No Problem Can Be Solved From The Same Level of Consciousness That Created It.

“No problem can be solved from
the same level of consciousness

that created it.”
So we must change our consciousness.
Philosophers, scientists and spiritual teachers
have been repeating this mantra for thousands of
years. But what does it even mean? How do we
start? And what is consciousness, by the way?
It is maybe the oldest existential question of all.
The dictionary defines “consciousness” as “the
state of being aware of and responsive to
one’s surroundings”. Hence, consciousness is
the property of a subject who is to a certain extent
aware and responsive to its environment.
The question can therefore be rephrased as
“Who am I?”, “I” being that subject who is
conscious. The existential crisis that each of us is
facing right now is, at the crux of it, a crisis of
identity.
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Throughout the history of humanity, many
different answers have been given. We can briefly
summarize them in 5 main categories.
(in chronological order):
1. Panpsychism, from the Greek pan: “all,
everything, whole” and psyche: “soul, mind”, is the
view that consciousness is a universal and
primordial feature of all things. FEarly forms of
panpsychism can be found in almost all primitive
animistic beliefs. Generally, animists primitive
people believed that everything, from animals, to
trees to all natural phenomena such as
mountains, water streams and celestial bodies
arewhere inhabited by powerful spirits that could
consciously interact with them. In the animistic
frameAt this stage, the mental and the material
spheres arewere seen as combined together in a
n undifferentiated, cosmic whole.
2. Dualism, is the view that mind and body are
made up of separate substances and occupy
distinct realms of existence:. oOne one side the
physical reality of matter, on the other the spiritual
reality of the soul. Compatible with most
theological traditions which claimed the
immortality of the soul, this view found a
comprehensive philosophical explanation in the
famous Cartesian dualism.
3. Idealism, is the view that reality is
fundamentally mental and immaterial. Idealism
asserts the primacy of consciousness as the
origin and prerequisite of all material phenomena.
According to this view consciousness exists prior
tobefore and is the pre-condition of material
existence. Again influenced by many religious
traditions which conceived the universe as the
conscious creation of a supreme divine
intelligence, idealism had a renaissance during
the 19th century philosophy in northern Europe.
4. Materialism, is the view which holds that
matter is the fundamental substance in nature,
and that all things, including mental aspects and
consciousness, are results of material
interactions. This is the view generally maintained
by modern science. NeuroMost scientists try to
analyzereduce consciousness by obtainingto
measurable data such as neural correlates or
integrated information circuits. Consciousness
hence is mostly regarded as an illusionary by-
product of the basic neural functions of our brain.
5. Emergentism, is the view for which
consciousness arisesemerges as a property of
matterfrom material interactions. A property of a
system is said to be emergent if it arises from
other it is a new outcome of some other properties
of athe system butand their interaction, while it is
itself different from them. Emergentism is
compatible with physicalism, the theory that the
universe is composed exclusively of physical
entities, but asserts that consciousness can’t be
reduced can only be understood by understanding
the dynamics of its material underpinningsto
matter. This vieww mightcan be summarized as
“the soul is more than the sum of its parts.”.
As explained in the first chapter of this

consciousness series, we believe that life and
consciousness evolvedgo hand in hand in their
evolution through time and space, and. Hence,
while recognizing that each of the aforementioned
views holds a part of the truth
, we choose the last option — emergentism — as
the most accurate and convincing.
An emergentist perspective is able to explain the
nature of consciousness without assuming
absolute metaphysical principles which are by
definition unscientific, and without falling into the
trap of scientific reductionism which basically
ignores consciousness as a subjective
experience. Emergentism is therefore, in our view,
the best option available to bridge the gap
between science and spirituality, and provide a
fertile ground for the birth of an updated
universal cosmology that resonates with our
new understanding of reality and human
existence.
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Some definitions to read the map above:
Consciousness: “the state of being
aware of and responsive to one’s
surroundings.”
Unconsciousness: “the state of not
being conscious.”
Sentience: “the ability to feel and
perceive things through the senses.”
Subjectivity: “the capacity of an
individual to condition its instinctive behavior
according to subjective experiences such as
success and failure.”
Intelligence: “the resultant of the process
of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving,
combining, comparing, and using in new
contexts information and conceptual skills”.
Self awareness: “the capacity for
introspection and the ability to recognize
oneself as an individual separate from the
environment and other individuals.”
