Remembering Robert Monroe and Journeys Out of the Body with Tom Campbell, author of My Big TOE -- IFiEobvvA7A

[01:44:00] 10 or 20 or 50 different kinds of conditions to see which ones work, which don't, why they don't. You isolate the things that don't, then you test those. That's why it took 35 years. It's just a lot of of repetition, but I was able to to get into those altered states very quickly, and I could reproduce those states very precisely. So that made it so you actually could do science there. I guess it's fair to say that your theoretical work really accelerated after you left your intensive period of [01:44:30] working with Robert Monroe. But that period was essential for getting you started. Yes. Exactly. That is that is a correct way to say it. Most of the stuff that I understand now, I understood after leaving uh Bob Monroe and and just basically working on things, trying to understand the logic because I'd get a certain logic build up and I'd run into a point that didn't compute. Okay, I knew this for a fact cuz I'd done that in the non-physical and I didn't know [01:45:00] how to get to that to make that rational. So, it's like how do you pull these things together? And the big aha moment came to me when I came to the realization that it was all information. Consciousness is information. And when I got that, a lot of puzzle pieces started to fall together. That was the first big step because okay, consciousness, what are you conscious of? What is your consciousness aware of? You're only aware of your five senses. You got five [01:45:30] senses. You see, you hear, you smell, you taste, you feel, and that's it. Take away all of those. And what And what's your consciousness like? Well, you have emotions. Yeah. Yeah. You have emotions, but you take all but most of your emotions are tied to these things, the things you hear and see and smell. So, you take all of that away and, you know, take your past away, too. You know, if you just take all of that away, you're at the what I call the, you know, the the decar moment. [01:46:00] I I'm here. I exist. I am. I think. I can think. I can ponder. And I exist. And that's it. There's nothing else going on. That's your total sum content of the content of your consciousness is that you exist and that you think. Say, I think, therefore I am. I am, therefore I think. And those two just support each other and that's it. So well, what is that then? You're you're conscious and say, [01:46:30] "Well, I'm conscious. I'm conscious. There's a camera and over here's a thing and there you and we're talking. I'm aware of all this stuff just because I have sense data." So, what is consciousness? What are we conscious? We take in data. We then process the data. Part of the processing is comparing it to memory from past data and seeing if there's any relationship there. Then we come to some kind of conclusion about what to do with the data. What should we do with it? And we make choices. The output. So what is [01:47:00] consciousness? Well, you get input, you do processing, you have memory, and you do an output. What does that sound like? Computer. Sounds like a computer. Exactly. And that was kind of the aha moment. Ah, this is an this is an information system. Consciousness about information. So now you go back to the Buddha who said, "Uh, all of this is male. All of this is an illusion." Mhm. Oh, well, I understand that it's [01:47:30] information. These physical things aren't really physical things. It's just information. We gather the information. We grab hold of that and I can say, "Well, it's heavy. It weighs probably five pounds." And put it on a scale. I can tell exactly how much it weighs. But all of that is information. So we can We gather information. We interpret that information what it means. That's our interpretation. We we look at it and [01:48:00] process it. We interpret that information and what it means. Look at it from our past experience. I've seen other things like that. And they were made out of metal and they were about 5 lbs, you know. So you you do that and then you decide what you're going to do with that information. Well, I'll just let that sit there. I'm not going to do anything with it. So you make choices and that then cleared up a whole lot of things. Consciousness is an information system. It's about information. You get information, you interpret it. And at [01:48:30] that point, the the the connection to a virtual reality was just that far. Took me a while to get there. It wasn't very far, but it took me a while to get there. And said, "Okay, that's it. It's an information system." And then I said, "Well, what can I do with that?" So I said, "Well, what's the smallest piece of information you can get? Let's reduce information down to the tiniest thing. Well, it would be a what I what I call a reality cell. It's a it's a thing that is aware that it can be in state A or [01:49:00] state B. Mhm. Okay. It only has two choices. That's the minimum set, right? It has choices. So, the minimum set is two. It can choose A or it can choose B. But it's aware that it has two choices. And it can make A and it can be B. Mhm. Well, that's your smallest piece of consciousness. Then I said, that's awareness with a choice. That's how I define consciousness. It's an awareness with a choice. So then I said, okay, let that thing be. Let it evolve. How could it possibly evolve? Well, it can evolve [01:49:30] in several ways. It can say, all right, I can be, let's say, a one or a zero. We'll turn it into more computer terms instead of a and b. So I can be in a one and a zero. So I can be in a one and then a zero and then another zero and then a one and then a one and then a zero. Oh, that's a nice pattern. Let me make another pattern. So it starts making patterns and then it starts making patterns and patterns and all this is evolution. And what is it doing? It's lowering its entropy. It's