Does consciousness originate from the brain?

Nityananda! Gauranga! Hare Krsna!

Dear Swami Gaurangapada and assembled devotees, please accept my full obiesances.

40 years ago Srila Prabhupada began a world wide campaign to spread a message, a message that long held western scientific views of reality were limited, and in some cases just plain incorrect. He backed up his view with wisdom from the ancient Veda. Wisdom that was broad, deep, and from the Transcendental.

In the last 10 years or so, transpersonal science and psychology is gradually being accepted by some scientific schools, due to the findings in quantum physics and other fields of research. Before these recent scientific findings the field of transpersonal psychology and psychiatry were considered by some to be metaphysical quackery.

It is interesting to read that these transpersonal thinkers are using modern scientific practice and research, and aligining it with ancient wisdom. I think Srila Prabhupada would be pleased with them to some degree, because now they may be a step closer in understanding what Sri Krsna really is. In Srila Prabhupada's time on earth, such thinkers were very few. I feel it is promising to see that the truths Srila Prabhupada spent so much time propogating, are gradually being accepted by some of the keen scientific minds of our age.

What interests me is this: Krsna consciousness and the message of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu! I truly believe oneday that modern science will grasp the deep purport of this great messiah's message. Any step these modern scientific consciousness researchers make in understanding the Summum Bonum, must be of benefit.

Here is an excerpt from a book I am reading presently. I deeply admire this man's keen insights:

The Holotropic Mind by Dr. Stanislav Grof

The Universe as a Machine: Newton and Western Science
At the core of this dramatic shift in thought that has occurred in the course
of the twentieth century is a complete overhaul of our understanding of
the physical world. Prior to Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum
physics we held a firm conviction that the universe was composed of solid
matter. We believed that the basic building blocks of this material universe
were atoms, which we perceived as compact and indestructible. The atoms
existed in three-dimensional space and their movements followed certain
fixed laws. Accordingly, matter evolved in an orderly way, moving from the
past, through the present, into the future. Within this secure, deterministic
viewpoint we saw the universe as a gigantic machine, and we were confident
the day would come when we would discover all the rules governing
this machine, so that we could accurately reconstruct everything that had
happened in the past and predict everything that would happen in the future.
Once we had discovered the rules, we would have mastery over all we
beheld. Some even dreamed that we would one day be able to produce life
by mixing appropriate chemicals in a test tube.
Within this image of the universe developed by Newtonian science,
life, consciousness, human beings, and creative intelligence were seen as
accidental by-products that evolved from a dazzling array of matter. As
complex and fascinating as we might be, we humans were nevertheless
seen as being essentially material objects—little more than highly developed
animals or biological thinking machines. Our boundaries were defined
by the surface of our skin, and consciousness was seen as nothing
more than the product of that thinking organ known as the brain.
Everything we thought and felt and knew was based on information that
we collected with the aid of our sensory organs. Following the logic of this
materialistic model, human consciousness, intelligence, ethics, art, religion,
and science itself were seen as by-products of material processes that occur
within the brain.
The belief that consciousness and all that it has produced had its origins
in the brain was not, of course, entirely arbitrary. Countless clinical
and experimental observations indicate close connections between consciousness
and certain neurophysiological and pathological conditions such
as infections, traumas, intoxications, tumors, or strokes. Clearly, these are
typically associated with dramatic changes in consciousness. In the case of
localized tumors of the brain, the impairment of function—loss of speech,
loss of motor control, and so on—can be used to help us diagnose exactly
where the brain damage has occurred.
These observations prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that our mental
functions are linked to biological processes in our brains. However, this
does not necessarily mean that consciousness originates in or is produced
by our brains. This conclusion made by Western science is a metaphysical
assumption rather than a scientific fact, and it is certainly possible to come
up with other interpretations of the same data. To draw an analogy: A good
television repair person can look at the particular distortion of the picture
or sound of a television set and tell us exactly what is wrong with it and
which parts must be replaced to make the set work properly again. No one
would see this as proof that the set itself was responsible for the programs
we see when we turn it on. Yet, this is precisely the kind of argument
mechanistic science offers for "proof" that consciousness is produced by
the brain.
Traditional science holds the belief that organic matter and life grew
from the chemical ooze of the primeval ocean solely through the random
interactions of atoms and molecules. Similarly, it is argued that matter was
organized into living cells, and cells into complex multicellular organisms
with central nervous systems, solely by accident and "natural selection."
And somehow, along with these explanations, the assumption that consciousness
is a by-product of material processes occurring in the brain has
become one of the most important metaphysical tenets of the Western
worldview.
As modern science discovers the profound interactions between creative
intelligence and all levels of reality, this simplistic image of the universe
becomes increasingly untenable. The probability that human
consciousness and our infinitely complex universe could have come into
existence through the random interactions of inert matter has aptly been
compared to that of a tornado blowing through a junkyard and accidentally
assembling a 747 jumbo jet.
Up to now, Newtonian science has been responsible for creating a very
limited view of human beings and their potentials. For over two hundred
years the Newtonian perspective has dictated the criteria for what is an acceptable
or unacceptable experience of reality. Accordingly, a "normally
functioning" person is one who is capable of accurately mirroring back the
objective external world that Newtonian science describes. Within that
perspective, our mental functions are limited to taking in information
from our sensory organs, storing it in our "mental computer banks," and
then perhaps recombining sensory data to create something new. Any significant
departure from this perception of "objective reality"—actually
consensus reality or what the general population believes to be true—
would have to be dismissed as the product of an overactive imagination or
a mental disorder.
Modern consciousness research indicates an urgent need to drastically
revise and expand this limited view of the nature and dimensions of the
human psyche. The main objective of this book is to explore these new observations
and the radically different view of our lives that they imply. It is
important to point out that even though these new findings are incompatible
with traditional Newtonian science, they are fully congruent with revolutionary
developments in modern physics and other scientific disciplines.
All of these new insights are profoundly transforming the Newtonian worldview
that we once took so much for granted. There is emerging an exciting
new vision of the cosmos and human nature that has far-reaching implications
for our lives on an individual as well as collective scale.

