I’m continually amazed by the lengths people will go to in trying to create a rational structure for irrational beliefs. As an engineer, I’m embarrassed when I find other engineers doing it. I guess that I should remember that engineers are just people, too, but it’s tough sometimes.

The situation that brought this to mind involves an internet marketer and top notch Ad Words guru that I’ve followed for years. Recently he decided to start a blog on his opinions about religion and marketing, and invited any of his followers who were interested to join in the discussion.

Well, since I’m very interested in both business and spirituality, I looked his new blog over. To my great surprise, he turned out to be a Bible literalist, fundamentalist Christian. I also found that he was drawing on information from a variety of junk “science” sources to validate his belief in the Bible’s historical accuracy.

That’s very much what an engineer would do – can’t just say he believes it, he’s got to have some support to make it seem rational to his engineering mind. Of course, since there’s little or no real science or scholarship to support him, he’s got to be creative.

I was interested in this not only because I was a fellow engineer, but because I had just finished teaching a class on the first 400 years of Christianity, focusing specifically on the widely divergent theologies that various groups taught as well as the multiple forged documents written in the names of various apostles.

A selection of these forgeries ended up included in the New Testament. In fact, only 9 out of 27 NT books were actually written by the person whose name is on them – 7 letters of Paul (out of 13 attributed to him) and the books of Luke and Acts. But since we know Luke wasn’t an original follower of Jesus, and neither was Paul, we know that the NT books were not written by anyone who knew Jesus personally.

What is the basis for my claims about this? Over 300 years of careful scholarship by many, many qualified academic researchers, carefully archiving and cataloging all the known early writings related to Christianity. That includes all the writings of early Christian authorities, all the surviving writings of their opponents, and the writings of Greek and Jewish historians from the early period.

From that we have a consensus among the scholars as to the approximate times different documents were written, why they were written, and who did or did not write them. You can pretty much ask any academic in this field about these things and get the same answers. Unless, of course, the academic is from a fundamentalist school where the inerrant Bible is worshiped and scholarship is marginalized.

So how does this apply to my internet marketer and his blog? Well, I entered into the discussion on the comment stream, and pointed out some of the dating and authorship issues mentioned above. Mark’s gospel not written by Mark and not until about 70 CE, Matthew 10 years later, not written by Matthew, etc.

He replied to my comment by saying that the dates I had for the NT documents had been shown to be wrong, and they were actually written much earlier, and by the apostles whose names were on them. His authority for this statement? A book written by Anne Rice!

Yes, Anne Rice of the famous vampire books, the fundamentalist Catholic author of a fictionalized account of Jesus childhood. Somehow Anne Rice is smarter than 300 years of academic scholarship.

To me that’s a flagship example of the lengths people will go to rationalize their beliefs. I know if he picked his mentors and authorities for his business that way he wouldn’t be a guru, he’d be broke. Now I don’t want to pick on him, because it can happen to us, too. The challenge for all of us is to see ourselves clearly so that we don’t fall into this trap.

I call this the “Fox Mulder” syndrome. If you’re an X Files fan you remember the poster Mulder had in his office. “I Want To Believe!” We all do. That’s why regular reality checks are so important.

Now that I’ve finished Sheldrake’s book, I want to continue the comments I made in the last post about his work. What he has compiled is a very interesting and readable summary of a whole area of behaviors that are remarkable and unexplained. Some are even uninvestigated. Here’s a summary list of the major phenomena covered:

• Animal-human telepathy (coming home and other intentions)
• Animals that comfort and heal
• Animal awareness of distant death and accidents
• Telepathic calls and commands
• Premonitions of fits and seizures
• Premonitions of earthquakes and disasters
• Sense of direction (place) including migrations and pets finding their people
• Swarm and flock coordination

Much of this behavior has been noted by humans for quite a while, but interestingly enough, only a small part of it has ever been seriously investigated by qualified scientists. And they didn’t find the answers.

The one area with a lot of research is in migrations. How do a wide variety of birds and insects migrate thousands of miles to a place that they’ve never been before? I always thought that they just followed the older and more experienced on the route, but that shows how little I knew. The research shows that birds that have never made the trip can do so without any help.

