“”What -when you really thing about it- is consciousness?” I had long understood that this is the mega-question of both science and philosophy, but I had not appreciated either the tautology of epicycles that neuroscience had projected onto the relations between the brain and the mind or the full boggle of philosophy’s forays in search of subjective being. (…)

For scientists to tolerate any exogenous source of consciousness would be to forfeit their eminent domain and vested legitimacy -the basis of their declaration of power. Conscousness must finally be either illusional or imaginary -a spinoff of thermodynamics and neural stacking. It cannot aspire to any higher status. If it ever gets a foothold outside entropy, their goose is cooked.

Everything that follows in my books is either an extension or ass-kicking of this dilemma; that is, it either addresses the crazy-making ploy of acting like conscious dudes who de factory deny their own existence, or it portrays consciousness operating sui generis under its own authority.

I mean to kamikaze rather than skulk into this snafu, avoiding “tao of physics” settles or stale resorts of quantum-mechanical metaphors that relocate science and spirituality at layers of the same general paradox (thought I think that these models are valid in their way). What I seek instead is an actual convergence of scientific and psychic attunements -very, very different birds that stick out hard beaks and shape claws in trying to bash the other into nonexistence. I force them into coexistence and frame their meaning in terms of each other’s. I can’t think of anyone else eager enough to operate at this frequency; yet I believe that it is precisely the dial tone of modernity as well as where we have to go.”

Richard Grossinger