Where does our consciousness reside? Part 2

By Lloyd I Sederer MD

Lucid dreams have been sought after by seers, gurus, prophets, dedicated meditators, and the like. They are a mark of what I have learned, not many years ago, as evidence of noetic experiences. Noetic refers to a non-local consciousness, “existing” outside of our brain and cranium. I imagine this to be a timeless (past, present, and some say future) repository of ideas, feelings, and events beyond the local (focal) consciousness of our brain. A type of invisible cloud (perhaps vapor is better) that can permeate the cranium and passes through what is regarded as the non-permeable membrane encasing our brain and thereby enters our “local” consciousness. I can attest, as can many others nowadays, that this is “no humbug”. It took some time to arrive, but we now have the science of noetics.  

If you have had lucid dreams, out of body experiences, extra-sensory perception, and other “non-local” conscious experiences, you are having noetic experiences, even if you had no idea what they were.

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A few nights not long ago, I awoke early in the morning from a very pleasant dream. In fact, it was hard to recognize it as a dream because it was as real as any film I've ever seen in a movie theater. It was a film about two couples each unable to achieve romantic love with one another despite wanting it and having keen affection for their respective partner. I truly thought I was watching a film.

The narrative proceeded as each couple tried earnestly and in vain to discover what the impediment was to their finding romantic love with their partner. In previous scenes, I saw with remarkable clarity the two couples, repeatedly, in a restaurant talking over dinner. In time, they found the trust to discover and reveal their respective dilemmas. Romantic love had eluded their bisexual relationship. Heartache bedeviled them. The scenes proceeded to demonstrate their dilemma and their inability to understand and therefore to change it.

The narrative tension grows until a later scene, also in a restaurant, has one of them disclose their heartache to the other couple. That breaks the ice and both couples discover that romance eludes them but not deep affection. They were attempting life with failing romance as bisexual couples, when in fact they were gay.

These were not teenagers, so you can imagine the emotional pain they had endured seeking love. One night, at dinner, one of the couples began to wonder if their dilemma was one not of affection but of romantic love eluding them because of their sexual orientations. The film music (yes, my dream had music) changed, it became soothing and heartwarming to reflect what they were experiencing in their hearts. They leave the restaurant and one of the men reaches out to hold the hand of the other man.

Romantic love unfolds and propagates from one couple to the other. In Hollywood, this type of film is often called a RomCom.

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In another very different lucid dream, I see myself standing across the street from my childhood home in the Bronx. There were two of me. From across the street, in the driveway of my childhood home, I see my doppelganger, both of us about in our 30s, dressed the same, and having a closely trimmed beard with the early sprouts of grey hair.  

But one on me stood erect, while the other kept collapsing, as would a circus clown with its helium escaping. I thought, in this noetic experience, that I was witnessing myself simultaneously alive and dropping dead. No sweet music playing as was in the dream I describe above. I was not alarmed or frightened. Instead, I felt curious, perplexed by the novelty of my experience.

In Hollywood, is this a sci-fi film?

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If noetics is new to you or your community, I suspect not for long. In his brilliant, suspenseful, and highly engaging new novel, The Secret of Secrets, Dan Brown, always a bestselling author, employs the science of noetics and the peril of its weaponization, to drive the story’s plot. It is fiction, but no matter. To paraphrase Philip Roth, if you want to read the truth, read fiction.

Whether this review is entering your “local” consciousness by neurons in your brain or, instead, entering from “non-local” consciousness as it permeates your mind like a vapor, matters little. Either way, its message has entered and embedded your mind.

Be prepared to receive all matter of information through traditionally known cerebral neurons as well as permeating your mind from a figurative cloud of consciousness floating above your head: The new and disruptive science of consciousness, known as noetics, is about to radically change our notion of what affects how we perceive, feel - behave too.

Yes, complex, but so has been all new and disruptive changes that our species has encountered, assimilated, and benefitted from for tens of thousands of years. So did the dolphins and the lineage of dinosaurs, the birds.

Ideas, and their impact, are rapidly accelerating in our world and our mind. Buckle your seatbelt, the speed of change and cultural disruption is only gaining momentum. Not only from AI.

Let’s be careful what we believe and how we use it. There is “better living” through science and chemistry if we are smart enough to treat it with the respect it surely warrants.

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Dr. Lloyd Sederer is a psychiatrist, public health doctor, and non-fiction doctor.

www.askdrlloyd.com