[Drifter]

Consciousness: What Is It?

Consciousness is the only thing that we experience directly -- everything else is filtered through the medium of our consciousness. Very often, I suspect, we confuse consciousness as a general category with human consciousness and the workings of the human mind. But consciousness takes in a much wider field of awareness, perception, and inwardness. Looking at the other kingdoms of nature, we know from observation that animals are aware, perceive, and feel. Experiments publicized in the 1960s and '70s in books like The Secret Life of Plants suggest that plants demonstrate awareness, memory, and sensitivity to the thought and feeling of other beings. Today research provides growing experimental evidence for a degree of consciousness even in individual cells, and earlier in the 20th century Chandra Bose conducted experiments which implied a sensitivity in metals.
The point is, how can we presume to limit the scope and expression of consciousness? Because we do not observe or recognize consciousness in a particular being or thing is no reason to deny its presence there. Our perceptions as humans are very restricted, which makes particularly apt the scientific maxim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That most of the electromagnetic spectrum is imperceptible to us makes it no less real. That thousands of radio and television waves fill the air around us, carrying sounds and pictures, would seem unbelievable if we did not have proof from our everyday life. Moreover, our scale limits perceptions in both space and time: what is too small, too vast, too slow, or too rapid is invisible to the most sophisticated devices.
In a parallel case, until the 20th century science wrestled with matter-energy dualism. If they are two absolutely disassociated principles, how could they interact? To solve this quandary energy was sometimes considered a byproduct of matter and at other times energy was considered fundamental and matter the byproduct. But Einstein, with his famous E = mc2, ended this dualism, proposing that energy and matter were not essentially distinct, but rather two aspects of a more fundamental principle, which implied that matter could be transformed into energy, and energy into matter.
Today we continue to wrestle with a similar matter-consciousness dualism, and perhaps in time a comparable basic unity will be recognized. This dualistic problem appears in Christian thought because soul and spirit are considered completely immaterial yet able to influence the material body. Mainstream science avoids the problem of how the psyche or consciousness influences the body by holding that there is no mind-body dualism: consciousness is a byproduct of complex organizations of matter, of chemical reactions in the nervous system. However, materialism and idealism are not the only non-dualistic solutions.
If matter and consciousness are two phenomena of one underlying principle, the terms may represent poles of a continuum which runs from beyond the densest substance we can imagine, through physical matter, energy, vitality, emotion, thought, and spiritual consciousness, up through the most divine consciousness or state. We are aware of our body, vitality, feelings, intellect, intuitions, and perhaps also of our spiritual and divine consciousness, though these last two are largely shut out from everyday awareness by our busy feelings and thoughts. As points or ranges on the continuum of substance-consciousness, each level is simultaneously substantial, energic, and conscious. Thus thoughts and feelings, for example, are not abstractions. They are as actual as x-rays or gamma rays -- and as imperceptible to our physical senses, though easily perceived by our psyches.
But back of all being lies the inner root or source of awareness. No matter how far we delve into ourselves, that inmost self always remains beyond. It is each being's fundamental junction-point with underlying cosmic reality, the same in all people, all life forms, everything, be it a subatomic particle, person, planet, or galaxy. In the same way, every manifested existence has a substantial form occupying a particular bandwidth of the matter-consciousness spectrum. This innermost shared consciousness and source of existence is the basis of brotherhood or the oneness of all, the unifying agent and most fundamental substratum of the cosmos. According to mystic traditions the world over, by transcending our unexamined patterns of thought, perception, and awareness, we can in time not only understand but actually experience for ourselves this unity at the root of our being.