Dear Anita,

If my post was vague it is because as I wrote, ‘to answer your question, what is the greater flame, I feel a need to give my words more attention than time allowed’ that morning.

My answer may seem philosophical and far away. To me, it is closer than a heartbeat and just as real.

Whether you respond to this or not is okay. Others may read it or not, and that is okay. I will continue to write on this focus and post on the Whole Human blog.

You wrote, ‘ maybe you mean by it the “higher feeling” – but I don’t know what you mean by the later either.’

As I wrote above, ‘For clarity on what I mean by lower emotions and higher feelings, I wrote on the Whole Human site with example lists of both.’

Out of respect for the Tiny Buddha Founder who wrote that ‘Tiny Buddha is about reflecting on simple wisdom and learning new ways to apply it to our complex lives’ I am looking at keeping my posts focused on simple wisdom and may go to posting short text with pics on the Tiny Buddha FB page.

But, to finish what I started here,

by ‘the greater flame’ I mean universal consciousness, the ultimate reality.

Can anyone deny that there is an Everything?

I don’t mean the bagel with cream cheese, but the all that is — physical, non-physical, known, unknown, all universes, dimensions and planes of existence with all its chaos and order design and randomness, laws and mysteries. No specifics now, as Everything includes everything, whatever it is.

And Everything is unified by Something called consciousness.

According to Athene’s ‘Theory of Everything’, consciousness is produced by neural synergies.

There is local consciousness generated by human brains (each person has three ‘brains’ – in the head, the heart and the gut,) the flame of an individual. Yet there is another consciousness, which pervades all things, animate and inanimate. It is the consciousness of the atoms, particles and creating wavicles, non-local and universal. This is what I call the greater flame.

There are many views regarding consciousness and voices speaking sense and nonsense. Matthew R. Francis debunks popular pronouncements in the article ‘Quantum and Consciousness Often Mean Nonsense.’ I have read lightly in this field and am informed/inspired not by writings but by feeling and knowing. A quick browse through Brainy Quotes yielded these nuggets:

“These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways so that no physicist really questions the end point…. these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality.” – Robert Lanza

“Consciousness, when it’s unburdened by the body, is something that’s ecstatic; we use the mind to watch the mind, and that’s the meta-nature of our consciousness; we know that we know that we know, and that’s such a delicious feeling, but when it’s unburdened by biology and entropy, it becomes more than delicious: it becomes magical.” – Jason Silva

“Each time you choose not to act on a frightened part of your personality, you create authentic power – and you grow spiritually. The frightened parts of your personality come less frequently and with less intensity, and the loving parts fill more and more of your consciousness.” Gary Zukav

Then, what am I?

What makes a being a being? Consciousness?

One dictionary definition of being is, ‘the nature or essence of a person.’

Athene wrote in his “Theory of Everything”, “When we use our mirror neurons to look at ourselves, we may construct the idea of identity. But if we do this with our scientific understandings, we see something completely different: the neural synergies that produce our oscillating consciousness go far beyond our own neurons….”

At my core essence I am a cell of the One Being, whose body is all that is. My core purpose is to emerge as a whole human.

Anita, does this give you a sense of what I mean by ‘the greater flame’?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by Gary R. Smith.