his book offers what I hope you will find to be a refreshingly plain and lucid theory of consciousness—one that satisfies the rational scientific impulse yet accords with the most profound and ancient spiritual intuitions.  It is not an attempt to persuade you toward or dissuade you from any particular view of the divine cosmic order.  Nevertheless, the scope of this theory is vast—as it must be, considering the immensity of the subject matter.  The theory calls for a thorough re-examination of the brain’s neuroanatomical structures and processes, employing a fresh conceptual vision.  It delves deep into our own evolutionary history—to the very origins of sentient existence—exposing the primordial roots of our most problematic human emotions and behaviors and confirming how difficult will be the task of releasing ourselves from their tenacious grip.

The theory is predicated upon a single metaphysical postulate—that light itself is aware; awareness itself is light—that the quantum field is brimming with an intrinsic but initially undeveloped proto-awareness, from which our own terrestrial forms of embodied consciousness are fashioned by specific evolutionary processes.  This is where the theoretical model first emerges into view from behind the veil of the Great Mystery of the union of spirit and light—or in the language of modern physics: the inseparability of the observer and the quantum event.  From here a much sturdier and more orthodox chain of logic and scientific inference will guide us toward an understanding of what embodied consciousness actually is and how it came to be.

Although microscopic in size, neurons within the brains of animals generate inordinately strong electrical voltages when they fire.  The small perturbations of the electromagnetic field that accompany these firings are, I contend, the source and conduit of the Light of conscious awareness.  The conscious mind manifests as an intricately patterned, pixellated quantum field created by the coordinated firings of the hundred billion neurons of the cerebral cortex.  By means of countless intricate “neurobioluminescent” effects, Light itself is shaped by the brain into the vivid three-dimensional presentations of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch that form the sensorium within which we indirectly experience our existence.