On the Origin of Consciousness - A Personal Experience on the Interaction of Mind and Body

Abstract

The title is, of course, an allusion to Darwin’s classic book “On the Origin of Species.” Here we are concerned with the question of whether there is actually an origin of consciousness or if consciousness is eternal and its availability limited by physical senses. A car crash in 1987 opened my mind to the possibility of consciousness existing independent of the senses i.e. independent of the brain and body. The circumstances surrounding the accident involve a variety of extrasensory perceptions, which, up to that time, I had ignored because of my scepticism. The accident almost cost me my life and led to a long period of convalescence reflecting on what had happened. My documentation of the resultant experiences made it plausible for me to conclude that extrasensory sources of information were active even before the crash and also that these senses seemed to be boosted during the years that followed. In order to understand what had happened, I started to investigate my own experiences and then began to search to see if there were other people reporting similar experiences. It initiated what was to become research for more than twenty years. This really took off when the Internet and its search engines enabled data collection. The method based on Grounded Theory led to proto-scientific theories, published in book