|
by Bharati Sarkar from ExperienceFestival Website
The primary
actions that keep us alive, such as breathing, seeing, hearing,
touching and even tasting, take place without our conscious
participation or stopping to think about them.
It is when a purpose or result can
be achieved by alternative means that consciousness is called upon.
In other words, at the routine level of existence, we do not employ
consciousness except when we are altering our actions or thoughts
from the routine, for a purpose.
He thought plants too have a form of consciousness, perhaps resembling human sleep.
The German philosopher Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854) wrote:
What is
Consciousness?
But what does this mean, scientifically?
The human brain, with its highly developed frontal cortex, is divided into three distinct parts and includes the cerebrum, cerebellum and the medulla oblongata or stem.
The latter is a remnant of our reptilian ancestry with the ocean as its original habitat.
The following view is an attempt to
avoid the above pitfall.
From the embryonic stage itself, there is a furious amount of editing at work to fine-tune our brain content.
It startled scientists to discover that our growing up and learning process is not of adding new material so much as editing existing ones. Nerve cells in the brain die without being replaced in our infancy (or in degenerative brain disease as adults), although they appear to remain fairly stable later through a lifetime of healthy individuals.
The fact remains that the brain is the only organ that
does not grow new cells to replace those that are lost.
The human body is incredibly complex and each of its cells is in constant communication not only with cells that perform similar functions but also with every other cell in the body.
Our consciousness probably results from assimilating all this
data and arriving at choices or solutions. Our present state of
consciousness may be likened to the tip of the iceberg of potential
human awareness, of itself and of the universe.
Human memories go back, to the primal soup and perhaps beyond, to the void before material creation. Scientists of various disciplines are involved in a worldwide research project that is trying to map all of the genes in the human DNA sequence.
Another project, not so widely publicized, known as the Human Consciousness Project is already well under way to map the gamut of human consciousness including the unconscious.
The latter project is also multidisciplinary and researchers around the world are piecing together what they call a spectrum of human consciousness.
This includes: instinct, ego and
spirit; pre-personal, personal and transpersonal; subconscious,
self-conscious and super-conscious; thus, no state of consciousness
is dismissed from its embrace. Undisputed evidence is already in
hand that such a spectrum does exist.
We may be aware, for instance, without really being conscious of being aware.
Other known aspects of consciousness are:
How Much
Do We Know?
Highly evolved individuals who have touched the hem of the eternal and communed with the infinite through their higher consciousness, made that quantum leap but have been unable to transfer their understanding due to limitations imposed by language.
Because language is incomplete and fragmentary, merely registering a stage in the average advance beyond the ape mentality.
But all of us do have flashes of insight beyond meanings
already stabilized in etymology and grammar.
We
sometimes see things not as they really are, sometimes invent
categories that do not exist and sometimes fail to see things that
are really there. There are people who have never seen or heard of
an aircraft and will not be able to imagine it and a real airplane
overhead will be distorted in their minds, creating alternative
realities.
Joseph Pearce explains this best:
On the other hand, if a seed of imagination is sowed, a germ of an idea can be planted contrary to existing evidence.
The seed will grow and sooner or later produce
data to confirm or deny the idea.
It is remarkable that despite the advancements of ancient civilizations in India, China, Mesopotamia and Greece, the discovery of the crucial importance of the brain as the seat of thought and action did not feature in human knowledge until barely two centuries ago.
The navel, the liver and the heart were revered instead by
different cultures, at various times.
Consciousness depends heavily on memory, which is very tricky and can be full of holes, patched up, more often than not, by fantasy.
Memory is also selective and, often, faulty. We paint rosy pictures of incidents, events and people when it suits us and we also do the exact opposite.
The fact that some of our memories (true ones, because no
imagination is involved) go back several billion years to the
procrustean age while others belong to just a few moments ago, only
adds to its mysteriousness.
So, it appears that our consciousness needs the 'other' even if the other is your own mirror image or parts of your body/bodily functions. It needs an external environment; it needs language, an interaction with something outside itself.
Consciousness therefore
presumes an entity that is aware of 'something'
(including itself)...
To understand something, first of all we need evidence of its existence.
Here, therefore, we are trying to use something (the mind) to understand itself and produce evidence of its own existence, somewhat similar to the Drawing Hands of Escher that depicts a self-drawn drawing. An inherent paradox where something in the system jumps out and acts on the system as if it existed outside it.
And when we examine our own minds, this is exactly what happens.
According to Godel's
Incompleteness Theorem, understanding our own minds is impossible,
yet we have persisted in seeking this knowledge through the ages!
Human consciousness, unlike awareness, includes a series of choices. American psychologist E.L. Thorndyke called this the method of trial, error, and accidental success. Modern AI (artificial intelligence) calls it 'generate and test'.
Applied to our thought
process, the chance creation concept goes back to Xenophanes in
ancient Greece.
With
enough experience, the brain comes to contain a model of the world;
an idea suggested by Kenneth Craik in his book The Nature of
Explanation.
This leads us to levels
of consciousness.
They are:
Cosmic
Consciousness
It is a transpersonal mode of consciousness, an awareness of the universal mind and one's unity with it. Its prime characteristic is a consciousness of the life and order in the universe.
An individual who at attains this state is often described as 'Enlightened' and such a person is also said to have a sense of immortality, not of attaining it but of already having it.
Burke saw this state of consciousness as the next stage
in human evolution, very much as spiritualists have always seen it.
Spiritually, consciousness is as vast as the universe, both known and unknown. The potential power of this level of consciousness has been merely touched upon and that too by a few mystics.
Consciousness at this level becomes capable of:
Collective Consciousness
It is not surprising that in any given field of activity, great ideas do not occur in isolation. Despite an idea germinating in an individual mind, it is interesting to note that the same idea strikes two or more thinkers, geographically far apart, around the same time.
Collective consciousness results from consensus.
At any given time, collective consciousness is actively operational in a group as small as the family and as large as half the global population.
The power of
collective consciousness has not been fully explored or appreciated,
except perhaps in times of great distress when 'prayers' are offered
by a group of individuals for a particular reason and the prayers
are answered.
It is only for the sake of simplicity that we talk of levels in the form of tiers with an upward hierarchy. In fact, consciousness, while rooted in causal linearity (within the Darwinian evolutionary framework) is dynamic, free moving and nonlinear.
The greatest discoveries and inventions were arrived at
intuitively. The genius sees what we all see except that s/he thinks
about it differently. The evil genius does exactly the same.
A conscious human knows something and he knows that he knows it (ad infinitum)...
The paradox of consciousness is not that we are aware of ourselves but of other things as well, including those that do not constitute the 'real world'.
Of course, when we 'conceive' or imagine something
'unreal' even our farthest imagination cannot transcend 'known'
symbolism, which is why there are some things that defy definition.
One of these is 'consciousness' itself.
It is consciousness that sets us apart from the opulent variety of earth-life and puts upon us an onus of responsibility. It takes us on incredible journeys and has given us the gifts of insight and transcendence.
The same kind of process that gives the earth abundant life allows us to have a sense of self, to contemplate the world, to forecast the future and make ethical choices.
Each of us has under our control a miniature world,
continuously evolving, making constructs unique to our own minds. In
the same way that life itself unfolded, our mental life is
progressively enriched, enabling each of us to create our own world.
Stars (and people) are born and die for no better reason than that they simply do.
As life forms evolved through random selection, humans emerged on the top of the food chain and from there, in the blink of an eye, here we are, seriously and consciously looking for answers and meanings in the universe around us...
|
