The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes

By Dr. Thomas Stark

Come and discover the extraordinary story of how consciousness is born from the unconscious. This is the story of existence. This is the story of the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Everything conscious has the unconscious for a mother. To exist is to live, to have a mind, and to think. As we see in our dreams, thinking can produce outer worlds, which we imagine are external to us but are just our own constructs. We are all part of a living cosmic organism, seeking to optimize itself, to perfect itself. The Cosmic Mind produces a Cosmic World in which Mind can contend with its own construct and come to consciousness via all the problems and struggles it encounters there. We are alienated from the world because we fail to understand that we unconsciously created it. Only consciousness can reveal the truth: that everything is made by us, that we have total control over it … if we put our mind to it. Minds and their thoughts are all that exist. There is nothing else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244768966

Book preview

The Stairway to Consciousness

The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes

Ontological Mathematics Series: Book Sixteen

Dr. Thomas Stark

Copyright © Dr. Thomas Stark 2018

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

The Ontological Mathematics Foundation

ISBN: 978-0-244-76896-6

Imprint: Lulu.com

Table of Contents

The Stairway to Consciousness

The Birth

The Reducing Valve

Expansion

Archetypes

Unus Mundum

The Talking Mirror

The Consciousness Revolution

The Shared Mind

The Predators

The Wittgenstein Fallacy

Darwinism

The Persona People

Manmade Falsification

The Forbidden City

Video Game World

The Vanishing Gods

Universals and Particulars

Top Down

The New Dark Ages

The Talking Snake

The Demon Barber

Bicameralism and the Self

The Ur Language

World-Historic Figures

The Shadow of Reason

Conclusion

The Birth

Imagine a zombie universe, a universe without consciousness. If consciousness were irrelevant to the operations of the universe, there would be no such thing as consciousness. After all, what would be the point? What sufficient reason could be offered for it? Nature doesn’t generate anything that has no function. Yet consciousness – the most important fact of our life that defines who we are and how we relate to the world – is, according to science, nothing but an accident, a product of random chance, a bizarre mutation, an epiphenomenon, an illusion, an emergent property. It serves no purpose, it has no causal efficacy. It is totally irrelevant to the workings of inert, lifeless, mindless atoms under the control of the inert, lifeless, mindless laws of physics. The ideology of materialism is deadly to the concept of consciousness.

Why would Nature create illusions? How could it? Materialism requires nothing but an unthinking universe, enacting nothing but zombie processes. That, after all, is the essence of materialism.

If there is nothing but lifeless, mindless matter, who needs life? Who needs mind? How can either come into existence in the first place? Who ordered that? It’s logically impossible to extract life from lifelessness, and mind from mindlessness.

You can arrange lifelessness and mindlessness in infinite ways. Not one will logically achieve the miracle of creating the emergent properties of life and mind.

Life and mind must be essential to existence, or life and mind should not exist at all. It’s a simple binary. Since life and mind exist, materialism – the doctrine of inherent lifelessness and mindlessness – is disproved. If materialism is disproved, science, which is based on materialism, cannot be true. This is logic 101. Science can perform all the experiments and observations it likes. No experiment or observation can ever contradict logic. Fallacious interpretations of experiments and observations, however, can certainly contradict logic. Science is full of these fallacies.

At the grotesque Cadaver Trial in 897, the corpse of a dead pope was exhumed and placed on trial at the papal court, on the grave charge of usurping the papacy. The corpse was duly pronounced guilty and the papacy of Pope Formosus formally rescinded. In materialism, the whole world is full of corpses, projecting the illusion of life, mind, consciousness, and free will. All of these properties are impossible in a universe which is grounded in nothing but matter.

It’s about time science itself was put on trial for its absurd claims about reality. Science is useful for describing any situation where the matter hypothesis is a reasonable heuristic. As it has proved, it is useless in every other circumstance.

Idealism, which is all about the mind rather than matter, has consciousness as its ultimate evolutionary product. Not just any consciousness, maximum consciousness, i.e. absolute consciousness, God consciousness. The meaning of idealist existence is for existence to come to complete self-awareness.

God does not create the universe, the universe creates God. That is its purpose.