Metacognition: “awareness and
understanding of one’s own thought
processes.”
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Our ancestors appealed to mythological
narratives, commonly transmitted via stories and
religious traditions, in order to make sense of the
world and give their lives a meaning and a
purpose. According to Joseph Campbell, myths
served 4 main functions:
Mystical — Helping us realize the
wonderful mystery of the universe, which is
also our mystery, and experience awe before
it.
Cosmological — Giving us aa (somewhat)
coherent image of the universe, answering
questions such as “Why are we here?”,
“Where do we come from?” and “Where are
we going?”.
Sociological — Endorsing and validating a
certain social order that binds together the
group with a set of rules and roles.
Pedagogical — Providing guidance and
support to each of us as we move through the
necessary stages of our individual lives.
Myths and religions employtalk a symbolic
language: they use metaphors and poetic
formulas to express what isn’t otherwise
expressible in words. When the Bible says that
God “created the universe in 7 days,”, some
suggest that each day really represents an epoch.
When the Gospel says that when Jesus died “he
ascended to heaven,”, some suggest thisit really
means that he went back to that source from
which all life comes from. The main problem with
symbolic language is that, once in use, people
easily forget its metaphorical connotation and
tend to interpret it too literally.
Also, the sociological function of promoting a
certain social order inevitably distorts the
preferred choice of symbols used to explain
reality. When Christians call God “father” or
heaven its “kingdom”, they are obviously
borrowing the terminology and concepts from the
obsolete social hierarchy that was in use when
their religion emerged 2000 years ago. WhileEven
if that hierarchy has recently been challengedis
now out of date, the rigid structure of
institutionalized religion makes it difficult to
change a custom thatwhich has become so
deeply ingrained in the cultural tradition.
Historically, religions have always been an
integral part of a cultures since they shared the
same symbolic systems of reference. It is almost
impossible today to distinguish between Hindu
culture and Hindu religion, or between Muslim
religion an Islamic culture. But in this
confluenceimmanence with the mother culture
poseslies athe most dangerous risk for religion: to
become nothing more thaen a sacralized form of
ideology, a “‘false conscience,”’, as put by
Marx.
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The cultural categories inherent inthat express a
religious doctrine are in factreally projections of
the collective subconscious and often end up
conveying, hidden under a mystical dressing, the
interests of the status quo.
The symbolic grammar of transcendence
becomes then a powerful tool in the hands of the
establishment, used to forge uncompromising
principles of internal cohesion and control.
If religions are only fossilized shells inherent
inimmanent to a certain cultural traditions, we
shouldn’t forget that inside each of them pulses
the same living force, the prophetic drive of the
human spirit, that leap of faith calling us to
transcend ourselves in the universal,
generative void we call “God”.
God is the fundamental symbol of our supreme
interest, the whole, the sum of what we care the
most. We can choose to call it by another name,
but this is irrelevant. As Paul Tillich said, “God can
be negated only in its name… Atheism can only
mean a denial of every transcending interest, an
indifference towards the meaning of existence.”
Indifference towards the future, towards truth and
towards life is therefore the only real atheism.
Atheism, when it doesn’t deny this universal
interest, is actually the purest form of faith. True
faith always transcends the conventional
symbolismogy of God with a sort of self-irony: it
uses the myth while denying it. It is able to pray
with the words of Meister Eckhart:
«Oh God, set me free from ‘God’»
Somewhere else, the great mystic explains: “Until
the soul aspires to know God, to have a notion of
God, it is really still far away from God… since it
depends from the will of the creatures if God is
named ‘God’. And the greatest honor a soul can
offer God is to leave it alone and so be free of
God.”
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Now, let’s try to place ourselves on the threshold
where humanity is currently standing. From here
it’s possible to see the extent of the new,
extraordinary challenges that undermine the very
foundations of traditional religions.
It makes no sense for religions to remain
disconnected from one another, each in its geo-
cultural region, each with its own traditions and
institutions. Their symbolic archetypes have lost
the old excuse of isolation, that for long had
paralyzed any attempt atof reform. Their message
of salvation has little relevance today if it confines
itselfkeeps being directed exclusively to the
human spiritsoul, as if everything else — the
biological survival, the vital environment, the
natural laws, that preserve the variety of life’s
genetic heritage — were not relevant to human
concern.still beyond the reach of the human will.