The most extreme example is the Monarch butterflies that travel from the Great Lakes in the midwestern USA to Mexico. None of these butterflies makes the whole trip, as their lifespan is too short. The ones that arrive at the end of the journey are 3 to 5 generations away from the ones that started it! How do they do it? No one knows.

Turtles can go from their birthplace on tiny Ascension Island in the middle of the ocean to the coast of Brazil, and months later return to the island. Radio tagging them shows that they go in a straight line, compensating for wind and ocean currents without reference to any known source of information.

Sheldrake documents the testing of all the common hypotheses for the amazing sense of place and direction that many creatures show and notes that it all has failed to explain it.

Much of the book is devoted to animal/human interactions, on which there is distressingly little good research. As I mentioned in Part 1, Sheldrake has done some good experimentation on his own, and has done analysis of a lot of data reported to him over several years. In addition to dogs, he has data on cats, horses and parrots. Note that these are all intelligent and known to bond with humans.

One interesting fact that was new to me is that some dogs are so good at predicting a seizure in their epileptic owners that an industry has sprung up to train and provide these animals to patients. The dogs can alert 5 to 30 minutes before the seizure in time for the patient to lie down and prepare. This industry developed because so many patients were reporting that their dogs were warning them, and someone finally paid attention to them. This kind of precognition is similar to the well documented behavior of some animals to predict earthquakes.

Sheldrake also notes that not all animals exhibit these kinds of behaviors. Many dogs, cats, horses, and parrots seem oblivious to any such information. But so many do that it can’t be dismissed as just weird coincidences.

Sheldrake has suggested that a new kind of field, which he calls a morphic field, contains the information that animals and some primitive people use for navigation. That idea has some similarity with physicist David Bohm’s concept of the Implicate Order as an information field beyond time and space, although Sheldrake doesn’t mention it.

At the end of the book he notes that, as I said in Part 1 of this post, many of the telepathic phenomena between bonded animals and humans look suspiciously like a quantum entanglement. He even credits Dean Radin and the Institute of Noetic Sciences for their work in that area with human telepathy. In any event, it’s 300 pages of questions that current mainstream science can’t answer.

The good news is that if you have a dog or cat, you can do research yourself. And after you read this book, you’ll probably want to.

I’m finally getting around to reading Rupert Sheldrake’s 1999 book, “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home” and I’m pleased to find that it’s well worth the time invested. As simply a collection of anecedotal tales of animals that were glad to see their owners, the book wouldn’t be worth much, except perhaps to dog owners. However, I’m finding that there’s a fair amount of data that was much more rigorously collected, including synchronized videos, random timing unknown in advance to the owners, and so forth. I should have known that a research scientist like Sheldrake would know how to do research properly.

I’m encouraged by the fact that mind seems to have non-local properties that aren’t confined to humans. This makes sense if we see the evolution of consciousness as the driving force (or a driving force) behind evolution itself. It’s also interesting that the connection between pets and owners tests stronger as the bond appears stronger. This replicates the experience found with people in which a strong emotional connection generally produces stronger results in mind experiments. Dean Radin, who wrote about this in “Entangled Minds,” proposes that the connection is a form of quantum entanglement.

In any event, these results are another blow to the strict materialist view of science, whose supporters generally choose to just ignore or ridicule these kinds of studies. The history of science is not on their side, I’m afraid. I’ll write more about this when I finish the book.

“We create our own reality, but there is a subtlety. We do not create reality in our ordinary state of consciousness, but in a non-ordinary state of consciousness.” – Amit Goswami, PhD

I’ve written in several posts that science has been proposing that consciousness is the real basis of reality, not matter. By science I mean by quantum physicists, cosmologists and biologists who are not otherwise associated with consciousness research. This has been going on for over 40 years.

These investigations led physicist Fred Alan Wolf to declare, “we create our own reality” way back in 1970. Sounds like the Law of Attraction, doesn’t it? Well, why doesn’t it always work? I tried to get Wolf to talk about that one time at a lecture of his, but he wasn’t interested. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he was always like that or just having a bad day, but I was disappointed.

I’ve since come to realize that one reason the so-called Law of Attraction doesn’t always work is that, thankfully, our individual impact on the world is usually small. Otherwise life would be like one of those bad dreams where your whole reality shifts moment by moment as your thoughts wander.