creating [01:50:00] order. You see? So the way to understand that think of an information system and every bit in the information system is random. Every bit's random. Mhm. How much information does it have? Zero. That's the definition of random. Is that there is no information if every bit is random. So how do you make information? Well, you order a couple bits. You may order a couple bits and this bit and stack this one on it and that one on it. And now you got something different. And [01:50:30] that little thing you just made, you can give it a name. You can call it a function. It might be one. And you can stack them up. Now you got two stacks. Oh, two. Now you've got mathematics. You got one and two. And then you make another one. And then two and one is three or one two three or you know and 3 minus 2 is one. And you start looking at that. So you just look at patterns and the patterns of patterns. And then pretty soon you say, "Well, I'm going to take one of my consciousness cells." [01:51:00] Now, you got kind of multiple things going on here. And I'm just going to let it go 0 1 0 1 01. And I got a metronome. Now I've created regular time. Now I can have sequences of patterns of patterns of sequences. And as it gets more complex, it's more order. The more complex it is, the more meaning and significance it can have. So the entropy gets reduced. Now if the entropy increases [01:51:30] then you get more chaos, less order, more randomness. And if it keeps deevolving you get nothing, no information. A random system all the bits are random. So what's its what's its driving purpose? Its driving purpose is to lower entropy because otherwise it dies as an information system. So like everything else, it's driven by its own survival and it wants to evolve because more and more complex, more and more meaningful things gives it more and more [01:52:00] choices. You see, so if it has 50 little objects that it's made now, it can arrange those in, you know, what 50 factorial over, you know, it's got lots of things that it can do. So the more it builds, the more it has to build from. It's it creates more possibilities so that it keeps evolving into the possibilities. And all evolution does that. It evolves into the possibilities. Those that work for it persist. Those that don't work for it go [01:52:30] away. So now it's just evolution. It's evolving toward lower states of entropy. And it finally gets to a point where there is a a plateau to its learning. I mean, in the beginning, it's really quick. You know, you make two or three things and there was nothing before and that's really amazing. But pretty soon, you've got about as many patterns of patterns of sequences of patterns as you can want and it slows down. So, what's the next thing it can do besides time in a metronome? What [01:53:00] else? What's the next technology it can do in order to create more possibilities? And that is it breaks a piece of itself off. He sits that over here. Now they both have free will. I sort of skipped that step, but free will's implicit in a choice. Yeah. An awareness with a choice. If there's no free will, there is no choice. Free will is required for choice. So you take another thing. Now it has free will. It also has choice. Now you have two things [01:53:30] with free will. They can interact. And then you make a whole bunch more. So now you have 100 things with free will. Now the possibilities go way up. Whereas before it was limited to one thought, one thinker. Now you got a hundred thinkers and they come to different conclusions. Immediately they all kind of see the world the same way. But as time goes by they have different experiences. They see things differently and pretty soon you have a social system. Okay. So that's that's kind of the [01:54:00] progress of why is this an information system? What does entropy have to do with it? Entropy is the is the purpose because the one thing I left out of this thing that it takes in information to process whatever it has to have a purpose because if it doesn't have a purpose it can't tell whether the choice it made was good or not good but it has a purpose. The purpose is to lower centropy to make more information. And the information information is non-physical. People think information [01:54:30] is physical. It's nonphysical. If you have a book, the book's paper that's physical. The ink is physical. But that's not the information. The information is the the meaning, the significance of what's written, not the ink that's written. It's not all little squiggles of ink that's valuable. What's valuable is interpreting those squiggles into something meaningful. So the information is the meaning, the [01:55:00] significance of something. And that only takes place within consciousness. I have a lot of questions stacking up about all of this. We'll do a whole separate interview where we get into the details of the evolution of consciousness and which I know is what you're pointing toward, but this was a good taste. Yeah. I had to describe this to people. You the hardest chore I had wasn't just the figuring it out. It [01:55:30] was how to explain it to somebody else. Yeah. Because I've had tens of thousands of hours exploring non-physical reality, exploring consciousness, but how do you explain that to somebody else who's never done any of that? So that was the biggest challenge. And uh so I made up a lot of things. I made up a lot of words and terms and other things. And uh I started off with a and uh then I thought it would be [01:56:00] really fun if I could move that into an aum, you know, the sacred syllable, right? Or the sacred sound or some sort of thing in the in the Tibetan Hindu Mhm. lexicon. So I thought that would just be fun. So I thought up of something that I could that I could turn into an acronym and show the fact that you have this system starts to evolve. And the first bunch of its mechanics