Panpsychism

The Marriage

 of 

Cosmic Consciousness 

and 

Quantum Mechanics

Cosmic Consciousness is a term often used to denote a higher or particularly spiritual level of awareness and consciousness.

This type of awareness may be associated with an experience of “knowing God," or of transcending the five senses and finding a hidden consciousness or reality which is beyond the perceivable world. For many, the journey to experiencing cosmic consciousness involves practices such as yoga, meditation, prayer and acts of faith.

It is said that in a state of Cosmic Consciousness, the human mind is elevated beyond the awareness of the self and the ego, and enters a place of oneness and unity with the universe. Finding this unity is one goal of yoga practice.

When Cosmic Consciousness is reached, the individual moves from believing in the oneness of the universe to having a direct knowledge of that fact. This level of consciousness requires letting go of the superficial ego.

Some claim that reaching this awareness may cause a person to retreat from the noise of the outside world and seek solitude. They will develop a heightened awareness of their own mental state and that of those around them.

In 1901, Richard Maurice Bucke -- a Canadian psychiatrist -- wrote a book about Cosmic Consciousness, in which he defined it as the highest of three levels of consciousness found in living beings:

• Simple consciousness  --   which both mankind and animals possess
• Self-consciousness  --  which includes thought, reason, and imagination and that mankind possesses
• Cosmic Consciousness  --  which is a higher and more spiritual consciousness than most ordinary people possess    SOURCE:  Yogapedia

A popular meditation and spirituality figure in the West, Deepak Chopra has postulated that the concept of Cosmic Consciousness may be related to the hidden dimensions of quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics explains how the universe works at a scale smaller than atoms. It is also called quantum physics or quantum theory. Mechanics is the part of physics that explains how things move and quantum is the Latin word for 'how much' .   Quantum mechanics describes how the particles that make up atoms work.  SOURCE:  Wikipedia


Panpsychism
is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy. For its proponents panpsychism offers an attractive middle way between physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other. The worry with dualism—the view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds of thing—is that it leaves us with a radically disunified picture of nature, and the deep difficulty of understanding how mind and brain interact. And whilst physicalism offers a simple and unified vision of the world, this is arguably at the cost of being unable to give a satisfactory account of the emergence of human and animal consciousness. Panpsychism, strange as it may sound on first hearing, promises a satisfying account of the human mind within a unified conception of nature.  SOURCE:  Standford.edu