is in some measure a reflection of the instinctive drive to survive.

Of course ‘survival’ for us as conscious beings isn’t just about surviving as genes; it’s about the hyper-complex way our consciousness perceives the world and reality which includes our ideas and feelings about truth, justice, morality and decency. All the interrelated subtleties of modern life have their roots in the survival instinct; it’s more fundamental than our DNA and as unpredictable as our imagination. Whether we’re materialist or spiritual, that instinct informs everything we are and do. We live and learn from our experiences not simply so we can be more efficient survivors, but so we can be happier and more fulfilled ones. That includes a need to feel spiritually fulfilled.

Complicating this further is our need to ascribe ‘meaning’ to the contents of our personal reality. And as this too is driven by our personal need to survive, we don’t just use senses, mind and intelligence to decide what’s real and what’s not, we cheat to try and shape reality to suit ourselves. We have a degree of free will and so are able to choose which aspects of reality we’d like to be more real than others. In this way we’re constantly designing our own personal reality to satisfy a forever changing idea of what that reality should be. 

At this point I become more involved in the program when I see people justifying their feelings of envy, greed, anger or whatever simply because these traits help them survive in life’s jungle. I identify when greed becomes ‘ME getting what I need for MY survival.’ Anger becomes ‘ME being assertive for MYself.’ I feel resentment but tell myself ‘an injustice has been committed against ME.’ Revenge is ‘ME getting justice for myself.’ Jealousy turns into ‘I want material equality for ME’. Ditto envy. I pretend my mean-mindedness is ‘toughness’ and tell myself it’s admirable…

The message is, until human consciousness discovers its true purpose, it will go on thinking of itself as the body it occupies, and so continue devoting its energies to the survival of that body, and the replication and reproduction of its genes, rather than furthering its development as consciousness.

Selfishness.

Richard Dawkins, arch anti-God proponent, aroused my interest in genetics years ago. After reading his seminal book, The Selfish Gene, and ones that followed, I became a Dawkins believer.

What do genes have to do with life after death? Genes are molecules that copy themselves. After millions of years of evolution, this copying process has produced our physical selves. But according to more considered notions of life after death, our conscious awareness isn’t created by our physical body and brain; it originates elsewhere and simply takes up temporary residence in a body as part of a learning process.

Where does selfishness come in? In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins implies that a gene’s only interest is making copies of itself, aka replicating, and that makes genes ‘selfish’. (He didn’t mean selfish in a human sense; as mindless molecules, genes are no more nor less ‘selfish’ than other molecules. Their behavior is governed by laws of physics and chemistry. Or God, if you want to annoy Dawkins.)

What’s important here is that Dawkins says our genes’ mindlessly self-interested behavior – their ‘selfishness’ – doesn’t necessarily make us selfish, because we have minds, we can think, and so make a conscious choice not to be selfish. And while you might well agree with Dawkins on that, it doesn’t change the painfully obvious fact that consciousness itself makes us selfish. Practically every decision we make is motivated by selfishness, and calling it ‘self-interest’ is often how we justify it. (The details are in the excerpt from my book at the end of this post.)

To accept that we are selfish is to recognize the reality behind all of our problems. Yet to appreciate that reality demands not only a proper understanding of what motivates genetic organisms generally, but also a grasp of the complexities that shape our conscious view of ourselves and the world.

So it’s pretty straight forward then? Hardly. It’s a matter of trying to see through the many delusions we live with as a result of our evolution, and in particular the delusion that we can simply choose not to be selfish.

Why do we behave selfishly? In a nutshell, because the genes that evolved our physical selves had to copy and reproduce themselves in such a hostile and competitive environment. To survive, successive generations of genes had to learn, through millions of years of trial and error, to build defensive (and offensive) collectives for themselves in the shape of living organisms.

Evolutionary science says that process then went on to produce us – the ghostly consciousness that haunts the biomachinery. As consciousness, we think of that evolutionary process in terms of our survival, rather than the survival of genes, because we see no essential difference between our consciousness and our genetic body.

