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Most people who have lived in the period from the evolution of Homo sapiens to the end of the 20th century - and indeed probably most of those presently alive - have believed or do believe that there is more to the universe than can be apprehended by the senses and more to the nature of persons than the body. I can put these ideas no more poetically than did the late Dean of St Paul's William Sherlock, who wrote in 1751 (Sherlock, 1751 [260]):
" ... for when we die, we do not fall into nothing, or into a profound sleep, into a state of silence and insensibility till the resurrection; but we only change our place, and our dwelling, we remove out of this world, and leave our bodies to sleep in the earth till the resurrection, but our souls and spirits still live in an invisible state. I shall not go about to prove these things, but take it for granted that you all believe them; for that we leave this world, and that our bodies rot and putrify in the grave, needs no proof, for we can see it with our eyes; and that our souls cannot die, but are by nature immortal, has been the belief of all mankind."
A century or so later, Charles Darwin threw an almighty spanner into the works of this universally accepted idea (Darwin, 1859 [70]). The concept that life evolved by natural selection turned all varieties of religion on their heads at a stroke. It simply removed any need for a designing God to create all the various and multitudinous manifestations of life. According to the theory of evolution it was all done, if not quite with mirrors, then at least with similarly mechanical algorithms of stunning simplicity. Evolution is a mindless process. In its scheme of things, Mind did not come first, as it so clearly had in the ontologies of the various great religions that had held sway in previous millennia. Instead of one great Mind which created and controlled everything, this upstart new theory had it that a multitude of smaller minds simply evolved, over the course of many slow eons, from nothingness. It is difficult to overestimate the magnitude of the conceptual shift this new way of looking at things required.
To philosophical giants like Berkeley and Hume, everything was a manifestation of Mind. The universe was essentially God's dream. To the molecular biologist of today, this view is so entirely foreign as to be ludicrous - a historical curiosity, if it is known at all. In fact, as a direct result of the success of the theory of evolution, most biologists for the last century or so have, at least publically, rejected the ideas of an immortal soul, an afterlife, or a personal God. It must be said that such a rejection is still statistically abnormal in the broader population and indeed privately these ideas have probably been more tenacious even among scientists than many have chosen to admit; but to the world at least, biological science nowadays presents a uniform face of stout and stoical atheism. What Dennett memorably calls Darwin's dangerous idea (Dennett, 1995 [75]) had the major effect of splitting religion and science wide apart.
The idea central to the present book may not be as great or as dangerous as Darwin's, but it does have modest implications in the same territory. In one sense, the present theory can be seen as knitting up the ravell'd sleeve of spirituality and undoing the schism between science and religion that was caused by the raw effects of the theory of evolution. It does so in the following very straightforward way.
If simple consciousness is indeed identical with certain localized configurations of the electromagnetic field, then the electromagnetic field as a whole (which as far as we know pervades the entire universe) includes all of the conscious configurations that currently exist in the universe. The electromagnetic field as a whole can thus be thought of as one vast mind. This concept relies on the understanding that the electromagnetic phenomena that are produced by simple material objects such as magnets (or more complicated ones such as brains) are not isolated individual fields generated de novo by the objects, as basic physics texts tend to suggest, but localized perturbations in a universal, all-pervading field which is presently known as The Electromagnetic Field. The present theory is that simple consciousness is identical with certain localized patterns of perturbation in this field, which are produced by the action of brains. So according to the present theory, The Electromagnetic Field contains an array of localized spots of consciousness that are spatially coincident with an array of brains, with quite large areas of non-consciousness between the spots of consciousness. When these spots of conscious experience are coincident with a human (or probably any higher primate) brain, they are integrated into a similarly localized system which feels itself to be the individual experiencer of all the conscious experiences generated by (or perhaps simply in close proximity to) that particular brain. However, when the spots of conscious experience are coincident with a non-human brain or an undeveloped human brain, this is not necessarily the case. Then simple conscious experiences almost certainly still exist, but there is probably no self-consciousness associated with them. In the hypothetical situation of the spots of conscious experience's being generated by hardware rather than wetware, there would almost certainly not be any self-consciousness associated with the simple consciousness - in fact according to the present theory, it should be possible to generate a little isolated blob of middle-C-experience in one corner of the room. If you have difficulty thinking of an isolated blob of conscious experience without an experiencer, then you might like to consider The Electromagnetic Field as a whole as the overall experiencer of all of the conscious experiences that are currently happening in the universe. And another name for the overall experiencer of all the conscious experiences in the universe would be a universal mind.
Whether or not this universal mind itself has a Self and whether It is capable of initiating any actions are further questions, into which we will not delve at this stage. The point is that if the idea presented in this book is true, then the universe as a whole is conscious. Furthermore, this universal consciousness can be thought of as continuously experiencing, in real time, every sensation and perception, every thought, every emotion that is generated by the mind of every conscious being in the universe.
If this is not a description of what humans through the ages have conceived of as God, then it must come pretty close.
Seen in this context, the core "mystical" experience which, at least according to Bucke's great late-nineteenth century classic (Bucke, 1993 [45]) happened to all of the founders of the world's great religions and was the immediate cause of their becoming spiritual leaders, straight away becomes to some extent understandable. This so-called mystical experience is widely reported as being ineffable, but it can be considered no less real for that - after all the experience of the color red is similarly indescribable if one is speaking to someone blind from birth. Insofar as it can be described in words, the experience in question involves a direct, unassailably real appreciation of the fact that "all is one".For this reason it is often called the unity experience. The continuous state of consciousness into which the unity experience sometimes pitches its subjects is called by Bucke cosmic consciousness.
Now, while there is no denying the reality of the unity experience to those who have it, there are two possibilities as to how it may be understood. It could simply be an unusual sensation, which is generated internally by the brain of the experiencer and bears the same relation to the outside world as does a dream. Alternatively, the unity experience may represent an accurate perception of some reality that exists outside the brain of the subject. At present we have no way of distinguishing between these two alternatives. However, the theory put forward here at least provides some framework on which to hang the idea that the second alternative might be the correct one. If the all-pervading electromagnetic field is in fact conscious, then the unity experience simply represents the sudden realization by one tiny conscious fragment of the field that it is not, after all, isolated and alone in its immediate surround of bone and flesh, but is in fact an inalienable part of the vast, glorious whole.
At this stage I would like to emphasize that while the present theory can be seen as undoing some of the deleterious effects that were produced by the rather hysterical initial response to Darwinism, it in no way refutes or requires rejection of Mr. Darwin's great theory. The present theory is quite compatible with the view that consciousness was not present in the universe before its biological evolution.
If we take this view, then humans were not created by God so much as the other way around. We (collectively) are God. The overall universal consciousness (which can be named God, Allah, Brahman, Gaia, Yahweh, or whatever you like) would simply have evolved as our own human consciousness evolved. The more conscious individuals appear in the world, the more complex God becomes. Such a viewpoint accords humankind both great power and great responsibility.
On the other hand, the present theory is also compatible with the notion that consciousness did exist in the universe before it evolved biologically. Take your pick.