Hierarchy of Consciousness
* Article: A Hierarchy of Consciousness from Atom to Cosmos. By Marilyn Monk. Integral Review, vol_16_no_2
Summary
From the conclusion:
"In the introduction, it was suggested that individual humans personally experience that they possess their own consciousness but sometimes they can have a sense of belonging to a much greater consciousness of the whole. The same could apply to our dual experience of free will and predestination. In the scheme presented here, both could be true depending on the viewpoint – whether the observer is viewing self from their own particular location in the hierarchy or, in dropping the mind, has gone outside of self into possible experience of the reverberating interconnected whole (a 'peak experience' ). One might ask what does it mean to drop the mind?
Observation of our own human mind activity shows that it seems to exist in past and future.
Indeed, projection of past into future could be seen as an imperative for survival of the physical self and its ego. Dropping the mind has an experience of presence - no past and no future.
We also observed that the study of consciousness was complicated by whether the analysis was from the viewpoint of the human mind or from a perspective of pervasive consciousness throughout existence (panpsychism). The latter view, followed in this paper, was prompted by the Oxford Dictionary definition of consciousness as 'aware of, and responsive to, surroundings' and the author's own experience as an experimental biologist. In addition, we noted that consciousness studies are further complicated by the many approaches depending on the background discipline of the scholar – religious/mystical, philosophical, psychological, quantum physics, geological and biological.
The approach here is not concerned with quantum mechanics. My observer relationship in this scheme does not alter the understanding of the biology of increasing complexity in the hierarchy of evolution. It derives purely from my own experience in biological research at many levels of study - observing and playing with evolving life forms. It is just another view to add to the already existing multiple views of consciousness. It may be simplistic but it does however remove what is clearly known from reproducible science from the darker areas of confusion created by quantum mechanics and philosophical and psychological analyses of consciousness.
Finally, can we draw a line at the top of this hierarchy? Remembering that parts cannot know who or what is being served at all levels, and that the higher order structures are looking after their parts, we cannot yet know the next higher order structure beyond cosmos. It is plausible to argue that beyond this entire scheme of all that is known to exist, beyond cosmos, there may be a yet higher order of complexity."