Beau Geste (imported) wrote: Sun Aug 03, 2008 2:30 pm There was recently an interesting discussion of this idea at a meeting of an organization with which I am affiliated.
The question is a simple one: Is intelligence (or, if you prefer, high intelligence) possible without consciousness?
As you stated, it's the problem of actually defining what consciousness is that presents the problem. I have been reading and thinking about this very thing for some time now; and it seems (despite the fact that consciousness is one of the few things science cannot fully define or explain) that what we generally think of as consciousness (i.e., aware of one's self, of one's past and future, of having aspirations and being an entity separate from others, and yet linked to others in familial, societal, and ethical bonds) actually may reside outside the body, and outside the brain itself. The brain, some scientists are coming to believe, is nothing more than a sophisticated receiver, much like a radio or TV set. Sometimes the brain gets jolted, or aged, or diseased, and ceases to be a good receiver....and yet the consciousness and intelligence still resides *SOMEWHERE* intact and whole. There are several things that point to the consciousness existing independent of the body.... out of body experiences (OBEs), near-death experiences (NDEs), lucid dreams, and so on suggest strongly that we can leave the body at will or sometimes due to an accident, a drug overdose, or sometimes on a surgery table, we humans are able to "get up and walk around" so to speak, or move through walls and know and see things that there is no rational explanation for. And if that is true -- that our consciousness is independent of the body, that our "MIND" is really not associated with the brain...then all sorts of things are possible. The most significant of which would be the possibility that we survive what people call "death" and our consciousness simply moves on to inhabit another, higher realm of vibration. There's a fascinating book, out of print now I think, but available free online, called On The Edge of the Etheric by Arthur Findlay, published in 1935 or so. In it he describes his encounters with a well-known medium of the time and his understanding of the etheric body that we all have and how it is really our consciousness, intelligence, and personality, simply inhabiting a physical body, and that at the time of death the etheric body (some might call it the "soul") detaches from the body for the final time and ascends to a higher level of vibration. He says it is this body that travels and leaves the physical body from time to time, as in dreams or out of body experiences...and recall that this was in 1935!
So in light of all that, I suspect [q
that at some level we are all ope
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rating at a similar level of intelligence and consciousness, but in our physical forms, we all have handicaps, our brains (our "receivers") might not be as highly tuned as others, so down here we all appear to be different, some highly intelligent, some not so much...but at a higher level, at the etheric level, the place we all go to when we leave this physical plane, I think it may be the case that we're all pretty much on a level playing field.
IMHO, of course.