As we had two new members attending our meeting for the first time we summed up the main findings from our last years meetings. Then watched a short film of the enlightened Eckhart Tolle explaining the joy of being in the now. Although we are all in the now as that is all there is most of us are either thinking of the future or the past but Eckhart tells us to regard all events as transient and not to expend our mindfulness on what is not real.
After tea and a biscuit we read and discussed Reality and Consciousness: Turning the Superparadigm Inside Out, Peter Russell, an abridgement of Russell's book, From Science to God.
His main conclusion is that to ask how consciousness arose out of the physical is wrong. This is trying to account for consciousness in terms that are themselves manifestations of consciousness. Space, time, matter, and all the forms and structures we observe in the world, are aspects of the phenomenon arising in the mind; they are aspects of the image of reality appearing in consciousness.
The question we should be asking is the exact opposite. How is that consciousness, which seems so non-material, can take on the material forms that we experience? How do space, time, color, sound, texture, substance, and the many other qualities that we associate with the material world, emerge in consciousness? What is the process of manifestation within the mind?
But this is not a question that science may ever be able to answer. It is more in the domain of the mystic, and others in the more contemplative traditions, who have chosen to explore the nature of consciousness first hand.
