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The Awareness Principle
A radical new philosophy for
life, science and religion
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Peter Wilberg – an
independent, non-institutional thinker whose life-long philosophical
studies and experiential researches have borne fruit in a multi-faceted
and trans-disciplinary body of teachings with revolutionary scientific,
spiritual, social, economic, political and theological significance for
the 21st century. Anyone who studies them in earnest, and
compares them with other contemporary or traditional teachings can
confirm this for themselves.
Peter Wilberg – expositor of the key
principal of this New World Teaching -
The Awareness Principle. Rooted in both Indian Advaitic philosophy
and European Phenomenology this offers a radically new understanding of
consciousness - one which recognises it as the absolute reality behind
and within all things, and therefore the sole possible foundation for a
‘Theory of Everything’.
Peter Wilberg – adept, founder
and teacher of
The New Yoga. This a
unique set of meditational and relational life practices - ‘The Practice
of Awareness’ - that complements ‘The Awareness Principle’.
Peter Wilberg – radical and incisive
critic of both the fundamental assumptions of modern ‘science’ and
fundamentalist religions, together with their contemporary counterparts
– shallow New Age pseudo-science and its irreligious ‘spirituality’.
Critic too, of the most basic assumptions of biological medicine and
psychiatry, together with the manifold varieties of ‘complementary’
medicine and New Age ‘energy medicine’.
Peter Wilberg – a self-described
Tantric-Hindu-Christian-Gnostic-Marxist-German Jew and Guru; a
phenomenological philosopher and scientist, theosophist and socialist,
psycho-analyst and socio-analyst in one - and a polymath in the
tradition of Ivan Illich, Rudolf Steiner, Karl Marx and the great 10th
century Indian adept and philosopher
Sri Abhinavagupta.
Peter Wilberg – a thinker who
challenges and undermines what he calls the ‘Major Myths of our Time’ -
showing them all to be rooted in fundamental philosophical fallacies.
13 MAJOR MYTHS
OF OUR TIME
Peter Wilberg
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Truth is ‘objectivity’. Wrong. For
the most self-evident truth of all is not the ‘objective’ existence
of a universe of things or beings but a subjective awareness
or ‘consciousness’ of that universe. ‘The Awareness Principle’ is
the recognition that awareness or ‘subjectivity’ cannot – in
principle - be reduced to the product or property of any object
or phenomenon, thing or being that we are conscious or aware of.
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Science is ‘true’, factually-based knowledge.
Wrong. What today we call
‘science’, far from being based on tangible facts, takes its own
terms and concepts, and its own abstract and purely mental
mathematical constructs as more real than the tangible,
sensory phenomena they are used to ‘explain’. Thus it is that for
all the ‘advances’ in knowledge supposedly accomplished by modern
science, it cannot begin to ‘explain’ even the most elementary
features of our everyday ‘empirical’ experience of the world – our
experience of colour for example. Instead it seeks to reduce all
qualitative dimensions of our experience of the world to measurable
or calculable quantities and, ultimately to so-called quantum physics.
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Consciousness can be ‘Explained’.
Wrong. To believe that consciousness as a phenomenon that can be
explained is to reduce it to one phenomenon among others – thus
forgetting that consciousness is the pre-condition for our
awareness of any object or phenomenon whatsoever. Again,
consciousness cannot - in principle be ‘explained’ by
phenomena that already assume a consciousness of them.
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Consciousness is Private Property. Wrong. All Western attempts to
‘explain’ consciousness or subjectivity wrongly assume it to be the
private property of an individual being, self or ‘subject’ –
or else the property or product of some ‘object’ such as the brain.
Yet since we only know of any thing or being – including our own
being – through an awareness of it, how can this awareness be
the private property of any being, let alone the product of some
thing such as the brain? In reality all things and all
beings are individualised portions and expressions of a universal
consciousness – one that is not the private property of any
thing or being. Consciousness is only a ‘mystery’ in need of
explanation if it is not recognised as the universal source and
essential nature of all things and beings – the very “stuff” of
which – like dreams - they are made.
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Thinking is ‘Brain Power’. Wrong.