The major downside to identifying ourselves as genetic bodies is that (whether we realize it or not) we’re allowing our conscious existence to be governed almost entirely by our body’s mindless biological self-interest; by the mindless physical urges and needs evolved into bodies by genes.

The interesting (but somewhat involved) part is that genes evolved bodies to survive in a competitive, hostile world, not for our conscious benefit. (Genes are mindless bits of biology, and we weren’t around when genetic evolution began.) They didn’t even begin evolving bodies for the benefit of those bodies. (Because again, as mindless biology, they didn’t know their copying and reproducing would later create bodies.)

In the only terms that are real for genes – mindless physical terms – the entire genetic replication and reproduction process has always been exclusively about maintaining the accuracy of gene copies. It was never about anything other than mindless biological interaction. In a more basic sense, about atoms and molecules conforming to the intractable laws of physics, in the same way that the evolution of the entire universe is.

In plain language, we devote our conscious existence to helping bits of mindless biology copy and reproduce themselves, in a small corner of an equally mindless universe that doesn’t give a damn about us or itself.

Which brings us to the life after death viewpoint.This says that when we take up temporary residence in a genetic body, the interface is so complete that we naturally identify the urges and needs that drive it, as our urges and needs. (Even though they’re entirely physical, and we – as consciousness – have no discernable physical existence.) As a result we confuse our evolution as consciousness, with what evolution designed genetic organism bodies to do: replicate and reproduce genes.

Whichever way you look at this, all that ‘we’ are is the mind that lives in the body and brain that genes made for themselves, without planning to do that, because genes can only build on the past. Try as we might, we haven’t been able to explain consciousness, or how it arises in a physical brain. But what’s certain is that without conscious awareness, ‘we’ wouldn’t exist. There’d just be collectives of insentient atoms and molecules that evolution built from genes. Whether we’re created by a physical brain or just visiting, the legacy we inherit through identification with the brain and its body is the survival instinct.

What’s the survival instinct? All the particles and forces in the universe obey the laws of physics. But when those particles and forces are shaped into a genetic organism whose primary goal is to survive so it can copy and reproduce itself, the organism develops a survival instinct. (‘Survival Instinct’ is just shorthand for saying your goal to survive was determined by the laws of physics working through the stuff you’re made from.)

Our physical selves are products of the survival instinct. It’s the primary motivation behind our thinking and behavior. It acts through the evolutionary levels of our physical brain that correspond with the levels of our subconscious mind. It determines how we perceive ourselves and the world. The survival instinct is so fundamental to our view of reality that we don’t even notice it.

It’s also why most of us relish being ‘genetic’; we justify the biological urges and needs we inherit in a body as ‘right’ and ‘good’ and even ‘moral’, even though our understanding of the concepts of right, good and morality is painfully limited by those same biological imperatives. (Any higher ideas we might have are subverted to a greater or lesser degree by the self-interests of our body. Consequently the genetic versions of ‘right’ and ‘good’ and ‘moral’ become expressions of our genetic nature, rather than ways of mitigating its selfish influence.)

The way we think is largely a result of our genes’ mindless efforts to replicate and reproduce themselves efficiently. Much as we might delude ourselves, we can’t just walk away from the fact that that goal still overwhelmingly motivates us. It’s the only reason why we care most about our own personal survival, and that of those who share some of our genes, eg: our family. But while ‘being selfish’ for our personal genes benefits us as genetic organisms, it happens at the expense of our conscious evolution.

Selfishness is selfishness because it comes down to deliberate favoritism for no other reason than a mindless biological one. Knowingly choosing our genes over someone else’s creates deprivation, inequality and imbalance on a global scale. It’s no secret. We all know we’re doing it. But we just don’t care enough to change.

Our thoughts and actions aren’t automatically predetermined by the evolutionary purpose of our physical body/brain. We can exercise free will, as Dawkins implies. My research into life after death suggests that our degree of free will depends on our personal level of conscious development. And that in turn depends on many factors related to our progress in successive visits to this world and the next, and to our own past, present and future actions. (There’s just too much involved for a short explanation; that’s why I wrote Diary of my life after death.)