Another reason has been laid out by theoretical physicist Amit Goswami in his new book, “God Is Not Dead.” It has to do with the solution to a paradox first proposed by Nobel physicist Eugene Wigner and illustrated by a thought experiment called “the friend paradox.”

Suppose you and one of your friends set out for work from your homes one morning. You both have to go through the same intersection, you going East and your friend going South. As you both approach the intersection, you both set your intention for the light to be green.

What will the Law of Attraction do? If you both get a green light, it won’t be pretty.

Fortunately, Goswami reports that three different physicists over a 25 year period came up with the same solution. There is only one unified, nonlocal and cosmic consciousness, and we are individualized expressions of it. When we create, we are expressing our preference from our individuality and the unified consciousness chooses for all, thereby avoiding any contradictions and any preferences.

So no paradox and no favorites. Interestingly enough, it provides a scientific backing for what spiritual teachers have always said, because spiritual teachers have had a couple of thousand years to figure out the answer to Wigner’s paradox. And they mostly came to the same conclusion as the physicists.

For example, about 100 years ago Thomas Troward wrote, “We are seeking to arrange things to set in motion a train of causation that will harmonize our own conditions without interfering with the exercise of a like power by others.” Like getting a green light. Sounds like Wigner’s paradox, doesn’t it?

Troward went on to say, “All individual exercise of this power is the application of a universal power which itself operates creatively on its own account” and that our job is to get in harmony with it. Why? Because “it is universal and can have no particular interests to serve, and therefore its action must always be equally for the benefit of all.”

When he says that “our individual exercise of this power is the application of a universal power which operates on its own account” he is saying the same thing as the physicists. We express our preference and the universal power (unified consciousness) chooses the best outcome for all involved. Goswami calls that a non-ordinary state of consciousness for us – when we choose from unified consciousness.

So that’s a big mistake people often make with the Law of Attraction. They forget that the Law doesn’t play favorites and it won’t help us get anything at the expense of anyone else. People who use prayer instead of the LOA make the same mistake (prayer is the same as LOA but with different terminology and levels of consciousness).

My wife, Sandra, is a Unity minister and has an online prayer web site at positive-prayer.org. She often gets requests for prayer to “make my ex come back to me” or “make my spouse treat me right” or “make my kids shape up” and the people are disappointed when her emailed prayers have some version of simply affirming the highest and best outcome for everyone involved. They don’t realize that trying to get God to force someone to do what you want is not very spiritual, and as we discussed above, not very likely to happen. If there is anyone who needs to be changed, it’s usually the pray-er and not the pray-ee. Intentions for love, wisdom, guidance, understanding and transformation for yourself are the kind that are likely to get cheerfully answered by either prayer or LOA.

So let’s adopt the policy of an Ohio business owner and politician from 100 years ago whose motto was,“What I want for myself, I want for everyone!” His nickname was Golden Rule Jones, and he lived by that motto.

We could sure use some politicians like him today, couldn’t we?

So work on setting your intentions so that they’re for the highest and best outcome for everyone involved. And work on you, not them.

Parker wrote the song above as a bitter commentary on the Vietnam war, but it serves as an accurate commentary on society in general. I was thinking about it the other day in reference to the disgusting artificial controversy over the mosque in New York.

The only reason that the controversy exists is because some people have been convinced that Islam is in some way a religion of terrorism and all Islamics are responsible for the World Trade Center attack. The fact that a number of American Islamics died in the attack is dismissed as unimportant. After all, Christians would never commit terrorist acts, so Islam must be special, right?

We have short memories, don’t we? One advantage of being older than dirt, in my grandkids terminology, is that I have a long memory. I remember the so-called troubles in Northern Ireland, which unfortunately have popped up again fairly recently. For those of you youngsters who don’t remember, just do a search on “northern Ireland terrorism” and see what you find.

What we’ve had there, for over 100 years, is Christian on Christian, Catholics versus Protestants. Although the Catholic IRA got most of the bad press, there were militant Protestant groups that fought back. This was a war on civilians, with car bombings, assassinations, attacks on shopping centers and other public gatherings. Many innocent people of both groups died. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

So does that mean that Catholics and Protestants are terrorist groups? There are many in the UK that thought so, one of many reasons that England is very irreligious. If it’s true that they’re terrorist groups, then isn’t it a problem that there are Christian churches even closer to the Trade Center site than the proposed Islamic Cultural Center?