Humanity as a species, and with
humanity the entire biosphere, has
entered a condition of extreme
emergency that fully deserves our
all-hands-on-deck participation in
a cooperative effort to save
the world.
The traditional answers were tribal, the new
questions are planetary. Any kind of ethnic
conflict or cultural rivalry poses today an
intolerable threat to the last chances of survival of
our species. Therefore, religions need to the only
answer living up to the current challenge is, for
religions, the recovery of their original intuitions,
that both pre-dates and transcends the particular
symbolic contour in which they haved fossilized.
There are no false religions. Each has drawn from
the common potential reserve of the human spirit,
adoptingeach assuming as central one particular
aspects, in order to actualize itself within the
provisional shell of a given culture.
But as the cultural shell cracks, it’s time for
religions to plunge back into the seminal core of
that intuition and let a new human
consciousness emerge from their ashes, to take
care of the authentic, profound, unitedson cry of
salvation that rises from the depths of our
collective soul. In short:
In order to live, religions
have to come up with
something newdie.
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“We are the universe becoming
conscious of itself.”
When we refer to God in the sense of the totality
of all things we are really referring to the
universe, although when our ancestors named it
‘God’ they didn’t know much about it. In fact, they
thought that everything we see moving across the
skies (the stars, the sun, the moon) had been
made by God as a shiny frame revolving around
the single most important part of creation: our
planet Earth, and more specifically, the human
species.
But those were just the anthropocentric
delusions of anuninformed immature minds.
Science has shown us that we actually live in a
galaxy one hundred thousand light-years wide,
which contains about 200 billion stars orbiting
around its center. Our sun is just an ordinary,
average-sized yellow star, near the inner edge of
one of the many arms of the spiral.
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Humanity finds itself relegated in a peripheral
corner of the universe, and this realization deals
a definitive blow to our old claims of grandiosity.
The fact that life evolved right in this particular
spot is something that many of uswe cannot
plausibly attribute to the intelligent design of an
all-powerful creator, but rather, if anything, to the
random chance of quantum physics.
Life emerged in this planet, in this solar system,
because here it found the suitable conditions for
its development, but the evolution from these
original conditions into bacterial, plant, animal and
human life was only a contingent occurrence.
The irreverent discoveries of science reveal us
that life is an ephemeral phenomenon inside
the cosmos and that the human, extreme
example of life’s evolution, isn’t, as our forefathers
thought, at its centre, but is instead a lost
wanderer “in the indifferent immensity from which
he emerged by chance at the periphery of the
universe”, as writes Monod.
If the universe is indeed God, then it surely
doesn’t care about us. Such a God is too large,
and we are too small. If there really is a “first
cause” or “inherent purpose” of the universe, the
only reasonable approach we can hold towards it
— as humans — is that of agnosticism: to admit
that we don’t know, and that most probably we
never will.
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It is easy to feel insignificant when facing such an
incommensurable vastness. And probably, after
centuries of egocentric pride, a little existential
humility is just what our species needs. But if we
zoom closer to our point of observation, we can
actually find some comfort and meaning.
“There is only one fundamental alternative in the
universe: existence or non-existence and it
pertains to a single class of entities: to living
organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is
unconditional, the existence of life is not; it
depends on a specific course of action. Matter is
indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot
cease to exist. It is only a living organism that
faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or
death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and-
self-generatinged action. If an organism fails in
that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain,
but its life goes out of existence. Therefore it is
only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept
of ‘Value’ possible, since it is only to a living entity
that things can be good or evil.”
If we can be conscious of the universe, it’s
because we see it as human beings, that is as
living organisms with a human form and
consciousness.
This is the human condition, our common reality,
our “God”: planet Earth formed from the debris of
the Sun, about 5 billion years ago, formed planet
Earth, where about 4 billion years ago began the
biological phase — the the evolutionary tree of
life of which humanity, a species able to become
gradually aware of the same evolutionary
processes from which it was born, is only one of
the latest branches.
The human phenomenon came forth as the
psychic wave emerging from the genetic memory
folded on itself and, recognizing its own image in
the mirror, started looking for the meaning of
existence.
That peak of human consciousness which so
many spiritual traditions alluded to is really the
moment when life completes this Uu-turn on its
own axis and is able to see itself from outer
space, thus becoming at once aware of its
holiness and maturely responsible for its common
future.