The major factor affecting our ‘free’ will is the ongoing conflict between what we as consciousness are, and what we’re persuaded by instinct to think we are by a genetic body. We might intuit that, as consciousness, we’re more than this genetic body and its biological self-interest, its urges and needs. Many of us share the conviction that there’s more to us than can be proven by scientific means, hence our ideas of a spirit or soul. But there’s no getting away from the hard evidence that says self-interest is our primary motivation in this life. It’ll probably remain so while we continue to occupy physical bodies.

Here’s a relevant excerpt from Diary of my life after death.

I’m to examine the conflict of interests created between consciousness and the human body it occupies. I’m told that ‘selfish genes’ is a misleading term – genes are incapable of selfishness. They’re just bits of biomachinery that copy themselves. All of the selfishness is supplied by consciousness. This lesson is important because selfishness is the cause of all of humanity’s problems…

At first I’m simply in mental sync with the energy controling the screen, but then a part of me is inside the screen. Some of my energy kind of splits off and goes into the scenes I’m watching. I’m simultaneously part of the picture, experiencing it yet observing it from the outside, able to take in everything at once with an expanded sense of vision.

My understanding is opened up so I can take in these multi-dimensional scenes showing how physical organisms work as a series of chemical interactions that genes evolved to replicate and reproduce themselves.

I see organisms compete with each other for the resources involved in those chemical interactions. I note how the organisms can only be ‘selfish’ if they have the intellectual capacity to understand that by acquiring resources for themselves and their genetic offspring, they’re depriving others of those same resources.

Next I look at how this applies to human beings in scenarios of people competing selfishly for material security, better jobs, ever-rising paychecks, a bigger roof over their head. In detail I watch them compete as employees, towns, states, countries and ideologies. Group selfishness works for their mutual benefit, but at bottom the mutuality is just more selfishness. Unrestricted by the usual dimensions of time and space, I look deep into each of these people and see that underneath their human hopes, desires and aspirations, their sense of ‘community’, is the same blind determination to safeguard the welfare of their own genes before any other consideration. The genes in the form of their own physical selves; the copies of those same genes in the people they care most about.

I learn how being ‘selfish for biology’ creates a demand for material wealth. It creates sprawling conurbations and social structures that spread over the landscape as people exploit material resources, simultaneously trashing nature and the planet – and each other if they get in the way – to accommodate their own genetic offspring and ensure their survival. I see how, as a side-effect, the unconscious ‘I want’ urge creates mountains of short-lived fashionable junk that threaten to turn the planet into a giant landfill site.

On a deeper level, I see how this desire for short-lived junk has become a psychosis that controls human beings. The lust for profits and growth economies, for new technology, higher living standards and social expansion – all of it is fueled by billions of individuals demanding more for themselves and their genetic offspring. The inevitable result is imbalance, deprivation and poverty, inequality, conflict, overpopulation, climate change…

Again I’m able to look into hearts and minds and see that while most human beings don’t consciously associate their competitive nature with creating and perpetuating all of these downsides, they’re well aware that personal acts of selfishness are the cause of their problems, but choose not to acknowledge this fact because it conflicts with their core instinct to reproduce. They believe this instinct gives them an automatic right to reproduce whatever the cost. This compulsion convinces human beings that their self-interest is acceptable.

From my enlightened viewpoint I understand that many negative side-effects of genetic reproduction conflict directly with the higher principles of consciousness. And yet a succession of human consciousnesses, developing inside of a genetic body, naturally mistake themselves for that body.

As consciousness, we don’t realize that taking human form reduces us to instruments of the genetic replication and reproduction process. Ignorant of who we really are, we become selfish for the organism we think we are.

Outgrowing our past.

Whatever our ideas or beliefs, we’re part of the evolution of something infinitely bigger than ourselves, governed physically and mentally by forces that prevailed long before we did. Whether we think these forces are conscious or otherwise, whether we call them evolution or God, they act as a cosmic ‘organizing agent’ that works through us. Not only did they create us, they built into us the need to find reason and purpose, to make connections and see relationships between things, and this way we progress naturally a conscious unification of all things. (Scientists’ search for a theory of everything that would reconcile the effects of gravity with the quantum universe, is an example of our inbuilt need for a unifying principle.)