Perhaps there’s a different explanation. Psychologists tell us that one of the most predictable characteristics of humans is the propensity to form groups and then create conflict between them. Us versus them. This can be merely amusing, as in football team rivalry, or it can lead to more serious consequences.

In Northern Ireland the groups are Catholic and Protestant but the conflict is not religious, it’s about political power. In the Middle East you see the same thing in the conflict between the Sunni and the Shiite – both Islam, but fighting over political power. In all these conflicts some members of both groups choose to use terrorism as a political weapon and justify it with religion. But that does NOT make the religion a terrorist organization! If it does, then we would have to label Christianity as a terrorist group, too.

The United States enshrined in its Constitution the idea that the government would be neutral on religion, specifically as a result of the founding fathers experiences with a state religion (Christianity) in Europe. As a result a wide variety of religions have flourished here freely and openly, adding a rich cultural mix to our country. I think it’s pretty funny that even today ignorant people, some with really loud voices, claim that we were founded as a Christian nation, when in fact the “freedom of religion” in the Constitution was put there to protect us from becoming a Christian nation.

The tendency to blame all of Islam for the actions of a political terrorist group is historically and intellectually repulsive. People from all religions and no religion have become terrorists. If we blame all of Islam for the World Trade Center we will be playing into the terrorist’s hands and slandering a whole group of mostly nice people who were just as horrified as anyone else in the US by those events.

As a side note, the most widely read poet in America is the 13th century Muslim scholar Rumi. Let’s not have short memories, eh?

It’s been interesting to follow the posts and comments on the Huffington Post’s Religion section recently. They’ve added a subject area of Science and Religion, as well as posts from a wide variety of religious traditions.

One things that I find interesting is that this Religion section has attracted a large number of atheist trolls, whose only contribution is to mock the articles and other people’s comments. (Note: “troll” is a term used in blogging and forums to refer to someone whose comments are designed to stir up anger and controversy, usually by condemning or insulting others, without adding anything to the discussion.) It’s a sad waste of energy.

The amusing part is that most of the trolls don’t even bother to read the post thoroughly, and so their snarky comments don’t even apply very well. Their most common assumption is that anyone writing about religion or spirituality must believe in a literal “old man in the sky” god and so that’s what they pick on. Or they pick on the historical sins and abuses of organized religion. In other words, low hanging fruit that doesn’t require them to actually think. Don’t they have anything else to do?

Anyway, I read a post today that pointed out that in fact all religions are not the same! As Louie said in Casablanca, “I’m shocked!” Even better, the post went on to point out that within each major western religion there exists a mystical tradition, and when the views of the mystics are compared we find that they are almost identical, not only with each other but with aspects of Eastern mystical traditions also.

Now this similarity is not new, it even has a name, The Perennial Philosophy, after the book of the same name by Aldous Huxley. The conclusion that we draw is that there is a transcendent aspect to reality that we can experience, and that the words we use about it may be dependent on our religious background, but the experience itself is the same.

When we look at this from a science viewpoint it makes perfect sense. We would expect that the closer we get to an accurate description of reality, the more similar the stories would be. So we can say that the differences in various religions are a measure of how far from being accurate they are.

This point, of course, was lost on the trolls. They are atheist fundamentalists, which means that they are right, everyone else is not only wrong but stupid, and we shouldn’t try to confuse them with facts. Too bad, because this transcendent aspect of reality is where consciousness and the physical world combine, and thus where we are likely to eventually connect science and spirituality. Physicists like Heisenberg and Bohm thought so, too.

I think that most of the Western world has seen Avatar by now, so I don’t think I’m going to ruin anyone’s experience by writing about it. But you can consider this a spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it.

I really enjoyed the movie on several levels. First, as a sci-fi adventure on a distant planet, it had all the juice. Strange creatures, mysterious dangers, astonishing special effects, lots of action and even a forbidden romance to top it off. Nobody’s gonna sleep through this movie.

Secondly, I had read about some interesting research the production team had done to guide them in the design of the aliens. It turns out there are things you can and cannot do with faces. The designers wanted faces that were human like, but distinctly alien, and found that there were some kinds of subtle changes that were perceived by people as frightening, repulsive or bizarre. So they had to consult with the latest science on the subject to find ways to make aliens that were empathetic, not disturbing. And they did.

