God doesn’t want your religion, just your love

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This lady is on the same thought path as I am. A former religious person who had an NDA and now realises that god doesn’t need you to worship him to love you. A god like that would be a narcissist.

We are spiritual beings inside human machines, here to learn through hard and beautiful experiences.

In search of Consciousness

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Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Author, Speaker, YouTube Producer on Human ConsciousnessAuthor has 166 answers and 382.1K answer views

Related Is consciousness totally the product of the brain? Or is consciousness ultimately separate from and independent of the brain

Consciousness, as a qualitative attribute of individual being, exists over and above the functionality of the brain. That physical organ is effectively an interface between the conscious Self, which in its essence transcends the physical realm, and that material world.

Neuroscience is simply wrong. It is fundamentally wrong based upon its reliance on the core scientific paradigm and its artificial determiner of validity — empiricism. Science, while useful in many ways, is a purely objective view of the world — but applied in a fundamentally subjective experience: life. Science, as a declared set of empirical rules laid out to examine reality, simply ignores intangible elements of experiential life, allowing only real-world elements as valid.

Thus, its very paradigm disallows even considering Consciousness as the basis of existence. If Science would examine an orange in the fashion it examines life, it would test its skin, measure its color variations and reflective spectrum, analyze component molecules for their properties — and totally ignore the fruit hidden within: the pulp and juice, the essence of its being and usefulness.

Science only looks at the outer “surface” of Reality — it cannot look into the depth of mind, as that, the real core of being, does not exist within the realm of empirical, testable, physical matter.

Neuroscience, and many writers here, presume the brain is the source of consciousness because it is part of the material world and if you tweak it, you get a response.

But if the brain, as a physical medium, were the sole source of consciousness, all remembered experience — the one trillion seconds of waking experience you’ve encountered and remembered in 50 years of living — would have to be codified in some fashion and stored somewhere in the brain.

And that memory, just as a starter, a base attribute of consciousness, would have to include all visual memories — a vast collection of graphic material — plus tastes and smells, thoughts experienced at the time of the original memory, hopes and fears. You can, with practice and concentration, recall vivid memories from all periods of life — that full range of reality-image would have to be stored in the brain such that, in an instant, you can pull it up, compare it for meaning with other extensive, stored values and meaning-definitions learned from childhood on, just to make sense of it.

(Compare, for example to computer graphics, where images are broken down into combinations of bits that represent color attributes for each pixel. These are stored in some flash medium and reconstructed when viewed on a screen. The brain would have to somehow codify each element of each visual encounter — plus all other elements of an experienced moment — and store all that data somewhere for later recall.)

There is no mechanism within the brain to store such a huge, interrelated collection of memory and meaning. There are hundreds of trillions of synapses in the brain, a vast web-work of connections that fire off signals continuously between neurons. But those are communicating information in that instant — not storing it, like a computer’s memory would in set registers.

There simply is no mechanism within the physical unit of the brain to store such an unfathomably vast amount of information as exists in human memory…

But memory isn’t the only attribute of Consciousness by any means. The conscious mind entails value-judgement, musical talent and creative capabilities even beyond the imagination — which is, indeed, yet another facility of Consciousness. From what process within the physical brain would imagination emerge — the ability to think of things never encountered? Collections of synapses or chemicals stored in neurons?

Where in the brain, what physical process of inter-cellular function, would be responsible for hope and empathy? Where, out of a physical realm of specialized cells, would fear and anger emerge, the ability to compose an opera, the love and dedication to raise a child, the dream of making a better life by starting a business…

Consciousness is the basis of life. All the complexities of memory and the meaning attributed to those recorded episodes of a lifetime, all of the broad array of human qualities necessary for evaluating beauty or planning for future actions, of hoping for better things, of designing complex machines or painting stirring pictures, of exploring the vast cosmos or creating a better toilet plunger — all of these are complexities of the singular essence of the Conscious Self.

They all translate meaning, held in timeless Consciousness, through the brain, into engendered activity via muscles and bones. But the brain is only an organ — no more vital for energizing an incarnation than a pancreas or anus. It’s just that the brain is the communication means to transfer intangible thought, as a single gesture of a vastly complex Consciousness, into body function.

To the scientist, adhering to his/her belief, it looks like the brain is the origin of consciousness. But that’s an illusion that deceives the scientific mind, just as a declared and defined deity fools the mind indoctrinated with religion.

Consciousness is separate from and independent of the brain. It interfaces with life through the brain, but will remain in existence beyond the death of the body and cessation of brain functionality — which is a common report in Near Death Experiences.

Those who would refute that obvious status are simply deceived by their own set of held beliefs. Oh, and as to beliefs — those artificial constructs of misunderstanding that serve only to distort perception — where would those be stored in the physical brain?

Story of near-death experience

This is much like my own out-of-body experience I had in the intensive care unit.

It is amazing to hear other people who I’ve never heard of, talk about the same things happening to them. I never went into the light in my experience, I came back before that was presented to me. Having listened to many people have the same experiences just re-enforces my own.