The publication of the treatise The Search for Universal Consciousness, by Ozán Lavoisier, by the prestigious and century-old publishing house Motilal Banarsidass Publications, New Delhi, India, soon generated comments in intellectual circles, particularly in the India International Centre, which houses the cultural elite of that capital, where our author has spoken on several occasions. The fact is that this topic, which was already worrying in those circles, aroused so much interest that it was decided to convene a Congress that took place in Bangalore in September 2022, with the title: Exploring Consciousness: From Non-Duality to Non-Locality, directed by Côme Carpentier de Gourdon, eminent lecturer and writer, who has written the Preface to The Search for Universal Consciousness. The presentation of the speakers at said Congress has been compiled in a book and published in January 2024 by the same publisher with the title: Exploring Consciousness, wich Preface has been writen by The XIV Dalai Lama, and is preceded by an article that Ozán Lavoisier wrote at the request of said speakers, entitled On Consciousness that we reproduce below:

 To ask about consciousness is to fully enter a philosophical plane, I will try to explain why.  The world always presents itself to us as multiple, and in this multiplicity, we can prove with evidence that it is full of intelligence, at least where there is life. By this, I mean that the beings that we individualise are composed of intelligence. We know that in the face of a simple injury a kind of organised army of lymphocytes, plasma cells and other agents of the immune system immediately try to close the wound; regardless of our will and consciousness. The Intelligence of Flowers (Maeterlinck) has been written about, and their relationship with insects, which in turn demonstrate their ingenuity for survival.

We could talk about consciousness in humans or higher mammals, but we would inevitably fall into generalities because each consciousness has its particularities, depending on its character and acquired knowledge; each consciousness is a world of ideas and feelings. We can, in a general manner, speak of degrees or levels of consciousness, but never of consciousness as a single thing or spirit; we always find ourselves with an infinite multiplicity of consciousnesses, although some are more “aware” than others; according to our particular criteria.

Surrounded by, immersed in, and composed of intelligence, we wonder if there is not an intelligent Being behind everything that exists, and the majority ultimately believe in its existence. But the inevitable result is that each consciousness has an idea of ​this universal Intelligence. The most generalised idea is of a Supreme Being who has thoughts, feelings and will, which are all too human faculties, to which are added all the attributes of perfection that our minds can conceive, among others the power to create the universe. This anthropomorphic and mythical vision is too simple, which is why it has led many to show their scepticism or simply declare themselves to be agnostic.

Both have a point, those who believe and the agnostics. But belief, whether by itself or not, does not settle the matter; from a philosophical point of view, it is sterile.  However, it is worth exploring the cause of these beliefs, that is, if they have a real basis. Unbelief is easy to determine: an almighty Person who creates and decides on the destiny of creation, from a rational, scientific point of view, does not hold.  But is this reason enough to judge a metaphysical reality, since the evidential proof is a faculty destined to resolve the physical or phenomenal world?

 The limits of reason have already been precisely drawn by Kant: any rational demonstration for that which transcends reason presents antinomies and results in being infertile. In other words, the sciences can only attend to the relative, the variable, and the dependent on time and space; the metaphysical is the domain of philosophy.

Now, is this God as a Person really metaphysical?  Strictly speaking, it is nothing more than a human projection towards the metaphysical and it is also, to a great extent, an invention of reason to explain something that consciousness latently intuits but does not fully understand.  And this is how humanity has remained divided between the followers of reason and the followers of faith, and only a tiny minority has realised that it is necessary to overcome these two options, since both respond to the same perspective.

In effect, what has happened is that the human being has become aware of his individuality, and it is this alone that differentiates him from the rest of the animals (see my work Origin and Destiny of Man), but he is still, unfortunately, very far from becoming aware of his universality, that is, of awakening a universal Consciousness.

My proposal is to awaken this Consciousness, and all my work is directed towards it. While it is true that this proposal must seem like a fantastic utopia, considering the current state of the human being, in whom materialism reigns supreme, which has led to a general alienation of the spirit, it is also true that the general opinion does not in any way alter the truths that remain intact.

Said universal Consciousness, I will clarify in advance, is not an invention of mine, a philosophical postulate, but is Reality itself, which is common to everything that exists.  Proof of this is that it has manifested itself in the mind in various ways since ancient times: mythology, religion, philosophy, morality and art, in their highest expressions, are inspired by it.  I have dedicated a treatise to each one of these branches of philosophy because they are paths of transcendental knowledge.  In The Search for Universal Consciousness I have followed the trajectory of Western idealists, in The Evolution of the Spirit the path chosen by the Buddhists and in Parallel Civilizations that chosen by Hinduism. I have tried to make this set, which constitutes what I have called Universal Idealism, converge in my philosophy; although everything converges, in truth, in universal Consciousness.

