Claim. Protoconsciousness is the cosmic consciousness (a lower-level function of God’s mind) that has entered into cells and tissues, becoming individualized as life itself — possessing sensitivity, perceptiveness, and purposiveness — analogous to how an electric wave enters a radio and produces sound.
Elaboration. This is one of the most theologically ambitious moves in Unification Thought epistemology. Lee identifies four things normally kept distinct: cosmic consciousness, individual consciousness in living cells, life as biological phenomenon, and subconsciousness as psychological phenomenon. All four are the same reality at different levels of individuation (Protoconsciousness): ‘protoconsciousness is life, and it is subconsciousness with sensitivity, perceptiveness, and purposiveness.’
The Divine Principle citation is doing structural work: ‘all beings in the creation grow by virtue of the autonomy and governance given by God’s Principle.’ Autonomy and governance are characteristics of the life force, and that life force is the cosmic mind entered into matter. The radio analogy — ‘just as an electric wave enters a radio and produces sound, so, too, does cosmic consciousness enter cells and tissues and give them life’ — frames matter as a receiver/expressor of an animating consciousness that originates externally (in God).
Lee further reads Genesis 2:7 (‘the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’) as the paradigm for all living beings: ‘God formed cells out of dust and poured life into them. So the cells became living cells.’ This generalizes the Adam-creation pattern from humanity to all biology.
Three functional capacities define protoconsciousness: sensitivity (intuitive perception of information), perceptiveness (maintaining the perceptual state, i.e., a kind of memory), and purposiveness (will-power to maintain and actualize a purpose). These map to the three functions Lee later attributes to cells reading their DNA: reading the genetic code, acting on its instructions, and transmitting information between center and periphery.
The doctrine is structurally vitalist and panpsychic in a controlled way: every living cell has consciousness, not merely chemistry. Lee will later argue (in the physiological-correspondence sections) that this is required to answer questions science alone cannot — e.g., what ‘subject’ decodes the DNA code or knows the cell’s internal state. Critics from naturalist and biological-emergentist positions typically engage here: the move from ‘science only describes phenomenological aspects’ to ‘therefore consciousness is fundamental’ is the load-bearing argumentative step.
See also. ut-dna-is-carrier-of-life-not-life-itself, prime-force-and-universal-prime-force-include-love, ut-layered-structure-of-sungsang-hyungsang