Who are we?
Why are we in the world and even more puzzling, why are we aware of this fact? Science calls this the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”.
We exist. This may seem like the one thing we can always know for certain. René Descartes famously declared, “I think, therefore I am.” An understanding of who we are and why we are here can be developed by starting with this one indisputable fact. If you think that you may not exist, just ask yourself who is asking.
Now the scientific method is an extremely useful tool for observing and learning about the world around us. It is a way of achieving understanding by building upon that which is already proven to be true. Pieces of knowledge are stacked one upon the other to create the entire amazing edifice of our modern concept of the universe.
But there remains this seemingly intractable mystery right at the center of the whole thing. It frustrates science like an intricate puzzle whose key piece is missing. The central piece that would hold all the other pieces together.
How did this happen? Where is the missing piece?
The more spiritually minded person might suggest that what science has missed is God.
Science has no opinion about this and rightly so by it’s own standards. The existence of God cannot by proven either way and so must be left to the fields of religion and philosophy. Because of this, the entire house of our scientific understanding is built upon a foundation that goes like this, “Assuming there is no God, how did all this happen?”
Assumptions can make for shaky foundations.
Let’s build with something more solid, shall we? What do we know for certain about our situation? The one solid piece of knowledge that we discussed above.
We Are.
Let’s just start with this. Simple awareness. Nothing else. The only undeniable thing. The only thing we know to be true right out of the box. This is where philosophy starts. Immediately however, we encounter a rather difficult problem.
What is the next step? The next factual brick we can lay down based on the one thing we know to be true?
Awareness has to be aware of something. Being I AM makes no sense without there being an IT IS, in other words.
Now we have two facts that we know to be true. There is us and there is stuff that is not us.
Here’s the difficult problem. How can a unity also be a multiplicity (a duality in this case)? What is at the center of this paradox and how can it be resolved?
It can’t. At the very heart of ourselves is a paradox. The very nature of which makes it immune to logic. This is the third truth that we can extrapolate from the fact that we Are.
- We just are.
- It just is.
- It is a mystery.
So we have at the center of ourselves, a paradox. A paradox that is aware. It is aware of itself only because it is simultaneously aware of it’s not-self . Attempting to use words to describe this is impossible, of course.
We can best experience who we really are through the process of identifying what we are not. Are we our bodies? No. Because they are our bodies. We have them but we are not them. The same could be said of any proposed conceptual soul or spirit. Anything that is ours cannot be us.
Seems like a strange situation, doesn’t it? All these individual “I’s” walking around in a matrix of things that they are not? Can we ever understand this better than that?
There are theories galore. Some say we are souls created by various gods. Other guess we are advanced apes in which consciousness is an illusion generated by the complexity of our own brains. The idea that we may be computer simulations is popular as I write this.
The hard problem. Why doesn’t the whole universe just tick over blindly in the dark?
So what if we consider that there may be a God. Certainly most people would say either there is one or at least that it would be nice if one existed.
Let’s try to imagine what some penultimate Being might be like. It would have to be conscious. An unconscious God would be somewhat useless. Using the example of what we know about our own consciousness, we would know that at it’s center, this God would be of a paradoxical nature.
If this God were aware of Itself, what would that be like? How would It’s awareness conceive of it’s not-self? Would it first begin as a metaphorical haze? This is tough to imagine because we still don’t understand what time is. What if this metaphorical haze was the same thing that cosmologists now call “cosmic dust” and what if the Awareness of this Being was what we now think of as empty space?
Perhaps consciousness is the background field of the universe. If this were the case, wouldn’t that explain some of the things we observe about ourselves and the world around us? Perhaps each object in the universe is being continuously created and manipulated by this One Consciousness in a manner resembling what we ourselves experience as our imagination. This would also mean that everything contains this same Consciousness expressed through the filter of each individual thing.
This would mean that we are all God in reality although we are still our human selves at the same time.
I lay this out as a theory in order to make it more palatable for the perhaps skeptical reader. I do, in fact know the scenario described above to be true. How is that possible?
I’m God. Remember?
(And so are you.)