Both idealistically and logically, this need for unity can lead to a greater understanding of ourselves, creating more harmony, equality and balance. Whether that happens in God’s name or in science’s (ultimately one and the same), there’s just one way we’ll achieve it – by outgrowing our past.

All our problems are a result of confusing our evolution as consciousness, with what evolution designed genetic organism bodies to do: replicate and reproduce genes. The legacy of this confused mis-identification – personified by our survival instinct – represents the past that we have to outgrow.

As an evolutionary imperative to keep genetic organisms alive and reproducing, the survival instinct shaped bodies, nervous systems and brains, and in so doing determined how we perceive ourselves and the universe.

We can sum up all the problems this survival instinct creates for us in one word: selfishness. While our genetic evolution so far has depended on our being selfish for our genes, our future depends on learning to be unselfish as conscious beings.

Regardless of whether we feel the need to know a higher power is looking out for us, or to find enlightenment through science, what matters most is learning to be unselfish.

Here’s a relevant clip from Diary of my life after death:

…At this point a series of faces comes on the screen, the features morph from one to the next and the program informs me that, as human beings, we all share the same mental evolution and the same subconscious structure. The morphing halts on the face of a smiling old guy with white hair and old fashioned glasses with round wire frames. The picture animates in 4-D and he begins talking (in some European language but I can understand every word) about how subconscious human minds all share the same symbols for their fears, aspirations, hopes, dreams, and understanding of reality.

This old guy is Carl Jung. I heard of him but I had no idea he named these subconscious symbols ‘archetypes’, or that one of these archetypes is the notion of god. He’s telling me that the same survival motive behind religion, with the same inbuilt ‘material provider’ god archetype, is as fundamental for all human beings as breathing and heartbeat. People may have cultural, social and personal differences, but these archetypes are what actually form the common underlying structure of what human beings understand as reality.

“But Laurie”, he cautions, “Some folk choose not to interpret these subconscious influences as a need for ‘religion’ or ‘god’. For them, the influences emerge as other, equally fundamental beliefs.” He tells me that god, like any other idea, is a way of figuring ourselves out. As human consciousness evolves, ideas about religion and god will evolve to give people a truer picture of themselves, of where they should be going and why.

Conscious self-awareness.

Why does the notion of a continuing existence after physical death seem a weird concept to many people? Our continued existence itself isn’t a weird notion. So long as we continue to exist, it’s perfectly normal to do that. It’s the ‘after physical death’ part that’s weird. It’s weird because we’ve never done it (knowingly at any rate), we have no idea how it could work, and because the thought of it is kind of scary and spooky. (We’re talking about death, which, for a lot of people, is taboo, sacrosanct, or just plain unthinkable.)

More precisely, we’ve gotten so used to sharing our conscious existence with physical things, that it seems neither sensible nor even possible that we could exist consciously without physical things. (A physical body; the physical world.) Physical things are kind of built up around our consciousness in layers…starting with our brain cells and other nerve cells, the rest of our body, and then everything else in the world, the solar system, the galaxy and the universe. We’re only consciously aware of a few of these as real things – the nearest and most relevant ones to us – but we’re pretty sure the more distant ones are just more of the same physical stuff.

Where did the notion of an afterlife come from in the first place? It grew along with our consciousness. Hardly a new idea, it occurred to early human beings when they became sufficiently self-aware to get their head around what it meant. (Outside of great apes, dolphins and one or two other species with well developed brains, most living organisms don’t appear to have appreciable levels of what we call conscious self-awareness.)

The big advantage of being consciously self-aware isn’t simply that we know stuff – it’s ‘knowing that we know’. Nothing else we know of besides our own consciousness has this special self-aware ability. Amongst other things, it tells us we have a separate existence from the things around us. (Sounds obvious, but most other organisms are probably unaware there’s a difference between their senses, and what they’re sensing.) But don’t imagine for a moment that same problem doesn’t affect us – some moreso than others. All that makes us different from those simpler organisms is our extra helping of self-aware consciousness.