Consciousness and Cosmos: Science Discovers Mind in Nature
As modern physicists refined their explorations of the very small and the very
large—the subatomic realms of the microworld and the astrophysical realms
of the macroworld—they soon realized that some of the basic Newtonian
principles had serious limits and flaws. In the mid-twentieth century, the
atoms that Newtonian physics once defined as the indestructible, most elementary
building blocks of the material world were found to be made of even
smaller and more elementary parts—protons, neutrons, and electrons. Later
research detected literally hundreds of subatomic particles.
The newly discovered subatomic particles exhibited strange behavior
that challenged Newtonian principles. In some experiments they behaved
as if they were material entities; in other experiments they appeared to
have wavelike properties. This became known as the "wave-particle paradox."
On a subatomic level, our old definitions of matter were replaced by
statistical probabilities that described its "tendency to exist," and ultimately
the old definitions of matter disappeared into what the physicists call
"dynamic vacuum." The exploration of the microworld soon revealed that
the universe of everyday life, which appears to us to be composed of solid,
discrete objects, is actually a complex web of unified events and relationships.
Within this new context, consciousness does not just passively reflect
the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality
itself.
The scientists' explorations of the astrophysical realm is responsible for
equally startling revelations. In Einstein's theory of relativity, for example,
space is not three-dimensional, time is not linear, and space and time are
not separate entities. Rather, they are integrated into a four-dimensional
continuum known as "space-time." Within this perspective of the universe,
what we once perceived as the boundaries between objects and the distinctions
between matter and empty space are now replaced by something new.
Instead of there being discrete objects and empty spaces between them the
entire universe is seen as one continuous field of varying density. In modern
physics matter becomes interchangeable with energy. Within this new
worldview, consciousness is seen as an integral part of the universal fabric,
certainly not limited to the activities contained inside our skulls. As British
astronomer James Jeans said some sixty years ago, the universe of the modern
physicist looks far more like a great thought than like a giant supermachine.
So we now have a universe that is an infinitely complex system of vibratory
phenomena rather than an agglomerate of Newtonian objects.
These vibratory systems have properties and possibilities undreamed of in
Newtonian science. One of the most interesting of these is described in
terms of holography....

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