Tuesday, January 10, 2012

What is Consciousness

The concept of consciousness tends to be one of those intangibles in life that begs many answers; but even more questions. We continually ask ourselves what it is that determines who or what we are. Are we a physically integrated form that reacts only to environmental stimuli, where the ability to conceive of self, is just a complex reaction, to an even more complex universe. Are we some nebulous aggregate of cells, whose individual reactions, define a process dynamic that is greater than the sum of its own parts. Or are we, as many believe, an entity with spatial limits that are beyond the physical form we see each day in the mirror. A simulacrum that moves, changes, acts and reacts to the higher self, and the three dimensional world our physical form connects us to.
Whatever ideal one comes to believe, there is an inherent survivalist need that pushes us to survive in the world we see around us or draws us to what we believe, may be a better world beyond. The common thread that permeates our existence (whether corporal, non-corporal, or somewhere in between) is the idea of Consciousness. A self-awareness that elevates our egos, if not our physical form above that of other organisms we define as life.
Just what is Consciousness? Are we the only forms of life that posses it? Does it make us less or more then the organisms around us we classify as life. If less! Why! If more! Why! Does saying, “I am!” determine our destiny, or does it limit our choices to a self-fulfilling prophecy called fate. Does defining our consciousness as a dynamic recognition of self limit our choice of path, or does it expand our choices to a level where thought and creativity are the catalyst by which we understand the universe around us. These are the types of questions we should be asking ourselves. Questions that aim at eliciting responses that help us to conceptualize that universal synergism, we call life.
The concept of life then becomes a self-conceptualization by which we may model the process that defines our relationship to the world around us, and through this the very nature of the Universe. It becomes a roadmap by which the details of our existence i.e., our past, present, and future each are seen as a separate component of the whole of our existence. A definitive algorithm that defines a process, whose nature is not found in the bits and pieces of reality, but in the relationship of ourselves to that of our surroundings; this is Consciousness, a dynamic ever-changing mosaic of thought by which the very fabric of reality comes to exist; a poetry of mind, body and spirit that brings into being a symbiotic self-awareness that feeds the soul its reality, and by which reality is defined.

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