Welcome to a fundamental node of the Pandeism index!!


Some theological formulations propose that human awareness falls short of some greater awareness experienced by the materials of our Universe as a whole, by the stars and planets and barren rocks and particles roaming empty space. It is difficult to comprehend how "the rest of Creation" may be any more aware of a divine essence than is Man, being the only entity we know of which presently bears the capacity to attest any such awareness.

We are, to be sure, part of our Universe; and we are aware, and so it is demonstrated that "some part of our Universe" is aware, and possibly other parts. But it is equally fair to observe that, so far as we can tell, the rocks and trees on Earth, and the stars and moons and clouds of dust in space, do not "know" anything at all. And yet, this does not disqualify them from maintaining a role as part of a greater "knowing" thing; which is just as fair as it is to observe that your hair and bones are part of "you" even though they bear no part of your process of consciousness. We are not yet entirely certain of what the mechanism of our consciousness actually is. But we can be confident that for all your body, consciousness is occurring in the few pounds of brain alone, and only in certain matter of that organ.

Neither the skull which houses and protects it, nor the blood which flows through and nourishes it; nor even the eyes, ears, and nerves carrying information to it, are having any direct part of the formation of insights and ideas fomented in that wondrous gray matter. If nothing else informs us of this, it is that history records humans who have lost (or replaced) every single other part of the human body (in some instances, much of a single body) without surrendering their capacity for conscious thought; people have even lost parts of the brain itself, and yet continued to be able to think, observe, cogitate. But only when it is the brain itself that is disrupted (even secondarily, as with the loss of oxygenated blood to it) do its owners experience effects upon their consciousness; and the destruction (or replacement, to the degree this is conceivable) of the whole of the brain is the destruction of the person it was.

And so may the physical matter of our Universe be like the nonthinking majority of our own bodies; so may it be that every rock and stream and ray of light, and every burst of radiation in deepest space, may be an aspect of a higher consciousness than our own. But those aspects are nonetheless without consciousness, attuned only to existence as a physical energy. Man, naturally, is a physical object as well, and so is necessarily attuned to existence as exactly that, but on a level of which we are for the most part only dimly aware. It is at another level where we are attuned to our conscious experience of the world, our troubles and toils and foibles. It is remarkable, then that all of the self-awareness, self-reflection, even self acceleration which we know to exist in our Universe is contained not simply in a single galaxy, or a single star system in such galaxy, or on a single planet, but in what is collectively a few cubic kilometers of brain matter scattered around some seven billion intermittently existing dots on the surface of that single planet.

Does this alone make us 'better' than anything else, better than other pieces of matter which lack evident self-awareness? Well it surely does make us 'different' from all things which do not experience this -- and it may well be this difference which brings a beautiful and useful diversity to the experience of our Universe. Though we are far from the 'pinnacle' of Creation, we are on the path for our future generations to achieve the capacity to reach for that pinnacle. If, that is, we may reconnect our conscious contemplation to our connectedness with all that exists beyond our crabbed claim of reality!!

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