The Evolution of Consciousness

This is a brilliant and profound work that deserves wider readership among those interested in the future relationship of science and consciousness. It turns the current materialistic understanding of consciousness inside out by postulating a holographic universal mind in which individual apparently separate minds are entangled microcosms. Lohrey shows how the assumption of a fundamental separation between minds leads to intractable philosophical problems. The book is in three parts, the first explaining the overall frame of One Consciousness and many minds with relationships of meaning and symmetry; these show the primacy of meaning over information, a term widely used but misunderstood. The second part distinguishes between what the author calls first and second sight, while the third explains various forms of seeing, culminating in what he calls Self-seeing that mirrors the mystical experience of unity and non-separation. The basic argument is stated in the preface, that 'the meaning and consciousness are content words for the same singular, unbroken, interconnected spiritual reality, which I call One Consciousness or the meaning of Meaning.' The informed reader can already catch the language of David Bohm, an important background to this approach, and discussed at some length.

The book begins with a reference to the 2012 book of Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, which criticised the neo-Darwinian conception of nature and called for a transcendent self-understanding, which the present work aims to provide. The author observes that there has been a tendency in materialistic consciousness studies, such as the approach of Dennett, to delete meaning, mind and consciousness from any discussion of the physical world; these are replaced by 'the separating paradigms of subject versus object' with which philosophers have been struggling ever since Descartes. One potential background philosophy largely missing from this analysis is New Thought, which in the late 19th and early 20th century postulated a universal mind as fundamental and immanent within humans - although the author does mention Emerson's Over-Soul. As explained in his article above, the author postulates a trinity of being, with 'I' represented as a point, 'us' in a circle, then the One Consciousness (That) outside the circle as the ground of meaning and consciousness, which the author sees as two sides of the same coin and embedded in the ground of being. Significantly, the relationship between I and That (p. 37) is 'an insight path that manifests through exchanges of meaning occurring in intuitions, insights, revelations, epiphanies, synchronicities or visions', all of which imply a resonant unity or non-separation. In this scheme intelligence becomes 'the universal, metaphysical agency of life and being: the mind-stuff of One Consciousness' (as Eddington would also have put it).

In his discussion of meaning, the author rightly insists on the primacy of implicit meaning, which also corresponds to what he calls first sight, the very capacity of awareness. The distinction between implicit and explicit is paralleled with that of Bohm between the implicate and explicate orders of dynamic unity and separation or diversity, background and foreground. This exactly reflects the thinking of Iain McGilchrist, whose work would have enriched the analysis here. Distinctions arise at the explicit or explicate level and are already structured into consciousness, as prefigured by Kant in relation to space, time and causality although still within a binary metaphysic. An important part of the analysis is the distinction between five levels of process: 0 as Implicit to Implicit, 1 Implicit to explicit, 2 explicit to explicit, 3 explicit to Implicit, and back to 0 with Implicit to Implicit where the first 0 is embedded and the second in conscious self-recognition; the whole process is one of unfolding and enfolding or, as Walter Russell would put it, refolding. The next chapter on relations of meaning explains this in more detail where relations are structural components of consciousness providing its natural ordering capacity, and these relations are imbued with meaning. One cannot arrive at these integral insights by starting from separation and parts, as represented by reductionist methodology: meaning is derived from Meaning, the whole as consciousness has priority and 'represents the first and circular cause of everything in the universe.' Lohrey explains how three relations of meaning in terms of symmetry, non-symmetry and asymmetry can be mapped onto the cycle he describes above, which also represents the evolution of consciousness; all this is described with great subtlety (pp. 82-85) - readers will find their minds being reformatted in the process.

The chapter distinguishing between information and meaning and asserting the primacy of the latter is essential reading as so many have climbed on the information bandwagon and have literally con-fused these levels. Lohrey rightly maintains that communication is not simply an exchange of information, but rather an exchange of meaning that necessarily contains an epistemologically prior implicit dimension. This criticism also applies to the Bohm and Hiley concept of active information where mind is reintroduced into information theory 'when the theory excludes it' (!) Machine interactions do not and cannot involve implicit understanding. Hence 'it is not information that is the primary substratum of universe, but the Meaning of One Consciousness' - it is worth pausing at this point to allow this sentence to sink in.