The universe starts off as God unconscious (Alpha) and ends as God conscious (Omega). This is achieved via us – the individual cells of God, the eternal and necessary monadic minds that comprise the substance of God.

Alpha God is the state of maximum mental entropy (total unconsciousness). Omega God is the state of minimum mental entropy, the zero-entropy state of perfect consciousness, perfect being.

Everything is conducted via mathematics, the divine language. Mathematics provides the syntax and semantics, the fabric and fiber, of existence. It is the only thing which can. Existence is possible thanks to mathematics exclusively. No mathematics, no existence. The equation could not be starker. The sole ontological truth is: existence = mathematics.

Existence is simply whatever is capable of existing. Only one thing is capable of existing: mathematics. Mathematics alone has the properties compatible with eternal and necessary existence. Anything that cannot exist eternally and necessarily cannot exist at all. That is exactly what the inviolable law of conservation of energy states: energy can neither be created nor destroyed. That being the case, energy cannot come into existence and nor can energy go out of existence. So, all energy has existed forever. It exists eternally and necessarily.

What is energy? Energy = existence = mathematics. Specifically, energy = sinusoidal waves, the eternal, necessary outputs of Euler’s Formula, the master formula for existence. Euler’s Formula is the God Equation. There is, and can be, only one such equation. Reality is nothing but the exploration of the consequences of the formula for existence.

The formula for existence is exactly the same as the formula for life, mind and thought. They are all the same thing. To exist is to live, to have a mind, and to think. As we see in our dreams, thinking can produce outer worlds, which we imagine are external to us but are just our own constructs.

We are all part of a living cosmic organism, seeking to optimize itself, to perfect itself. The Cosmic Mind produces a Cosmic World in which Mind can contend with its own construct and come to consciousness via all the problems and struggles it encounters there. We are alienated from the world because we fail to understand that we unconsciously created it. Only consciousness can reveal the truth: that everything is made by us, that we have total control over it … if we put our mind to it. Minds and their thoughts are all that exist. There is nothing else.

Come and discover the extraordinary story of how consciousness is born from the unconscious. This is the story of existence. This is the story of the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

The point of life is to know what the point of life is, and you can accomplish that only via the attainment of absolute knowledge, absolute understanding, absolute consciousness.

We are all part of a God factory. Gods are what come off the production line at the end of an eons-long, protracted, dialectical process designed to overcome every possible obstacle, trial, setback, difficulty and ordeal. You need to be a God to survive the dialectic. It takes you to hell and forces you to confront the Devil. The Devil is you.

The Devil is your Shadow. Only Devils can become Gods. That is the law of the dialectic. As Nietzsche said, Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father. And everything conscious has the unconscious for a mother.

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When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My inference was that God, in contemplating himself, created the second person of the godhead; but that, in order to be able to contemplate himself, he had to contemplate, and thus to create, his opposite. With this I began to do philosophy. – Nietzsche

Sentience

Sentience and consciousness are often conflated. They should be prised apart. Sentience is a feature of the unconscious. Taking Jung’s four mental faculties of thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition, we shall define sentience as encapsulating feeling, sensing and intuition, with consciousness corresponding to thinking (reasoning). Animals are sentient but not conscious. Humans are sentient and conscious.

To be conscious, to be able to think and reason, requires a conceptual language. Thinking is the manipulation of concepts. To feel, sense and intuit requires no language. Consciousness is the means by which mere experience is translated into verbal concepts, which can then be manipulated separately from the original experience. A human can lie in his bed with his eyes closed and have next to no sensory input, yet be consumed by his thoughts, his conceptualizations, his plans. No animal can do this. Consciousness is totally different from sentience.

So, sentience concerns feeling, sensing, and intuition (i.e. it deals with emotion, sensory perception and extra-sensory perception), while consciousness is the faculty of thinking (it deals with reasoning applied to concepts; it is an intelligible Platonist activity).

There are two hard problems: 1) explaining how sentience is possible, and 2) explaining how consciousness arises.

The Very Hard Problem

Everything that is wrong about both science and philosophy is encapsulated by philosopher David Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness. He wrote, The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. ... The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. ... When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.