And finally, I had heard that the plot was a thinly disguised environmentalist warning about the dangers of rampant exploitation of natural resources on a different planet much closer to home – Earth. And that was true, too. As someone who spends as much time in the outdoors as I can, I’m definitely sympathetic to that story line.

But not everyone is. And the reason that not everyone is as concerned about the environment has nothing to do with the facts or science. Let me explain.

I’m going to draw on the work of one of my personal favorite geniuses for this – Ken Wilber. Wilber developed an integral model of human development, which includes the idea of individual lines of development that proceed through levels of development. Different lines might includes such things as intellect, compassion, persistence, spirituality, empathy, determination, or other features. An individual can be on different levels for various lines of development.

One of the lines of development is what might be called “the circle of concern.” This is the composition of the group that matters to the individual at their particular level. We all start as infants at the level of concern for ourselves only. This circle widens as we get older to encompass more and more people.

But be clear about this – it is a growth in consciousness, not in knowledge! Knowledge is important but it does not determine consciousness. A brilliant scientist can find a cure for cancer or build better gas chambers. The circle of concern is very different.

Normally we grow to include our family in our circle of concern, then to include a social group or tribe, then perhaps our nation. This is as far as many people go.

But some go farther and include all of humankind in their circle, and perhaps then include all living creatures and the planet itself. Most people on Earth aren’t there yet, but a significant and growing segment of humanity is. It gave birth to the environmental movement.

You can see this divide in Avatar, where the aliens on Pandora are totally integrated into the planet and its ecosystem, while the invader’s circle of concern extends only to their own interests. It’s a vast gulf in consciousness.

You can see a similar divide right now in the public debate about climate science. The people at “nation” consciousness or below are fighting any attempt to take action on the climate by either denying the science or complaining that it’s too expensive and we can’t afford it. They express zero concern for the planet or other nation groups.

Movies like Avatar encourage people to expand their concern from their nation to the planet. But encourage is the operative word. You can’t brow beat or lecture people into higher consciousness. All you can do is invite them to “come on up!”

Trying to guilt someone into caring about the people in Bangladesh, or the Amazon rain forest, is hopeless if their circle of concern is too small. You have to show them how it will directly affect them for them to care. So that’s how you have to construct your arguments to be effective. Trying to make them care won’t work, no matter how emotionally compelling your story is.

In Avatar we get to watch several of the humans move into a planetary consciousness as they experience the life and people of Pandora. We know it can happen. As the movie sparks discussion it gives us the chance to invite people to a higher place. And that’s a good thing. What would you say your own circle of concern is?

Thanks to perceptive health journalist Alison Rose Levy I just found out about a conference held last week by Deepak Chopra and Rustum Roy that brought together scientists from a multitude of disciplines to discuss life at the frontiers of science.
One comment from her article that summed up the foundational conflict in the sciences today was this one:

‘Unfortunately, said Larry Dossey, “We’re up against an old science in which consciousness is local, finite, and physical with no direction, and no meaning. One prominent scientist called humans nothing but computers made of meat.”’

The battle between real science and the science that is blinded by the artificial division of Decartes continues, but eventually the truth will win out. As someone once said, “Science advances not discovery by discovery, but funeral by funeral.”

You can read Levy’s full article on the conference here:
http://healthjournalistblog.com/212
I recommend you do. It’s pretty interesting.

I’ve been reading a book from the Institute of Noetic Sciences – IONS – titled “Living Deeply.” It’s a study of the process of transformation in people’s lives, the kind of transformation that is life changing because it changes our consciousness, or our world view.

The authors define consciousness as how we perceive the world, including both our conscious and unconscious perceptions. Then they make this comment: “To a great extent, our worldview determines what we’re capable of seeing, and therefore determines our perception of reality.”

They illustrate this with an example from the life of Charles Darwin. As a young man Darwin hunted for fossils with a geologist, Adam Sedgwick, in the valleys and gorges which they thought had been created by the Biblical great Flood. Both of them completely missed the obvious signs of glacial activity all around them – the scratched rocks, the moraines, etc. Darwin later said that the signs were so conspicuous that they might as well have labels on them. It’s a great example of how even two observant scientists can miss the obvious if it doesn’t conform to their world view.