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We are all made of the same star stuff that makes
up the entire universe, and we are also
subconsciously guided by the same biological
drives that propelconcur at the development of all
living matter. And yet we realize that, at this
stage, we can exist as a species only if we
become collectively aware of the complex
unity of life, the system of which we are part.
The niche of humanity is Nature, this small
region of the universe where, around planet Earth,
shaped itself a vital belt, the biosphere, that
wonderful twine of elements that makes life
possible.
“This Nature — writes Edgar Morin — that became
so dear to us, isn’t but a tiny island of life lost
between the thermonuclear fire of the stars and
the freezing emptiness of space, and yet this
island is, for the scale of each individual as well
as for the entire humanity, an ample and
embracing placenta.”
Natural religion
“Driven by the forces of love, the
fragments of the world seek each
other so that the world may come
to being.”
Eventually, we must transcend the old religions
with a new, original faith in the interconnected
and evolving web of life that binds together
every human being and every living creature
in our natural environment.
If we free our mind from the old perspective which
held it prisoner inside separate bodies, we realize
that we are one living being.
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Nature is the dynamic system we all belong to,
this island of life floating in the abyss of space,
our home, our world.
Love is the force that keeps it together, the
holy spirit through which life is continuously
generated, as the rays of father Sun meet the
womb of mother Earth.
Human consciousness has indeed grown beyond
the Earth’s biosphere and is now even sending its
probes outside the boundaries of the solar
system. But the only thing we get by aiming too
far into the vastness of space is a distinctive
feeling of existential vertigo.
Our roots are here on Earth, with the multifaceted
community of Life. If we cut our roots we are just
an insignificant speck lost in the void. If instead
we turn back towards Nature, embrace our roots
and nurture them, we feel empowered, infused
with vital energy and ready to face whatever
challenge the universe may be throwing at us.
In order to make good use of our fully
developinged consciousness we must
therefore learn to recognize and accept our
natural origins and limitations. That’s the only
way we can deal with the world responsibly, as
adults, and leave the schizophrenic phase of our
youth behind.
We are indeed the creators of life and
consciousness, we are the Gods, but we are not
almighty and we are not immortal.
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We are the carriers of the living
seed, and love is the force through
which we plant it, give it birth and
help it blossom.
We must treat Nature as our lover — with care
and respect — and not as a slave. She loves us
and we love her, and we are the same One.
Together, we are the fertile creators of all life.
If we listen to the “tiny, silent voice of our
conscience”, as Gandhi would say, we’ll find it
speaks a language that we all understand:
“It tells us we are all living beings, and the world is
our home. That humanity has come of age, and
must now assume its new responsibilities. That if
we respect and love each other there’s enough
space and food for everybody, so we shouldn’t be
fighting. And also that it doesn’t matter if we grew
up and already think of moving outside: this is
always going to be our home, and if we wanna
eat tonight, we’ve got to tidy up our room first!”
The old theologians and philosophers used to
place this utopian community of life outside of
space and time, either at the mythological
beginnings (the garden of Eden) or after the end
of times (the Apocalypse).
Today, the realization that a world community is
needed without delay, and that we must start
developing it already in the next decades (which
means during our own lifetimes!), hits our
consciousness with apocalyptic force indeed and
compels us to place it right at the heart of space-
time: now!
The planetary community of life is already
here. Its appearance on the world stage coincides
with the end of an epoch, and the beginning of a
new chapter in the human story.
The time has come when — as the prophetic voice
of the spirit shines new light on the ancient
wisdom carved in the stone — we realize that the
home of all living creatures is one, and that it
can be saved from destruction only if, in a
collective act of transcendence of the many
traditional cultures and religions, a humanity
inspired and united by the natural religion of
love will step up and take the helm.
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“I follow the religion of love,
whatever path its luminous
caravan takes:
this is my faith.
The language of science is used to
talk and tell
yet a language of the infinite
needs no speeches.
The pilgrims go to the Mecca,
yet I pray to Whom dwells
within me.
They sacrifice victims,
I offer my living blood.”
Feel free to leave any comment or question
below, and join the discussion on the dedicated
forum.
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“No problem can be solved from

the same level of consciousness

As explained in the first chapter of this

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