So our consciousness tells us we’re different from the things around us. (Being consciously aware allows us to identify ourselves as individual personalities in a world where billions of others of our species all do the same.) Consciousness makes each of us aware that we’re unique, and it’s generally assumed that consciousness evolved this way for the sake of genes.
Although we’re probably unaware of it, each of us is working for the good of our own personal genes; we identify ourselves with our genetic bodies and with what evolution designed them to do: replicate and reproduce genes. Conscious self-awareness is our personal viewpoint from where we decide how we want to interact with the world and each other. Our consciousness also informs us that our physical existence (and maybe our conscious existence too) invariably ends in death.

Remember that most organisms are consciously unaware of a difference between themselves and the things around them. (You have to think about that concept a little to appreciate it.) But with evolution and enough consciousness, an organism gradually becomes aware that its sensory impressions are separate from what it’s sensing. As human beings we’ve evolved far enough to take that distinction for granted, but – more weirdness – something else is happening, and not all of us are aware of it. If you think about this, you might realize that your conscious awareness, as non-physical stuff, must be very different than the stuff that makes everything in the physical world. (Including your physical body.)

But how different? And what does this difference mean? What might it make possible? You know what I’m getting at. Maybe it means our conscious self can exist – somehow – after the death of our physical body. Many millions of people hope that’s the case.

Neuroscientists argue that ideas of an afterlife, along with religious notions and God, are a result of the way human beings and their brains have evolved, and are just a product of the same random, chaotic events that brought the universe into existence and drive its evolution. (The universe’s beginnings and most of what happened since sure seem pretty random and chaotic.) And yet here we are, conscious and self-aware. So obviously things aren’t so random and chaotic that they couldn’t create consciousness.

This notion of an ‘organizing agent’ capable of creating conscious self-awareness from within the seemingly random, chaotic universe described by science, would give religious believers sufficient reason to believe in God. (As God, the organizing agent would bring meaning and purpose to everything.)

Scientists also feel a need to find reason and purpose in the way the universe works. But where science diverges from religion is in seeing reason and purpose as emergent properties of our mind; a natural function of our evolution as genetic organisms. They’d say it’s not God’s meaning and purpose, it’s entirely ours. We make connections and seek relationships between things because evolution designed us this way. Just because the universe embodies an ‘organizing agent’ (evolution) capable of creating consciousness, doesn’t mean an intelligent designer is behind evolution, a process that seems perfectly capable of ‘designing’ without being conscious or intelligent. The notion of an intelligent designer merely requires someone capable of thinking up such a notion. (To many, the notion actually implies a lack of intelligence.) Certainly to a rational mind, evolution does appear to be so random and chaotic that the idea of it being ‘designed’ is hard to imagine. The beauty of evolution is in its very unpredictability. And yet to deny the presence of an organizing agent – even in the midst of that random and chaotic unpredictability – would amount to denying the process of evolution itself. The universe, stars, planets, gravity, organisms, our consciousness etc., all exist because of evolution.

Maybe we’re wrong to use words like ‘randomness’ and ‘chaos’ to describe what’s going on. Maybe things only appear that way to our limited human perceptions, which are accustomed to judging things only on the basis of where we’re coming from and what we know.
To a significantly more highly developed consciousness than ours – the kind of consciousness ours will evolve to become in time – what seem to us like random and chaotic events could actually be a superior organizing process.

Think big. Small mindedness isn’t compulsory. Our consciousness appears to have sprung from a process that seems random and chaotic because evolution (as we understand it) takes time. And yet if we could see the evolutionary process speeded up, from a point outside of the temporal dimension (and therefore outside of spatial dimensions too), evolution might appear not as random or chaotic, but purposeful. (Kind of like the Nazca lines become pictures when seen from above.) Or the way the physical forces would be unified in higher dimensional space.

To really test your skepticism quotient, check out Mellen Thomas Benedict, who died and returned to talk about how he was given a guided tour of the cosmos and shown how a new universe is formed, along with other profound stuff.