Chapters
1. Introduction
2. Existence
3. The Mystery of Consciousness
4. Consciousness and Identity
5. Inscrutable Memory
6. Are You an Electrical Impulse?
7. My Genes Made Me Do It!
8. Beyond the Gene
9. Do You Have Free Will?
10. On Being Objective
11. A Broader View of Consciousness and Memory
12. Learning from the Wise
13. To Be Good
Introduction
What is the point of human life? Of much more immediate concern to you and me, what is the point of our lives; and of utmost concern for you, what will you organize your life around: Finding happiness, meaning, fulfillment? Having as many pleasurable experiences as possible? Feeling good physically as much as you can? Being productive? Having good relationships? Being creative? Fulfilling your duties? Finding love? Giving love and compassion to others? Improving your situation after this current life ends (getting to heaven, having a better reincarnation, getting off the wheel of rebirth, merging into the One, or whatever the reality turns out to be)?
Whatever your answer, starting from wherever you are right now, if you wish to have any conscious input into how your life will turn out from this point forward, the first order of business is a better understanding of how you got to be who you are. To “Know Thyself,” as Socrates counseled. My book, On Being Human: An Operator’s Manual, provides guidance for this task. It deals with the four major forces that shape our lives: basic urges and desires, the messages we received from the people around us growing up, human reason (the capacity to think through and consider options), and intuition (the ability to catch a glimpse of the broader picture or the flow of things).
On Being Human explores how the stories we were told as youngsters and the way we put those stories together into our personal story is the foundation of our sense of self and our current worldview. This mostly unconscious process produced the lives we are living. But the story of your life does not end there. The crucial point of the book is that you have the capacity to examine your stories and your worldview, to consider how they are serving you—as well as how they are the prisons within which you are trapped. The book suggests that those who develop an understanding of their stories and worldviews and the way they are creating their lives will be able to employ the incredible human capacity to make more conscious decisions and alter the course of their lives. And strategies are suggested for making decisions that will lead to a more fulfilling life.
My second book, Art, Science, Religion, Spirituality: Seeking Wisdom and Harmony for a Fulfilling Life, takes a wholistic look at the many facets of our lives and explores how these currents can be brought into better harmony with each other. We tend to compartmentalize our lives, thinking separately about relationships, finances, health, spiritual matters, career, sex, values, passions, goals, political views, group identities, finding pleasure, aesthetic interests, and on and on. At the living edge, however, where life happens, all these currents are not separate. Thus, to find meaning, to live a fulfilling life, requires that we discover how to integrate all these currents with each other harmoniously.
The book notes that the basic questions and motivations of human life have not changed much through the centuries, so the biggest challenge we each face, as was true with our ancestors, is to discover and put into practice wise responses to the core questions in relation to our personal motivations. As mentioned, in ancient Greece this quest for wisdom was exemplified by Socrates’ admonition: “Know Thyself.” Two thousand years later mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blasé Pascal said, “It is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are.”[1] Continuing this theme in the twentieth century, the humorist James Thurber advised, “All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.”[2]
Art, Science, Religion, Spirituality takes on the task of examining four of the most valuable ways we humans have sought wisdom and fulfillment: (1) Engagement with science; (2) Creating and experiencing art; (3) Following a religious tradition; and (4) Undertaking a spiritual journey. Although different on the surface, these four major areas of human exploration and expression are not so different underneath. As Albert Einstein succinctly put it: “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.”[3] This book explores the commonalities between art, science, religion, and spirituality and the guidance they each provide for a fulfilling and meaningful life.
Since the publication of these two books, I have been writing three more that take up the story of life’s journey where these leave off. The next book in the sequence is this one, Consciousness and Memory: Two Great Mysteries. The next is Ego, Identity, and Beyond, and the final one is Embracing the Mystery: The Journey to Fulfillment. In addition, on my web site there are several series of essays that deal with specific topics such as the importance of Transformation in life’s journey, and the need to find balance in our lives between the pull of Freedom and the need for Community. To read these essays go to: https://ameaningfullife.org
This book, Consciousness and Memory began long ago, when I first started to notice that I existed as a separate self. What follows is the culmination of more than fifty years of reflection and thought concerning what being aware of myself as a separate being suggests about life, its meaning, and its fulfillment.
Existence and Consciousness
Two core questions that have troubled and confounded human beings as long as there have been human beings are: 1) How did we come to exist? 2) What is consciousness and how did we come to have it?
Of course, most of us don’t sit around puzzling about these questions with the majority of our time—we are too busy looking for food, shelter, security, sex, various pleasures, adventure, comfort, power, wealth, fame, relationships, love (many different kinds), inner peace, and a feeling that our lives are worthwhile and meaningful.
In trying to fulfill these goals, we are sometimes brought face-to-face with the two core questions. When this happens, we usually fall back on the answers we were given while growing up, or on ideas we have read or heard from others since that time.
All the world’s wisdom traditions, however, going back thousands of years, arose from people who wrestled with these crucial questions and found answers that satisfied them. Moses, Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Mohammed, along with various Hebrew prophets, Christian mystics, Greek philosophers, Chinese sages, Sufi poets, ancient shamans, Hindu sannyasins and pandits—all attempted to come to satisfactory answers and share what they had discovered with the people of their times.