What Chalmers is actually talking about is the hard problem of sentience, not of consciousness.

All animals and human babies are sentient, but none is conscious. They have plenty of experiences, feelings, intuitions, and so on – a whole world of empirical content and percepts of various kinds – but all without the benefit of consciousness.

Sentience concerns the experience itself (the content; the empirical percept; the feeling), but consciousness concerns reflecting on the experience and establishing its intelligible aspect (the form; the rational concept). This is exactly what animals and human babies cannot do, and regarding which a popular practice such as meditation is useless.

Consciousness is what you get when you separate the concept of the experience from the experience itself. This allows the creation of a conceptual mind-space, distinct from the perceptual sensorium (the sensory apparatus or sensory faculties considered as a whole; the seat of sensation where the mind experiences and interprets the external environment), which we shall call the sense-space.

The sense-space relies directly on the eternal world. The mind-space does not. You cannot carry the sense-space around with you, to be studied later. You cannot put it on pause. You can with the mind-space. You can put it to one side whenever you like and return to it whenever you like.

The mind-space is the noosphere, the sphere of thought, which can detach itself from physicality and evolve mentally rather than physically.

The sense-space is all about percepts, the mind-space all about concepts. In the sense-space, we respond to external objects: percepts. In the mind-space, we respond to internal objects: concepts.

Percepts are always immediate. They are there while we are observing them, and not there when we are not. This is the essence of the philosophy of empiricism: reality, it says, is about the immediate objects of experience. Everything else is a mere pale echo, and after-image.

Rationalism is about the mind-space. The mind-space, not the sense-space, is where we reflect on the past and anticipate the future. It is the non-meditative, non-physical space of judgment, of conceptualization, where we manipulate concepts, form memories (of the past) and projections (into the future). It is where our I – our ego, our agent of action – exists and operates, where it spins its continuous narrative concerning our life, where we are always at the center of our world.

The I can exist only in the mind-space. It can never be in the sense-space. No animal is an I, and no human baby is. All unconscious creatures lack a mind-space. They lack the capacity to conceptualize.

The unconscious is where we perceive and react instinctively to what we perceive. The conscious is where we conceive and plan. The mind-space is a mental space that firstly allows us to reflect on the sense-space, and secondly to start reflecting on itself. Consciousness is impossible without a mind-space you can contemplate. Sentience is impossible without a sense-space you can experience. Machines have neither. They can’t contemplate and they can’t experience. They simply execute programmed algorithms. When the computer system Watson won the quiz show Jeopardy!, it had no idea it had won, and no experience of playing and winning. It felt no stress during the game, no excitement as the tension built, no interest at any point, and it took no satisfaction from the event. Its human creators got all the fun.

Human consciousness is initially born from the human mind’s response to the sense-space, but it can then evolve in its own way and become totally independent. We can live as pure conscious minds, wholly separate from the physical world of the senses. We can still have externality, but externality would now consist of mental entities that surround our personal conceptual space. What mentally contains us? – the collection of all monadic minds, which manifests itself to us as the Collective Unconscious. It also offers the possibility of direct mental interaction with other minds via telepathy.

Absolute Cosmic Consciousness – God – precedes the sensory universe. A perfect mind-space is all that originally exists. This is the Singularity, prior to the Big Bang. This is a living version of Plato’s immaterial domain of Forms outside space and time, a strictly conceptual (non-physical) domain. It is God as a collective being, a Collective Mind, made up of individual living cells (monadic minds), of which each of us is one. We are, and always have been, units of God. God is defined through us. He is not separate from us. He is not our Creator. He is our creation; that which is created out of us.

The Big Bang is an involution event, signifying a transition from a higher state to a lower state. God splinters from a conscious unity into an unconscious plurality of countless individual cells. This is the Fall. It was not Man that fell, it was God. The God Mirror split into myriad shards, and now they all have to be fitted together again, so that God can once again see himself reflected and know exactly who he is. The evolution of the Cosmos is designed to achieve exactly this.

At the Big Bang, God totally loses consciousness. We might even say that God dies. It then has to resurrect itself, which equates to completely restoring consciousness.