We see that today, as Dean Radin points out in “Entangled Minds”, when otherwise brilliant scientists insist that non-local properties of the mind are bogus, in spite of mountains of research to the contrary.

Of course, this effect on the theology side is also quite well documented. People can spout nonsense without even hearing themselves, so powerful is their world view. Here’s an example from our local paper, which runs articles from various preachers on Fridays. The writer was deploring “modern theology” for having departed from the Bible, which in his opinion was clear and easily understood by anyone who could read. He asserted:

“It would seem strange to any honest heart that a metaphorical sign would be used to confirm a reality. The truth of the matter is Jesus did die, was buried on Friday and rose on Sunday morning. Those who know and understand the Bible understand Jesus was in the grave for three literal days and three literal nights.”

In this case his world view, or consciousness, interfered with his ability to count to three. Since the Bible accounts tell us that Jesus was buried around sundown on Friday, and raised before dawn on Sunday, counting that as three literal days is a stretch. It’s only 48 hours. But, heck, it’s parts of three days, so we’ll let him stretch it. But there is no way to get three nights, and he seems oblivious of that fact!

That’s exactly the kind of world view induced blindness that Darwin suffered, and from which we all suffer. The ancient person who first noted that humility is a virtue had probably just gotten caught in it. It’s a reminder to bring “beginner’s mind” to every new idea.

“All successful men have agreed in one thing — they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson

At a news conference at the United Nations a few years ago, the 2006 Templeton Prize was awarded to John Barrow, a distinguished cosmologist and professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England. The $1.4 million prize is given each year to a living person to honor the advancement of knowledge in spiritual matters.

In the course of his career, Barrow has tapped mathematics, physics and astronomy to raise interesting questions about time, space and matter to challenge both scientists and theologians to understand the universe.

In 1986, Barrow co-authored “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle”, a ground breaking book that investigated anthropic principles across physics, chemistry, cosmology, astronomy, history and theology.

What is the “anthropic principle”, you might ask? Well, it’s the principle, first proposed by theoretical physicist Robert Dicke and later named by astrophysicist Brandon Carter, that the universe seems specifically designed to support carbon based life. If even small changes were introduced in any of the various constants of science – like the force of an electric charge, the attraction of gravity – the universe as we know it would not exist. And neither would we.

This original version is now know as the “Weak Anthropic Principle” since it really doesn’t make much of a statement by saying that the universe has to be the way it is or we wouldn’t be here to notice. However it has since been joined by three other versions that are much more interesting.

Carter also proposed the Strong Anthropic Principle, which states that the universe must have those properties that allow intelligent life to develop within it at some stage of its history. This was later joined by the Final Anthropic Principle that asserts that once intelligent life has developed it will never die out. These two, although science based, are considered more speculative.

The fourth one, though, is the one I consider the most interesting. It’s called the Participatory Anthropic Principle and it states that the universe had to develop intelligent life of some form because consciousness is required to bring the universe into physical existence.

It’s the observer effect on a grand scale, and advocated by some very prominent scientists. The late John Wheeler of Princeton, who said that we live in a “participatory universe” and his friend Andre Linde of Stanford who says “you cannot have the universe without an observer” are two of them.

So we, or beings like us, are necessary to have a universe made manifest. Wheeler believed that there might be sections of the cosmos that were still just probability clouds because no conscious observer had ever looked at them. So what does that mean for us?

In his acceptance speech, Barrow said, “Many of the deepest and most engaging questions that we grapple with about the nature of the universe have their origins in our purely spiritual quest for meaning. The concept of a lawful universe – with order that can be understood and relied upon – emerged largely out of belief about the nature of God. Out of these beliefs came confidence that there was an unchanging order behind the appearances that was worth studying.”

Do you see the importance of that? It’s not just that the universe is friendly to conscious life forms like us. The universe is also logical and understandable by us, so we can learn how it works and make our lives better. The more we know, the more we thrive.

Some people still want to believe in chance and luck. If that was how it worked, we’d be powerless, wouldn’t we? How could we improve our lives in a world of random chance? No, like Emerson said, to be successful, we have to be causationists. The universe works by law, and it works by law because it’s founded at a deep level upon consciousness.