We can appreciate in the Universus, i.e. in the totality of spirit and matter that constitute Reality, a centrifugal force that tends to expand and generate the multiple, and also a centripetal force that tends towards concentration and original unity. Both are emanations of the primordial One, of universal Consciousness. These forces are spiritual in their origin but in their projection they interact with matter. We can observe these forces in the expansion of the stars and in their force of attraction in the cosmos. But since this material aspect of the Universus falls in the domain of the natural sciences, we will attend to the spiritual sciences.

Many mythologies speak of an original chaos on which a later order was established; this is not my experience. The original Unity is the absolute Order and on expanding it disintegrates and multiplies, and it is then that chaos can generate itself. On becoming matter Consciousness is not now in its Essence, nor is it purely spiritual; nevertheless it projects itself into the whole cosmos and fills it, and thus strictly speaking there are not two realities but one Universus.

The first things that emanate from universal Consciousness are the primary manifestations, which are unitive and of a spiritual nature, i.e. they tend towards unification and reintegration in the original Unity. From what has been said it is clear that between the manifest centripetal and centrifugal forces in the Universus, there has to be an equilibrium that is maintained through contact with the unitive forces, if this were not so the chaos would establish itself immediately.

These unitive forces, these primary manifestations of the One are a priori the forms of time and space, that reason uses (Kant) in order to understand the material world. The mental faculties that are connected to the concrete world are external, utilitarian or speculative and generate accumulative knowledge. These faculties are the mental or spiritual part of the centrifugal force found in the Universus, which tends towards expansion and multiplication. They are also a projection of the One, but they are mediate or secondary manifestations, already interdependent with matter.

The immediate or primary manifestations are purely spiritual and respond to centripetal forces that tend towards the reabsorption of the Universus in its original Unity, they tend to the absolute Order that is found in the Unity of Consciousness. The Universus, the spiritual and material whole, I repeat, is thus maintained by the equilibrium of the aforesaid forces; hence man’s need to maintain contact with the unitive faculties, as disconnection with respect to these, that is alienation, leads to chaos.

Time and space are not only the conditions for knowledge, but also the conditions for the existence of beings. They are found between two realities, on the border of the Transcendent and Nature, they are the infrastructure of the Universe. 

The primary manifestations of universal Consciousness come before the forms of time and space: Order in itself, as an ordering energy; Good in itself, as an aspiration towards the perfection of action; Love it itself as an integrating energy; Life in itself which is the energy of life; Beauty in itself, which is the aspiration towards the perfection of forms; and the intuition-instinct that is its intelligent manifestation. These are the guiding principles of everything that exists, all of them emanate from Unity and make creation possible and maintain it; all things tend, according to their possibilities, towards Unity, which is perfect Order, the Absolute.

All the intuitions of universal matters are refracted in Unity, and are inspired in its perfection, in its total Order, in its exemplary integration, harmony, correspondence and, naturally, uniformity. The Good and the Beautiful emanate from Unity, which illuminate moral and aesthetic consciousness; man extracts his moral, his ideals of justice and his sciences from the perception of Order; Love makes him integrate it harmoniously; his vital élan moves him to live. I am speaking of the most essential, decisive and intimate elements of human nature. 

Firstly the Good and the Beautiful, Love and Order are the a priori ideas indispensable for knowledge in general, without them we would have no capacity for judgment, they are the references without which we would not know which road to take; they are like the compass of reason. We only have to reflect to see that they are in each decisive and ascendant choice; because, of course, capricious and descendent choices seem to lack these parameters. All morality would be impossible without the Idea of Good, all art without the Beautiful, all relation without Love, all sciences without Order in our mind and without the premise that there is an order in Nature. God and the religions would be inconceivable without the attributes that these ideas suggest to us. But these are not just ideas that occur to us, (those who think so lightly this way surely forget to think why they occur to us) they move us and they push us to act, they are forces that are acting in Nature, they accompany life and advance it in its ascendant path.

The intuition-instinct is, in a manner of speaking in order to make it clearer for human understanding, the intelligent manifestation of universal Consciousness, but it is a priori to all intelligence, it is the pristine aspect, essential to it. I believe that other animals’ instincts have the same origin, except that they cannot process them like human intelligence, i.e. they cannot apply reason to them. Intuition puts us in direct contact with the Creative itself, for this reason it is the creative aspect of intelligence, that can a posteriori construct around original intuition, but this construction obeys another mental mechanism that I have called accumulative knowledge, while the former, like all primary manifestations, is unitive.

The human being ignores the origin of his intuitions because it is not he who creates them, they come to him, and he receives them from the universal Consciousness. The same happens with the rest of the animals with instinct; it is for this reason that we humans ignore from where they get this kind of intelligence, which at times seems more ingenious than ours.