We have to qualify this by pointing out that God has two modes: being and becoming. The first is eternal and necessary. It never changes. It is Parmenidean. The second is temporal and contingent. It always changes. It is Heraclitean.

The Cosmos of becoming is where our human consciousness is located, and it is in this Cosmos that a dialectical process is underway to convert the unconscious into the conscious.

The Cosmic Mind creates a collective perceptual space – the physical world – and then, as the individual minds that make up the Cosmic Mind try to grasp what this strange, alien world is, in which they are totally estranged, they slowly and steadily create language and concepts and thereby become conscious. Unfortunately, they are falsely conscious because they are using invented, manmade language and concepts.

When they become sufficiently intelligent, sufficiently conscious, they then grasp that reality has its own language, its own concepts. To understand reality, they must align themselves with Nature’s inbuilt language, not their own artificial, manmade languages which necessarily falsify reality and anthropomorphize it (give it a human shape).

Ontological mathematics is the inherent language of existence, and it is when we align our consciousness with natural numbers rather than unnatural (manmade) words that we become true minds that see the truth of reality, and also acquire total power over reality (mind over matter).

Words falsify reality. They are false concepts. Numbers reflect reality. They are true concepts.

Humanity has suffered from two radical problems: 1) the empiricists have become obsessed with the sense-space and dismissed the mind-space as an illusion, and 2) the believers have worshipped manmade concepts, such as anthropomorphic gods. Empiricism and faith are the twin enemies of reason.

Followers of Eastern religion have dismissed the sense-space of percepts as illusory and equally dismissed the mind-space of concepts as illusory. They deny that the material world really exists, and they deny that concepts reflect reality, hence what they seek is to be absorbed by bare consciousness, which they conceive as some blissful, non-judgmental, enlightened state of mind, free from pain and suffering – nirvana, moksha, heaven. They have of course fatally contradicted themselves since this idea is just another manmade concept!

Followers of Eastern religion emphasize intuitive visions, while followers of Western religion (Abrahamism) emphasize emotional beliefs. Scientists focus on the sense-space and reject the conceptual space. Philosophers dwell on the manmade conceptual space and largely ignore the sense-space. Ontological mathematicians – the true thinkers – are those who grasp that reality is all about the eternal, necessary conceptual language of mathematics, from which everything else is derived.

Only ontological mathematics is true. It is thinking, conceptual truth. Everything else is perceptual, emotional, intuitive or manmade and is invariably false. You cannot state any truth that is not conceptual, intelligible, and based on form and essence, reason and logic, i.e. on pure thought. Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle understood this thousands of years ago. Modern humanity, under the spell of empiricism, has gone backwards.

The Need for Language

Jung wrote, Individuation is not that you become an ego – you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist. … You see as the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense relationships and not to isolation. … Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity. … Thus the devil is a preliminary stage of individuation, in the negative it has the same goal as the divine quaternity, namely, wholeness. Although it is still darkness, it already carries the germ of light within itself. … Individuation does not isolate, it connects.

We are the unapologetic champions of mathematics, the supreme thinking (conceptual) subject, the subject of reason and logic. Yet things are more complicated than simply turning to mathematics for everything. There are four Jungian mental functions: thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition. To become fully individuated, we need a separate language for each of them in order that each can be optimally expressed, whilst bearing in mind that mathematics is the ur language.

If we regard mathematics as pure Logos (the language of thinking), the relevant language for feelings is Mythos, the language of emotional and emotive stories and characters. Abrahamism is based on a Mythos concerning the highest possible stakes: heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. That’s why it is so popular and persuasive.

Logos (mathematics) is the language of analytic numbers. Mythos is the language of emotional words. Mathematics has an analytic logic. Stories have a story logic, an emotional logic. Hollywood is all about Mythos and goes nowhere near Logos. Logos doesn’t sell.

The language of the senses is dimensional science where mathematics is applied to observable patterns.

The language of intuition ought to be dimensionless science where mathematics is applied to unobservable patterns. However, a realistic substitute is something like Jungian psychology, but supported by mathematics rather than science.