All the world’s major religions grew up around their insights. After someone had a profound personal experience of answers to the basic questions, religions grew up to share and perpetuate those answers. And, crucially, every major culture in the world has been organized around some combination of these answer systems. This is how beliefs, values, and ways of life have come to be established throughout history.
You might think, if all this time and energy over thousands of years has been spent trying to answer two fairly simple questions (simple in being stated, but not in their solutions), that by this time they would have been answered in a way that most humans could agree upon. But this is definitely not the case. These questions remain the most mysterious and difficult issues with which people grapple today, and no satisfactory resolution is on the horizon.
When science emerged as a separate power base in the last few hundred years and discovered that philosophy and theology had been unable to answer these basic questions, numerous scientists took up the challenge, using the tools of science. The result, however, has not been promising: No widely agreed upon answers have been forthcoming from science either.
This lack of definitive answers has persuaded some to simply throw up their hands (and thinking minds) in frustration and declare that the two questions are unanswerable and thus should be abandoned. And in the more practical-minded corners of the world, many have. Lots of people don’t actively think about these questions at all, either settling for answers they were given when young or cobbling together a patchwork of answers from ideas they heard or read—while pursuing full steam ahead toward one or more of the goals listed at the start of this chapter. (This, of course, requires pushing aside the nagging sense that there is something they have not yet understood).
My response to this lack of definitive answers to the core questions is different. I have come to realize that, for me, the point is not to discover if someone else has found the answers so we can all go contentedly on with our mundane lives. Rather, it seems to me these deep questions are the call life brings to each of us to encourage us to wrestle with what is truly important for ourselves. There is no formula, no ready-made set of answers. Each of us must go through the process of searching and seeking and asking and wrestling, and it is only through this process that we have a chance of finding solid ground on which to base our own lives. If we rely solely on the answers of others, or declare there are no answers, we never come to terms with the mystery of life for ourselves. But doing so is precisely the point! Each of us is called to find our own answers and to live them out fully. Anything less means failing to discover life’s meaning and promise for us.
Before we get to the issues that form the title of this book, consciousness and memory, the first question of all is existence. One of the greatest mysteries is that a universe containing billions of galaxies, extending trillions upon trillions of miles (or perhaps infinitely, as some recent research suggests); a universe made up of enigmatic black holes and composed mostly of things about which we know next to nothing (dark energy and dark matter—and the even more mysterious things such as antimatter and the zero-point field); that such a universe seems to be here, seems to exist. Where did such a vast universe come from?
If we look closer to home, in just our little corner of this gigantic universe, there are trillions of living things, which in turn are composed of countless trillions of cells, atoms, electrons, quarks, energy, superstrings—or whatever your preference for the best way to think about what matter consists of. You see, the deeper science penetrates the material stuff around us, the more rapidly theories change and the less we seem to truly understand what matter is, or how to think about it. This means—if you believe you are composed of matter, that you are made of material stuff—and the nature of matter itself is so much in question, how do you think about who you are? Are you made up of superstrings? How much of you is dark energy, or antimatter? How do we deal with thinking about ourselves in these ways?
Or consider that we are now told that the particles we thought were real things and of which all matter was built are not always particles, but sometimes waves. This is not to question the science, which is persuasive, but I personally find it very difficult to think of objects as waves, and I especially find it hard to think of my own body as being made up of waves. So let’s focus on the idea that we are each made up of made up of many infinitely tiny particles for a moment. But as soon as I say that I am made up of trillions of tiny particles myself, I immediately recognize that there are trillions of other living things within my ecosystem, all made up of the same very small bits of matter and energy, and that I am constantly exchanging bits of matter and energy with them, and all of them with each other. I am involved in complex exchanges with the world around me each time I breathe, eat, radiate heat from my body, send out sound waves, take in light, smell a pleasant or unpleasant odor—perhaps even each time I have a thought or feel and emotion. And beyond all these local exchanges, current theory suggests that some particles communicate instantly over limitless distances with each other—shattering the previous scientific understanding of the exchange of information in this vast, complex system.
So here we are, in this infinitely large universe, or almost infinite, depending on the theory you choose, for at this point we simply do not know, and the mainstream view keeps changing. So here we are—you and I experiencing existence among trillions of living things, each of which is made up of a swirling flux of waves and infinitesimally small particles that are constantly in exchange with each other. Yet, despite all this, we usually think of ourselves as separate individuals with individual identities! How on earth (thinking both literally and idiomatically) does that happen?
This book, then, will explore both existence and consciousness—and how coming to a better understanding of these two mysteries can lead to a more fulfilling life. It will consider the opportunities involved in living an ego life. Then, delving into the furthest reaches of what is possible, it will contemplate the implications of the fact that moments arise in which the nature of identity shifts significantly and the experience of who we are changes, sometimes dramatically. At such moments, sometimes that which lies beyond normal conceptions of identity and consciousness breaks through, the clouds part, and we recognize, at least for a moment, who we really are.
This, then, is the prologue, the beginning of a journey through existence, consciousness, identity, and whatever might lie beyond our normal understanding of who we are and what life is about. Come join me.
[1] Blaise Pascal, trans. W. F. Trotter, Thoughts, The Harvard Classics (New York, New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909-1914), Vol. 48, Part 1 of 51.
[2] James Thurber, Further Fables for Our Time, “The Shore and the Sea” (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956, 1st edition).
[3] Albert Einstein, “Moral Decay” (1937); Later published in Out of My Later Year: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words (New York, New York, Citadel Press, 1957), 9.