The Origin of life on Earth is a mystery.   There are two theories. One is that life  originated here, the other, called panspermia,  is that life  originated elsewhere and came here somehow, either by way of a comet impregnating the earth with seed from its phallic tail, or by the actions of aliens wanting to  seed the earth.

Panspermia  is not a solution. It merely moves the problem  of life's origin to an unknown place and time.

The origin of consciousness is a mystery.  The materialist theory is that consciousness  is created by the brain and depends on the brain.  Philosopher David Chalmers has  presented strong, and to my mind compelling, arguments that consciousness is something  fundamental that cannot be explained in terms of more elementary phenomena. 

Time is a mystery. We know a lot about how it works but not what it is. It is a fundamental property of the universe Energy and Space are other fundamental properties.

Chalmers thinks we need to add consciousness to the list of fundamental properties of the universe.

I  have argued that there is good evidence for the existence of spirits and I presented a conceptual model of spirits as self maintaining excitations in SOMETHING, which may be the zero point field or something else. This model explains a lot. but does not explain  what consciousness is or  how it originates and  does not explain how it manipulates matter.  Examination of mainstream scientific argument shows that  the idea consciousness arises from  neural activity, or more generally, from complexity in  certain types of system  is a matter of faith, not  observation or necessity.

Chalmers has refuted the materialist  view and postulating the existence of spirits together with Chalmers'  idea that consciousness is a basic attribute of reality shows that it is not enough to say we may be meat wrappers for spirits, and  the brain transmits rather than generates consciousness. Like panspermia it merely  moves the problem to a largely unknown region.  I see no way in which (say) the zero point field can create consciousness.  

This is comforting. It suggests that  consciousness cannot be destroyed. Maybe a spirit that “dies” simply moves to another level of reality. To refute the materialist viewpoint for our world but not for the spirit world just moves the problem of death up to another level. It also  flies in the face of the collective intuition  of humanity that the inhabitants of the spirit world are immortal. It would imply a fundamental difference between our worlds with wide ranging implications.

It appears that my  researches into the  spirit world and the paranormal have no  bearing on the hard problem of consciousness.  But if we treat the spirit world as another part of the multiverse  and follow Chalmers we get some fascinating  possibilities.  If  consciousness is a fundamental attribute of the universe it would seem that the universe must be conscious. If, as seems inescapable,   one aspect of  a conscious entity is that it must be aware of a distinction between itself and others then  if the universe is conscious those others must be  other universes.  We  then have a picture of the multiverse as an ensemble of  creatures, just as our universe is an ensemble of creatures: you, me, Fido, Greymalkin and the rest.

It remains an open question whether anything is NOT conscious.  It seems reasonable to assume  everything is conscious, if only  in a very different way from us.  I recall a  report of  an NDE where the experient realised  every organ in the body had its own consciousness and of that were the case we have a tentative explanation for Transplant Memories.

We may never be able to know the origin of consciousness, or how (say) the consciousness of the heart and lungs changes as the body “dies” but taking consciousness as a basic attribute  is a productive hypothesis with considerable explanatory power.