In our current age of the almighty Reason and Logic, everything has been about matter. You know, stuff — the physical world. If you can see, touch, and measure it, it is real. Our reality is made up of atoms and photons, wavicles and quarks that form earth and stars and plastic, music, and lipstick. Matter is primary…Right?
Not so much anymore. This is currently under debate. Consciousness is giving Matter a run for its, er, money.
In philosophical, spiritual, and I guess, quantum physics circles, the debate is raging: which is primary: matter as we have always thought, or in fact, consciousness?
The theory of the primacy of consciousness (vs. the long-standing incumbent Primacy of Matter) states that it is consciousness that’s responsible for creating reality. Under this thought, it might be a “divine consciousness” that creates reality as easily as it may be any individual consciousness creating reality. So, Joe Pizza Guy and God are co-creating our world. Well, that could explain a lot.
Kidding (?) aside, the popular doctrine holds that we all carry a spark of the divine. So maybe the fact that we are busy creating what we call reality is that very spark of the divine that is being referenced? The god/goddess within creating our physical world?
A big but: if our understanding of what it is to be conscious is to be aware of something, how did that something come into being in the first place? It is a chicken or egg conundrum. So these questions evolve:
- can we have consciousness without anything to be conscious of?
- Does consciousness imply an observer and observed?
- Or is consciousness by its very nature “aware” of and is the wholeness that we name the Oneness…the very Isness?
- In other words, is the state of awareness as pure consciousness experiences it foreign to the concept of duality so inherent in our matter-driven psyches?
To this last question, I say yes, I think so. I think the human brain, so busy differentiating for, among other things, the love of control and organization, cannot easily grasp that consciousness is a very different chicken. There is no “other.”
There is no other. That is the essence, the beauty of consciousness.
Why spend time pondering such?
Because we humans are evolving, our consciousness, specifically, is evolving. To even make that statement can bring up a slew of questions for those who haven’t yet explored this area and those who have. Part of the current cultural unrest we are experiencing is the tug between what I will call “old conscious” (and I do not mean this judgmentally, it is just an expression to delineate parts of a dynamic) and this consciousness evolution. Both live in individuals but get expressed among like-minded people, resulting in a “group-think.”
None of this is bad. It can just become uncomfortable. Sometimes very uncomfortable. So some of us spend time pondering the ol’ chicken and egg…
Your thoughts?