Few understand Science as purely a system of inquiry. More see it as a source of facts, including those relating to our experience of existence, and perhaps most importantly, facts that form the foundations of our worldview. For example, it is commonly accepted of ourselves to exist within a universe made up of matter and energy as lifeforms evolved from single cells over billions of years. These ideas emerge from Science, or Reductionist Materialism, to be more specific. Taking them as granted makes human consciousness impossible to logically comprehend, as if not matter nor energy, what is it and where does it come from?
Though if a human was to suspend these ideas in their entirety, and to rather cease engagement with all passing thought, all feeling and perception long enough, they will eventually arrive at the crystal-clear realisation there is actually no discrete personality or character existing as a separate self, that is to say, no thinker, feeler or perceiver. Further, in the moment of dwelling within this novel awareness, omnipresent consciousness is seen as all that exists, without doubt, self as this. This is seen with the mind’s eye, a point of view otherwise obscured by the senses.
Summarily, by assuming all is either matter or energy, we inadvertantly shroud the origins of consciousness. Though upon awakening from the illusion of a separate self, there is no problem. Consciousness and the cosmos are inseparable, and we are as emergent yet inextricable parts of the cosmos, like so much as individual windows of the cosmos upon itself.
The problematic situatioon appears to be a consequence of humanity’s curiosity coupled with a reluctance to question the nature of the self. As a survival strategy this makes practical sense, though results in a perpetuation of the confusing arbitration of an inside and outside, when actually there is no such separation.
The assuming of a separate self as the source of consciousness didn’t entirely begin with the institution of Science. Christianity had its phase of banishing Animism, excluding spirit to within the heavens with the Church as the intermediate agent, and thus denying any suggestion the Earth is of any such numinous qualilty. Somewhat ironically, Animism appears closest to reflecting the true nature of the cosmos and our place within it, to all a spiritual essence, though still unconscious, still with a palpable sense of inside and outside, of other, of us and them.
The history of the West may serve as a cautionary tale. In short, assumptions of convenience may result in immeasurable, if not tragic oversight. For whatever reason, the Church mistakenly interpreted the one intelligence or divinity to mean theirs; and through the era of Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes, beliefs of the Church found to be erroneous, for example, the idea the Sun rotates around the Earth, led to not only wholesale rejection of the religious belief system, but rejection of the notion of any inherent intelligence within the cosmos, leaving the mechanistic worldview of matter and energy as the default ideology.
The consequence of such historical developments is a widespread ignorance of the inherent consciousness or awakened intelligence of the cosmos, the planet and its life forms, consequently guiding us along a trajectory of impoverished and destructive relationships amid perceptions of ostensibly non-living, and if living, then non-conscious objects.
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