Autistics have poor language skills. This means they have poor conceptual skills, whether Logos or Mythos. They are perceivers, not judgers. Therefore, autistics will be sensing types or intuitives.

Sensing autistics struggle with communication, but intuitive autistics are the least responsive of all – trapped in their own internal world, in a permanent dream, almost comatose. If you want to know what being an intuitive autistic is like, just take loads of drugs. You will become profoundly introspective, lose all coherence and capacity to communicate, and exist in a near-comatose state, overwhelmed by visions and perceptions. Your consciousness will be radically reduced, not expanded. By contrast, your perceptual field will massively expand, and you will mistake this for heightened awareness.

Those known as autistic savants are typically extremely gifted artistically (they can paint vast, accurate canvases after just one look at a panorama), musically (they can reproduce the most complex compositions after a single hearing), and arithmetically (they can do astounding calculations effortlessly, as if the answer simply appears to them out of their unconscious).

We need words and constructed languages in order to give us a larger mental vocabulary than mathematics alone provides. We can express ourselves more fully if we have a bespoke language for thinking, for feeling, for sensing, and for intuition, while always recognizing the primacy of mathematics. Humanity’s mistake is that it has made religious Mythos (for emotionalists) and religious mysticism (for intuitives) the highest languages for expressing the thoughts and beliefs of ordinary people, and science (for sensing types) the highest language for expressing intelligence. Philosophy has typically been used as the language for thinking types, but it has been destroyed by science. The language that has been deemed least relevant to reality is none other than the one that actually defines reality: ontological mathematics.

Humanity will become divine only when it puts ontological mathematics first and realizes that everything else is just a degraded version of mathematics.

What is the problem with science? It operates exclusively with regard to the sense-space and sees mathematics as abstract conceptualism. It believes that undefinable matter is the empirical syntax (framework) of reality. In fact, matter is pure mathematics. Matter is made of sinusoidal waves, as quantum mechanics more or less explicitly reveals.

Science’s method addresses the observable sense-space, hence science cannot cope with reason and logic, with conceptual intelligibility, with rationalism. Science’s central failing is its inability to address the mind-space.

What is the problem with meditation? It seeks to reduce both the sense-space and mind-space to zero, leaving nothing but nothingness – which is imagined to be an enlightened state of nirvana … pure mind, pure consciousness, pure acceptance, pure bliss.

What is the problem with prayer? It seeks to make manmade concepts of perfection (God) the highest good, in need of worship and glorification. This establishes a master-slave mentality whereby we are all seen as created beings that must do everything to please our Creator or be annihilated or horrifically punished by him for being so imperfect.

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Science is all about the sense-space; it dismisses the mind-space.

Eastern religion dismisses both the sense-space and mind-space and concentrates on nothingness (supposedly bare consciousness).

Abrahamism accepts the sense-space as the Creation of God, and focuses on the mind-space conception of God as the highest reality.

Ontological mathematics derives everything, including the sense-space, from the conceptual, numerical mind-space.

Everything is about how the sense-space and mind-space, and their mutual relationship, is handled.

Reality is made of concepts we can grasp through reason and logic. It is not made of mysterious matter that we can observe in some way but can never know. Only mathematical concepts are definable and intelligible. Everything else is undefinable and unintelligible. Everything else is mere description, and never explanation. Mathematics alone is a system of intelligible ontology, epistemology and explanation.

Concepts are the matter of systematic knowledge. We must replace unintelligible matter (perceptual matter available to the senses) with intelligible matter (conceptual matter available to reason and logic).

The reification, the concreteness, the ontology of concepts (yielding ontological mathematics) is the hardest of all ideas for people to grasp. Only the finest minds can embrace it.

German idealism is much closer to the truth than science will ever be. The sole flaw with German idealism was that, unlike science, it could not embrace mathematics, the supreme conceptual subject.

Ontological mathematics – allied to the work of Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Hartmann and Jung – is the wholesale replacement for science, and will totally transform the human psyche and default worldview. It will also allow serious philosophy – grand philosophy – to be reborn, and

Reviews for The Stairway to Consciousness

[mutterkuchen123 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

all the writing is fine but I hope you have a pure mathematical form too.