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!!