Consciousness and the Sea of Lights…
- By Chuck Seegert
- August 28, 2014
- No Comments
Consciousness and the Sea of Lights…
In the Fall of 1998 I enrolled in the Biomedical Engineering program at the University of Florida. I had recently attained an MS in Cell and Molecular Biophysics and I had also begun organizing my day such that I could spend the first and best couple hours of it working on things that interested me. As opposed to coursework or other more pedestrian things that were required of me.
At the time as I reflected on things a question came to me, I think from Carl Sagan’s book Contact. Somewhere in the story the main character Dr. Eleanor Arroway questions her dedication to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (S.E.T.I). After mentally reviewing the paths available to her and where she is, she concludes that there is no more relevant question facing humanity than that one. And so she must continue.
One morning as I woke, I went through a similar exercise. I reviewed options and weighed different thoughts eventually concluding that one of the fundamental, if not the fundamental questions about our existence seem to focus around consciousness. What happens when we sleep? What happens when we die? How can we increase our understanding of our own consciousness? Why don’t we as a culture wonder about this more and make greater efforts to understand?
These are questions that affect us all and, as a general rule, we don’t look at them seriously, but continue through our lives until the end comes. There are some things that we do know about this area, but what we have been able to uncover is obscured by religious beliefs, or other emotionally charged belief patterns that have developed over the course of history and are firmly entrenched. In this way the things we do know are dismissed instead of being accepted, even though it seems as if the two should complement each other.
Many among us take the religious path as part of our lives, at least the standard religious path of church on Sundays and praying, or confessing etc… This is not without its merits, but it is also not satisfying in many ways. This seems more like meeting a minimum requirement than truly trying to understand with the tools we have available to us now.
I’ve imagined a special lens, analogous to a lens that can see only certain wavelengths of light. This lens, however, is one capable of seeing the small, glowing ember or consciousness that resides in us all. If from a high vantage point I could look out across the world I see in my mind’s eye a vast swirling sea of lights composed of these embers as we interact with each other in our lives (It’s a little like the view of the L.A. basin at night, but more active).Each of the embers is reaching for something swirling down near the earth. There are many that spin in vortices with each other, whirlpools that go in endless circles, sometimes guided by a few embers that try and keep them there as they feed off the group’s energy.
Few look up…
I imagine floating ,trying to attain some height, breaking free from all the pressures of society and the whirlpool eddies that confine us, a single ember reaching up, up, up seeking truths, or something unique that isn’t known… always reaching, knowing something more is there to understand. Challenges from society, money and the other whirling vortices come, but through the buffeting currents a driving force remains… a few others see it and break off from what they are doing, rising despite all the challenges as well…
Maybe with time the others will too…
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