The primary manifestations of universal Consciousness are spiritual and existent and overflow on to the Universus and by extending over all spiritual reality they are in the human mind and for this reason they are paradigmatic par excellence, i.e. they are obligatory and priority references and a priori to all human thought and action. They are a priori to all moral idealism and they are the sources of the same. Man does not create moral, aesthetic, religious or philosophical ideals; he interprets them according to his understanding and imitates them.

The primary manifestations are the indispensable references for all ascendant knowledge. They are elementary forces that are expressed as energy in matter, as instinct in animals and as instinct, sentiment and intelligence in higher mammals. The final knowledge is Consciousness of these forces that flow over the World. A clear example is the effect of Order understood as practical reason, like a moral applied in society. It is no coincidence that all those who intuit that Reality, such as mystics feel compelled to preach and establish a moral order. 

The ultimate objective, the Unity that is absolute Order, can only be realized by the spirit, and this is not an inference but an experience, that can be realized by any sensitive person with a capacity to love beyond particular objects or people. Various philosophers have observed that Love is a universal force. For Plato it is “a great and admirable god who extends his power over all in the human as well as divine order” (Symposium 186) “in such a way that the whole is connected with itself” (Simposium 203). Are we not speaking about the same unitive energies? They are impalpable forces that work on the most subtle and light elements, leaving Nature free to create in keeping with its potential.

    A moral universal Order can be intuited; Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism take it as a premise, so do Plato, Fichte in his own way and I in my thoughts, as expressed in The Roots of Morality. Almost all men experience a unitive force on a personal plane that we call love and many suspect that it transcends this plane. We all intuit that there is a vital force in action that nurtures our lives. Everyone, at least at some time has been enraptured by the beauty of Nature; the aesthetic phenomenon is capable of transporting us beyond the matter that we contemplate; as Schopenhauer believed. These suspicions and presentiments are absolutely real and can be experienced on higher planes of consciousness. Where do these manifestations come from? From the Essence of the World which is not a postulate as from it we can have immediate consciousness.

The specific function of philosophy and the sciences of the spirit is to stimulate the centripetal forces of the spirit, whose final objective is reabsorption in the Unity of universal Consciousness, where the spirit achieves its freedom, not just from matter but also from its dependant faculties: the utilitarian.

It will be understood how my project differs from philosophies that wanted or tried to be “scientific,” as speculative or utilitarian faculties do not respond to this objective of unification and liberation. My proposal is to make philosophy and the sciences of the spirit more independent of the natural sciences, not to oppose them but to complement them in order to establish the necessary equilibrium, in order to maintain coherence in human action.

It is evident that in our times centrifugal forces are so predominant in man that they occupy his mind and his activities. If one considers the aforesaid on alienation and the consequent chaos, it will be admitted that the situation is alarming. For this reason I have insisted on knowledge of the mechanisms of the mind in my theory of knowledge in general, explained in my Psychosophy, and in the need to awaken and activate unitive faculties.

The paths of transcendental knowledge, which are unitive, have our unification as their objective i.e. to make us more real. We are real as long as we participate and manifest our Unity; we are universal, because reality is the Universus. As individuals we are effectively an illusion. In other words, as we near the ideal, our universal Consciousness, we are real, i.e. the ideal is the real. To the common man this could seem to be a play on words by philosophers, but religious beliefs, moral motivations, the urge for justice and to perfect ourselves, to order our ideas, to become better, etc., which are part of the daily routine of normal man, all obey this natural, universal urge to unify us. To give just one example, morality, which is one of the paths of transcendental knowledge, makes us more real, the immoral act disintegrates us, it scatters and alienates us, it launches us into the chaos of the multiple and it leaves us like a meteorite in infinite space.

When the spirit is concentrated, it approaches its own essence, the Creative, when it expands it creates (inspired by the Creative) and grows as an individual, society or species. Individuals and societies expand in such a way that they forget their systole, i.e. their inner life and they are left with no base and fall apart, and they are projected like fireworks that will fall after having been displayed, and disintegrate. 

It is my aim to bring to consciousness this kind of diastole and systole of universal Consciousness in which all beings will participate, the Unity that underlies diversity and plurality, the need to maintain a permanent relation with this Unity which we really are. Conscious of this Unity and harmonious beating of its Soul, man can develop, avoiding the extremes of thesis and antithesis, walking on the zone of equilibrium; they will recognize the adequate speed for their creative and dynamic evolution. (See The Spirit in History)

There is only plenitude of life in the experience of totality, which is the totality of consciousness; there is only plenitude of love in the experience of Love in itself. It is the apperception of the said emanations in all beings that gives plenitude of life to this existence. The human being is part of universal Consciousness, he is part, consequence and extension of it; hence he has the motivation to create, to love, to order and also to philosophize, which leads to the comprehension of its Origin with which he closes the Cycle of Life and realizes his destiny.