To believe that brains can create conscious, aware and thinking
beings is like believing that musical instruments can create their
own music, musicians and composers, that brushes and pigments can
create their own paintings and painters, or that bricks and mortar
can create their own buildings, builders and architects. The
reduction of thinking to some calculative activity of the brain that
happens to be accompanied by consciousness, and that can be
gymnastically enhanced by puzzles and arithmetic exercises shows how
little understanding there is today of the nature of thinking
itself, and how little deep and truly meditative thinking and
questioning – as opposed to purely calculative thinking – goes on.
Thus it is that despite all the supposedly ‘rational’ thinking that
goes into commercial, political and scientific activity, what we
call ‘reason’ has become nothing but an instrument for the rationalisation of the egotistic interest of individuals and/or
of commercial and political ‘interest groups’ – leaving no room for
or even interest in thinking as such.
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‘The aim of medicine is to
fight disease’. Wrong. The myth here is that
illness has no meaning and that health is merely a matter of
finding ‘causes’ and ‘cures’ of disease. The medical ‘war’ against
‘disease’ treats the body as a clinical object, preventing us from
understanding disease subjectively, as the embodiment of what for
the patient is a subjectively felt discomfort or dis-ease.
Far from being ‘scientifically’ founded on biological facts, modern medicine is in fact built almost entirely on verbal
metaphors - for example the military metaphors employed
in talking about illness as some hostile and alien disease entity,
one that is ‘caused’ by hostile and alien ‘foreign bodies’ such as
viruses, faulty genes or cancerous cells which ‘invade’ or ‘attack’
the body – and against which it must therefore ‘mobilise’ its
‘defences’. The very idea of ‘fighting disease’ is a military
metaphor - resulting in a military model of medical and health
treatment. This model of medical theory and practice serves only to
eradicate the stresses and dis-ease generated by what is an
inherently pathological and sickness-generating social and economic
system. The ill-health of individuals is ultimately nothing but a symptom of the ill-health of this system, a symptom of the
sickness of human social, economic and political relations.
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‘It’s all in
the genes’.
Wrong. This is now a principal myth of biological medicine and
psychiatry. To think that our body’s genetic vocabulary determines
the nature of our bodies or behaviour is like thinking that our
personal vocabulary determines what we say – and that
illnesses can be cured by correcting genetic ‘mis-spellings’ or
removing offending genetic ‘letters’ or ‘words’. Just because their
personal vocabulary may predispose people to speak in a particular
manner does not imply that it determines what they say. To
try and prevent or cure illness by manipulating or deleting genes is
like trying to prevent people swearing or using hurtful language by
abolishing or re-arranging the letters used in swear words. The myth
that ‘It’s all in the genes’ also totally fails to explain why
millions with ‘faulty’ or supposedly disease-disposing genes develop
no diseases at all - despite the onslaught of carcinogenic
‘mutagens’ and other so-called ‘causes’ of disease.
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‘Everything is energy’.
Wrong. And yet this is the
principal myth shared in common by both modern science and New Age
pseudo-science with its talk of spiritual ‘energies’ and of ‘energy
medicine’. The term ‘energy’ is used in both scientific and
spiritual literature without the question ever being raised as to
what this ‘thing’ called ‘energy’ essentially is. In place of the
myth that ‘Everything is Energy’ The Awareness Principle argues that
‘Everything is Awareness’ – for awareness is, in principle, the
pre-condition for the experience, conceptualisation, calculation or
measurement of any phenomenon whatsoever – including what is
conceptualised as ‘energy’.
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‘mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances of the brain’. Wrong.
This is the myth of biological psychiatry and the pharmaceutical
corporations. The myth is based on the fundamental misconception
that consciousness is rooted in the brain. But since the brain
itself is an object of waking consciousness, to claim that it is the
very foundation of consciousness per se is like claiming that
some particular object we dream of is the foundation or cause
of dreaming consciousness per se. Science has not yet grasped the
simple yet fundamental philosophical principle that consciousness as such - what I term ‘awareness’ or ‘pure awareness’ – cannot
possibly be explained by any particular ‘thing’ we are conscious or
aware of - such as the human body or brain. To seek to do so
is, again, like seeking to explain dreaming as such by
something specific thing we dream of.
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There
is no alternative to the market economy.
