Cosmic Brain

This is an image I created for the conference “Bridging Nature & Human Nature” organized by the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness.

Below you can read the interpretation from the event organizer, Mark A. Schroll

The Cosmic Brain
What This Image Means

I would like to acknowledge Fernando Paternostro for his assistance in creating a visual image that is representative of how we are beginning to conceptualize “consciousness in the 21st century.”  For some of you this image may at first be a bit “stark” — which I think has to do with the “realistic quality” of the brain’s image.

This image of a brain floating in space, with interlacing-matrix-links throughout the brain (representing neurons firing–information and neural networks connecting) reaching out to the Earth and into the Universe visually represents the conceptual vision that the neural networks/information networks of the brain are interconnected with the Earth’s ecosystems (Gaia consciousness) and the Universe (cosmic consciousness).  This is what Gregory Bateson was attempting to convey to us with his discussion of cybernetic systems in his book’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.  This image also offers a visual representation of Michael Winkelman’s concept of psychointegrators, which are the sign/symbols that connect us to our primordial origins, the eternal moment of body/mind awareness which is “now” and our future oriented cosmic transpersonal consciousness.

This iconic image also provides us with the means to better visualize “psi fields” and/or “morphogenetic fields” as an aspect of both brain function, Gaia consciousness and cosmic consciousness.  This image can therefore be understood as an expression of our evolutionary development that is rooted in the anthropology of consciousness.  This image helps to move our discussion of consciousness away from arguments that psi is merely the study of something “supernatural,” and thus not a part of science.   Stanley Krippner points this out with his definition and discussion of psi as “supernatural” Vs psi as “natural, anomalous and transpersonal” in Becoming Psychic: Spiritual Lessons for Focusing Your Hidden Abilities.

This image also helps us to weave in a discussion of consciousness as a product of the brain’s neural chemistry Vs consciousness as psi fields/morphogenetic fields (which is William Roll’s, Rupert Sheldrake’s, Russell Targ’s, Larry Dossey, Charles T. Tart, Stanislov Grof, etc, view).  The psi fields view or paradigm helps us to explain things like “remote healing” in a way where we can begin to suggest hypotheses’ for laboratory testing by psychologists and for sociologists and medical anthropologists to study psi’s natural occurrence in the lives of everyday people.  The psi fields view and this image also helps us to make the often conceptually impossible discussion of David Bohm’s implicate order and C. G. Jung’s collective-transpersonal unconscious possible for us to visualize, which in turn also supports the views of Roll, Sheldrake, Targ, Bohm, Dossey, Tart, Grof, Bateson, Krippner, Winkelman, etc).