A Joint Venture

A parallel to the relationship between consciousness and the body.

Consciousness and the body have formed what is called—in the language of the business world—a joint venture.  A joint venture integrates very different capabilities of two different organizations.

There is a parallel here between a joint venture and our human experience of being alive.

To illustrate this, here is a real-life example of a joint venture.  In the 1970’s American corporations began to worry about the possible side effects of employers coming to work high on drugs.  They wanted a simple, hand-held device that could measure the presence of drugs in the blood.  No such device existed at that time.  A company that could build one would have the market all to themselves.

But there was a catch.  To build a drug testing device would require two very different sets of expertise:  it would need chemists who could make the tests for blood and it would take engineers who could design and build the physical device to administer that chemical test. 

The pharmaceutical company I worked for decided to take up the challenge.  We would provide the chemists and an engineering company down the road would provide the engineers.  The two companies got together and agreed to create a joint venture:  a third company which was owned by—but not part of—the two existing companies.  

This joint venture operated as an independent company with its own management and employees. They also had their own separate building. The chemists did their part, the engineers did their part and together they created a successful product.  Here is the important part:  neither the pharmaceutical company or the engineering company could have done this on their own. And this is the point that we are trying to get: contrary to what science tells us, consciousness is more than a product of the brain.

How does this example help us understand consciousness and the body?

In this example, the chemists could not have done the job by themselves.  The engineers could not have done the job by themselves.  They both had to be involved.

It is this principle of needing two separate entities that we are trying to illustrate here.  Humans need both the body and universal consciousness to exist. Despite what science tells us, the body—by itself—cannot give us the experience of human life.  By itself, the body has no life.  A body without life is a cadaver.

Can consciousness by itself give us life?  The answer is yes, but not a human life.  Human life is life that is experienced from within a human body.  Consciousness without a body is a very different kind of experience of being alive.

We need both consciousness and the body to have the full human experience.

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