What’s the meaning of life and what’s consciousness?

Here is in an excerpt from An End to Upside Down Living:

"Consciousness exists beyond space and time as the basis of all reality. Nothing "caused" it to exist; it simply is without something causing it to be (as counterintuitive as that sounds). Notions of "linear time" and "causality" are merely illusions and human constructs. So the notion that something would have needed to cause consciousness is an artifact of the mind's limited capacity to understand reality.

"I argue that the brain acts more like a filtering mechanism that restricts, limits, and processes a consciousness that exists independently of the body. Consciousness doesn't need a brain to be conscious. Rather, the brain gets in the way like a blindfold; it is the lens that governs the type of consciousness we experience. So when we get the brain out of the way, we can experience an enriched consciousness-one that has always been always there, but which our brain blocks us from experiencing fully. If we accept that the brain does not produce consciousness and instead limits it, then we have to wonder where consciousness comes from. The view I'm most drawn to is how Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck stated it in 1931: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness."

"In Kastrup's excellent Scientific American article "Transcending the Brain" (2017) he offered a metaphor to explain the basic idea further. He said that we can imagine that all reality is one universal consciousness represented by a stream of water. Within the stream, whirlpools form. Each whirlpool has a sense of individuality, but they're interconnected as part of the same stream. Using another one of Kastrup's analogies, it's as if the stream of consciousness- we'll call it the "One Mind"-has dissociative identity disorder. Each of us is an individual "alter" of the whole. So, the reason the hard problem of consciousness hasn't been solved is that it's posing the wrong question. It's asking how a brain can make consciousness... when the brain doesn't make consciousness in the first place! No wonder Science magazine's #2 question has gone unanswered. And incidentally, this consciousness-centric view of reality answers Science magazine's #1 question in all of science: "What is the universe made of ?" The answer, according to this framework: consciousness. Back to whirlpools. Imagine that I'm one whirlpool and you're another. If some of the water escapes my whirlpool and enters yours, it's akin to saying that some of my consciousness enters yours. In other words, it's a telepathic or psychic occurrence. So this model predicts that psychic phenomena would be real. Furthermore, if a whirlpool delocalizes, the water flows back into the broader stream. But it doesn't leave the stream. The water simply changes form. Analogously, when the physical body dies, consciousness doesn't die but instead transitions into a new form. This model of consciousness would predict that consciousness survives bodily death (that is, when our body dies, our consciousness continues).

"Psychic phenomena and survival of bodily death are rejected by physicalist science and are often scorned as "paranormal." The word paranormal itself is problematic because it assumes that we know what "normal" is. It's conceivable that what we consider to be paranormal or impossible today only seems that way because of our primitive understanding of reality. After all, wireless cellphone technology would have seemed paranormal to people two thousand years ago."

Join Mark and I this Thursday, June 17th at 9AM PT / Noon ET for a fascinating conversation on how his model of consciousness can give you answers to the meaning of your life.