Consciousness

Man: A paradigm shift in Evolution

There is something persistently truthful about the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. In this evolutionary turning point, the entity called man has just about broken free from his biological communion with nature and acquired a nascent sense of his own solitude. He is not at all sure what has happened to him, and why he has this deep nostalgic yearning in his soul. 

The appearance of individuality in man, the birth of the free Ego, has given him his first taste of alienation from nature. He seeks reunion with other humans and with the world of nature, forming communities and tribes, and tries to drown his solitude as much as he can. But late at night, when everyone is asleep, he lies awake and looks up at the heavens, there is both a fear and a wonder in his heart over the mysteries of his existence. 

He has the Garden of Eden with him, nay, the entire Universe, right there in the palm of his hands. He carries it with him wherever he goes but he wonders why he can no longer be part of it, to live within its warm folds, why must he be this outsider, this alien, this unnamed thing always watching; as if from the outside, vicariously living, as it were, a superficial life

Consciousness

 

As a child I grew up in a sort of blissful obedience, an obedience inspired both by the greatness of our shared world and the love of the people we grew up with. With the passage of time, this greatness became less direct and more factual and objective, and it was as if my ever growing understanding of the "essence" of things somehow reduced their stature, like a magic trick that had revealed it's basic simplicity.

And what I once thought was an Abundance of Love, now came into sharper perspective as something of mere biological or instinctive origin, as mute and ordinary as the mindless and ceaseless activity of the plants and the animals. It was as if the  nurturing tree with its soft, wet sap had fulfilled it's function in me and could henceforth be regarded, with an almost contemptuous indifference,  as a "natural cause", as a mute and automatic process that moved on its own impulse, needing no thoughtful word of gratitude nor even, at times, even a backward glance of acknowledgement. 

I therefore just could not fathom the reason for my growing restlessness nor why things that were once so easily familiar now appeared like strangers that had to be cautiously befriended. Something was constantly at work within me, always in the background, a something that demanded that I abandon Eden, abandon this illusion of beauty and harmony and unity, something that,  like a drowning man floundering and gasping for air, struggling to stay afloat in the tidal waves of it's own constant awe, and, with every tiny and trivial insight, inch by inch opening up the doors of a dry objective world, as delicate as a paper boat on a stormy sea, pretending gleefully that it had gained enough control over the magnificent chaos that relentlessly threatened to engulf it in its benevolent embrace

Never enough,  but enough to sustain it's hope, feeding spoon by spoon its growing sense of self hood, of dominion over its world and the distant goal of an eventual mastery over its own destiny. 

Later I learned that it had a name.

Consciousness.

Plunging headlong into everything that comes its way, with eyes wide open.