The second part is based on a distinction between first and second sight where the first is characterised by immediate visual experience implicitly related to the One Consciousness, while the second represents our interpretation of experience. After criticising recent work of John Searle based as it is on separate minds, Lohrey restates his argument that 'consciousness is a singular and internal system in which the whole inheres in every part and the parts reciprocate in the patterned fabric that makes up the whole' (p. 106), hence the characteristics of vision are already inherent in the One Consciousness: 'within the integrated principles of One Consciousness there is no separate, private mind that is the seer' (p. 121), a reciprocal insight only fully realised in mystical experience or what Thomas Troward calls Self-recognition and which is beautifully expressed by Eckhart when he says that the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees in me - this is also gnosis. Or as Lohrey elaborates, 'the sight within seeing comes from One Consciousness, not from the individual.' As the next chapter explains, this has interesting parallels with signifier and signified in the linguistic work of Saussure and the biological work of von Uexkull where mind and world are inseparable and the environment or more widely the cultural context represents a series of meanings in the organism's model of the world. The danger is that we fail to become aware of the assumptions embedded in our culture, language and mode of thought, which, in the West,are based on what is called here separation seeing (sometimes also tribal). In the case of the materialistic scientist assuming an omniscient point of view (p. 176), he cannot in fact 'escape the relativity of his cultural responses simply by assuming that his theories and experiments are beyond the culture in which they work.'

The third part is devoted to a more detailed discussion of the six ways of second sight that are also mapped onto the five stage process described above and involving identification, differentiation and integration in a circle of learning. The first is ego seeing based on separation and control, followed by binary tribal seeing, both of which represent learning patterns of identification. Then separation seeing is characterised by explicit to explicit exchanges and differentiation, which can ultimately result in a belief in randomness divorced from contextual and implicit meaning; this also corresponds to the separations of Aristotelian logic and the mechanistic metaphor as well as arguably being related to the prevalence of alienation and depression in mental health. The next stage is empathic seeing involving love and compassion, and finally clairvoyant seeing as non-symbolic, non-verbal and extrasensory - also Implicit to Implicit within the One Consciousness. In terms of spiral dynamics, one could postulate an evolution of consciousness towards empathy resulting from an appreciation of the One Consciousness. Importantly, empathy as understood here involves seeing 'the many within the one and the one within the many' resulting in an order of love where there are no separations - hence its association with happiness and meaningfulness.

The penultimate chapter on presence is represented in the Hindu satchitananda or being-consciousness-bliss and communicates through unitive connections at the Implicit to Implicit level, which includes field interfaces between mother and child. At this point, the author relates a mystical experience of his own, a realisation of the unity of the universe as an essential spiritual truth. The ultimate form of this lies in what he calls Self-seeing, normally only achieved through long spiritual practice and self-enquiry. At an everyday level, we can 'drink orderliness' as forms of therapeutic practice bringing balance, harmony, coherence, equilibrium and peace. The author eloquently expresses the nature of Self-seeing in his final paragraph when he observes that the Self is both 'local and universal: the seer and the seen. This is the holographic Self and it emerges from a holographic seeing. The wise say that Self-seeing is a state of everything and nothing: the feeling of unity with everything and the realisation that we are nothing separate' - where the ultimate destination is 'the loving, meaningful bliss of One Consciousness.'

As readers can hopefully gather from the foregoing exposition, this work is a seminal contribution to the evolution of consciousness studies articulated within a comprehensive philosophical framework and founded not in the separation seeing of modern biology, but rather in the nonlocal entangled view of physics and mystical insight. The book provides a coherent personal and philosophical framework reconciling science and spirituality and starting from the whole represented by the One Consciousness as the ground of our existence, both source and destination.