Wrong. This is the myth of the global financiers and multinational
corporations, whose drive for profit through unending economic
‘growth’ cannot but lead to global poverty and exploitation, along
with total ecological devastation and increasing wars over declining
natural resources. Within the ‘no alternative’ myth go many other
myths – for example the myth that competition generates
‘employment’. In fact, competition for the same markets results in
the over-production of commodities, leading to wage cuts and/or job
losses which in turn reduce people’s ability to afford the very
commodities they create as producers. In the capitalist system work itself has become the single most dehumanising and unfree
form of ‘economic activity’ - one in which the true creative
potentials of millions of human beings remain massively under-employed or totally
unemployed. And far from
increasing their ‘choice’ as consumers, competition results in the
mediocre standardisation of commodities – in hundreds of
near-identical cars, mobile phones or TV channels for example. Far
from there being ‘no alternative’ to capitalism, the ‘alternatives’
has never been clearer – socialism or the end of human civilisation.
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‘NATIONS ARE IN DEBT THROUGH OVERSPENDING’.
Wrong. This is the myth sustained by the global financial and
monetary system – which demands that nations borrow from private and
international banks at interest, and prevents them from issuing
their own sovereign, interest-free money - as Lincoln sought to do
with his ‘Greenbacks’. National debts do not arise
from public overspending but from public over-borrowing - from
private banks. Instead spending for industry and employment, public
works, welfare and education could be funded by governments simply
issuing their own sovereign, interest-free money directly through
national and public banks. These could provide money for investment
in the real economy and not merely money placed in the hands of the
banks – which includes trillions spent on ‘bailing out’ those banks
when they over-lend and accumulate bad debts. These bailouts are of
course paid for by massive cuts in public spending - and are
dependent on nations borrowing yet more money from private
and international banks. This is a vicious circle that can only be
broken by national, public banking.
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God is a ‘Supreme Being’.
Wrong. This is the common concept
of God shared by ‘theists’ and ‘atheists alike’ - both of whom
understand ‘God’ as a supreme being that merely happens to have or
possesses consciousness. Yet thinking of God as a supreme
‘God-being’ makes no more sense than thinking that the ocean - just
because it is indeed the creative source of all the fish within it -
must itself be some sort of big or ‘supreme’ fish. The concept of
God as a supreme being also reduces God to the status of one being
among others ‘with’ consciousness - rather than allowing us to
understand that the very essence of God is Consciousness – a
‘God-Consciousness’ that is the divine source of all beings. Only by understanding God as a supreme, all-pervasive
consciousness can we overcome the false debate between atheists
and religious ‘believers’ in a ‘supreme being’, understanding all
beings as individualised portions or personifications of that
divine-universal consciousness which is God.
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The
Universe Began with a ‘Big Bang’. Wrong. If creation did not begin
with a supreme ‘God-being’ then neither did everything begin with a
primordial ‘Big Bang’. The belief that it did is perhaps the
philosophically dumbest myth of our time – even though it comes
through the authority of the new religion of ‘science’. For one does
not need to be a philosophical genius to ask what came ‘before’ this
Big Bang - and to see that it makes no sense to speak of time itself
as having a ‘beginning’, when to talk of a beginning is to already
assume the existence of time. Ultimately, neither time, space nor
light are dimensions of an ‘objective’ physical universe ‘out
there’. Instead they are inner dimensions of an infinite
field of subjective awareness. For without the light of
awareness no things could appear or ‘come to light’ as cosmic
phenomena in the first place. The light of the sun and moon, stars
and galaxies all reveal themselves first of all in the light of an
awareness of them. We live then, in a multi-dimensional universe or
‘multi-verse’ of awareness which has no beginning or end in any
dimension of space-time. For all dimensions of space-time are
ultimately dimensions of awareness - just as every thing, body and
being manifest within these dimensions is a specific form or pattern
of awareness – a distinct mode or ‘species’ of consciousness and not
just an ‘object’ of consciousness. Therefore we do not need to
search for, prove or merely ‘believe’ in the existence of life
beyond our planet. For the universe is alive and aware throughout
- consisting of countless planes and species of consciousness
- of which our own physical planet and species is but one
manifestation.
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The Qualia
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