The idea that conscious, mind-like qualities are prevalent in the universe’s physicality is a very interesting one because it blends the physical with the metaphysical. The universe becomes God-like and because of that circumvents the problem of the existence of God while maintaining the spiritual benefits otherwise offered by religions. The advantage of the conscious-universe being that it is not subject to the surplus baggage coming with any religion’s package of theosophical faith.   

The computer age and its, both practical and theoretical, investigations of the quantum construct of reality, has given this idea of the mind-like universe a new tangibility. It is easy now that we have computers to envisage the cosmos as a kind of giant mainframe and our own PCs as microcosms of the great universal macrocosm. However, while this idea is perfect for formulating complex sci fi plot lines like The Matrix, it is not very satisfying on a deeper philosophical level which still needs to consider the problem of how this computer/macrocosm could have come about in the first place (because philosophy is and always will be fundamentally the problem of the chicken or the egg).

Many of our own indagations (published here in these posts) have dealt with the idea that the universe is made existent in Being through sapiens’ consciousness, and this idea seems to be made obsolete if the universe itself has its own kind of consciousness. However, what we are stumbling across here is the problem of the idea of the term consciousness itself, for to imagine a conscious universe we cannot assume this conscious-cosmos to be the same kind of consciousness that we possess as human beings. Humans are conscious through their perception of reality, but cosmic-consciousness, if it exists, would have to be of a non-perceiving kind, or at least it would not perceive reality in any way like what we understand perception to mean.   

So, to imagine the non-perceiving universe as a mind or as nous, we believe it needs to be conceived primarily in a pure sense of the idea of noetic, as a mind void of objects. But what does that mean?

In order for a mind to function on any level, it needs to have a noetic space to function in, even though this space does not actually belong to the dimensionality of space itself. It could well be that the noetic space exists outside space and time itself. Sensory perception roots it in the physical, but its essence remains in the transcendental.

To approach an understanding of this noetic cognizance we could use meditation to clear our own minds of all objects and linguistic echoes of thoughts— a mind free of perception and any internal monologue. Of course the experiment can only be truly successful if we immerse ourselves in a sensory free environment— floating in water and enclosed within a pitch-dark capsule, for example. Nevertheless, from simple meditation, we can get an inkling of what the noetic does have in its vacuum— a sense of self enclosure, and nothing else.

From this, we deduce that the intrinsic sense of self-enclosure, of belonging within certain boundaries, is the most primitive sense of existence. It is the unconscious sense of self enclosure and the presence of horizons that is the foundation that makes all other mental processes, conscious or unconscious, possible. It is this unconscious sense of self enclosure and the presence of horizons which we believe describes the noetic universe.

If our thesis is correct and the universe is made existent in being through sapiens’ consciousness, and that it is also able to develop a permanence through sapiens’ memories, there must also be an absorption of sapiens’ consciousness into the fabric of the universe itself. In order to imagine how this might be possible, it is useful to conceive of the universe as a noetic-space in which noemic material (the stuff that conscious minds perceive and imagine, that we ponder and dream about) can be gathered and saved. Like an Internet cloud, the noetic universe is the true existential space: the place where all existence lies (the spirit of this reality being information — the essential components of which are the subatomic particles that make up the physical nature of the universe). In this way, we can imagine a physical way that the mind, our minds, which are so dependent on the proper functioning of our brains, can transcend the physical lifetime of the body and enjoy an existence beyond the lifespan of the brain itself in the noetic-space of the universe that is also, in fact, beyond time and space itself.

As the universe evolves through space and time, and sapiens consciousness evolves with it, perceiving and interpreting itself from within the material realm of dimensionality, it is, at the same time, absorbing a transcendent universe that reflects the material universe and stores it in a non-dimensional place in which the noetic-universe resides.

As consciousnesses are collected in the noetic-space of the universe, the noetic universe becomes conscious of those consciousnesses, creating a consciousness-conscious existence in which consciousnesses may also be prolonged. In this kind of state we could well imagine a kind of afterlife existence for consciousnesses. If what those who have been revived from clinically dead experiences claim to have happened to them is true, that consciousness (and the ego) seems to exist outside of the body, then these proposals on consciousness may point us in the direction of understanding what an afterlife-existence might consist of. In fact, in the universe as nous the idea of spirituality gains a whole new perspective, opening doors for a revolutionary worldview that is both physical and metaphysical in nature.

The cosmos may be silent, self-contained, and void of thought — but in us, it begins to dream. Human perception gives contour to the noetic vacuum, shaping meaning where none existed before.