What do we need to learn about consciousness?

[Magical Realist]

It's the hot topic of the day--a stubborn dilemma fitfully grappled with by our best scientific and philosophical minds. Consciousness. What is it? How does it work? And where does it come from?

But consciousness isn't just one more among many other philosophical problems. It isn't even really a problem. Everybody on earth is living and experiencing consciousness all the time. It's not just a property or an aspect of our being. It literally IS our being. Everything we are and will become pivots on this one fundamental state of being. We all understand it and how it works, much as a violinist understands playing a concerto or ballerina knows her dance.

So what more do we need to know about it? What information specifically about consciousness will benefit us and make us more "conscious"? Because that is really what we are looking for--not some abstract theory about consciousness, but ways to become more conscious ourselves. Is that not in fact the essence of all truth and knowing--to become more conscious of the reality we find ourselves in and to expand the horizons of what it means to be knowingly real? Yes. It is our essence and our destiny. So let us understand consciousness by being conscious ourselves. It's taken us 6 million years for us to wake up out of our beastiality. It's taken only a few more centuries for us to wake up from our history. In our current age of hi tech hyperconnectivity and DIY worldviews, everybody must explore and experiment with consciousness for themselves. It is the one defining truth of our being. And it will save us all in the end.

[C C]

[...] In our current age of hi tech hyperconnectivity and DIY worldviews, everybody must explore and experiment with consciousness for themselves. [...]

Perhaps the case that it will be left to personal exploration, since it appears that researchers might return or retreat to the old days of just ignoring their experiences (or the origin of them). Only this time around, due to dismissing consciousness as even being a fact, rather than the old view that it was something metaphysical and thereby little chance of ever achieving an explanation.

[Magical Realist]

I would venture to say that this grand and mounting experiment we vaguely sense as collective consciousness will find more and more expression thru art and film and literature rather than thru science or philosophy. If there is any thread running thru the evolution of this extraordinary manifestation of our being in our history it is that it is consistently outputting timely creative visions and transformative cultural movements and baroquian spiritualities that transcend our mundane material existence. This incessantly exuberant fertility and energy has driven everything from new scientific paradigms to new religions, branching out and quenching humanity's constant thirst for cosmic meaning and absolute value. We need to recognize this powerful force for novelty and understanding in our own selves, as the very soul of who we are and are becoming. Technology disembodies. Art embodies.