According to Philip Goff, a professor of philosophy at Durham University, UK, understanding our consciousness goes beyond exploring brain chemistry. In a perceptive article, published in “Scientific American,” Goff explains: “In my new book, entitled ‘Why? The Purpose of the Universe,’ I take head-on the question of why it is so hard to make progress on consciousness. The core difficulty is that consciousness defies observation. You can’t look inside someone’s brain and see their feelings and experiences. Science does deal with things that can’t be observed, such as fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, maybe even other universes. But, consciousness poses an important difference: in all of these other cases, we theorise about things we can’t observe in order to explain what we can observe. Uniquely with consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain cannot be publicly observed.” There may be, according to Goff, a way forward, perhaps, for the evolution of consciousness through “the possibilities left open by the arrangements of particles in our brains – the random chanciness implicit in quantum mechanics.”
You could think of consciousness as being equivalent to your mind’s compass and radar. Granted that this allegory is far too expansive, wide, and tapered – depending upon our own boundary of thought and outlining of contexts, their diverse, palpable and not palpable shades, or tones, too. Also, when you equate your mind with its processes, conscious, or not conscious, it becomes a part of your self-consciousness – like musical rhythms, or subtleties, are to the harmony of the spheres.
For philosophers, and their ilk, consciousness is part of our attentive awareness – a state with ease of access to our mind, body, spirit, or soul. It is not restricted to being awake, or wakeful, where everything surfaces like a dizzy array of cerebral images and experiences – graphic and aural. It is a fact that when we are awake, there are, at times, a number of things that we don’t experience at all, even when we are conscious of oneself and our surroundings. The core story is we are often unmindful of ourselves and our surroundings. Put simply, we are in a state of deliberate isolation – far not only from the frenzied horde, but also oneself.
Socrates imparted to Plato that the fool-proof alleyway to wisdom was allied to sound reflection, while being a pupil of knowledge, or insight, was the utmost formulation. Plato, likewise, taught his pupils that each of us wants to be a part of something higher, a transcendent reality, of which the world we perceive is but a small fragment, although it unites everything into a single harmonious whole. What this simply means is that each of us wants to scuttle out of the cavern of darkness and ignorance and walk with the torchlight of truth. Plato’s celebrated acolyte, Aristotle, typified that our route to knowledge is the lucid, methodical unearthing of the realm around us, along with subtle, or apparent, details that decorate its context.
What does this connote? That it is only when we begin to grasp the ‘core’ of our consciousness would we know why a thing – good, okay, or bad – ensued, or why it did not. Or, that every situation that we are challenged with is a new learning process, also enriching experience, or understanding, that provides us with the competence to grow, act, and not retort, at the ‘drop’ of a thought. This exemplifies, no less, the divine reality that each of us is endowed with – the ability to embrace the whole quintessence of mysticism that is all-pervading.
This brings us to yet another connotation – the primary text of the sound and the subtext of its echo, or modern thought. It has been an age-old question, ‘Do such contexts, thoughts, or behaviours influence emotions?’ The answer is they do; and, in more ways than one. Medical research surmises that certain behaviours enhance the level of serotonin, the feel-good chemical, in the brain. For instance, when one is not ‘grounded,’ and depressed, or hear not the sound, or its echo, our serotonin levels are much lower than in people who are not depressed. In other words, some behaviours relieve depression; some amplify the condition. It does not require a mind scientist to figure this out, notwithstanding the several ups, and downs, in life.
All we need to, therefore, do is keep ourselves smiling from our heart, and not just on our face, while hearing the sound, also the echo, and by investing in oneself, making happiness a pursuit within, and telling ourselves that difficulties don’t last long, but determined folks do. You’d certainly include contemplation, meditation, and art therapy, as a requisite in the progression – they all ease our stress levels, including depression, or moody blues.
The best thing to do is to imagine yourself driving a car. Visualise the front wheels as your mind, or regulator, with your body and emotions being the rear wheels. As you ‘drive’ your vehicle smartly, try to shed your unhappy feelings. Now, come to the source of your anguish. When you take a turn, try to hold onto a new thought. One that helps you overcome your unhappy feelings and also behaviour. Move on; don’t look back. Look ahead – with buoyancy, optimism, and flexibility.
You may not ‘buy’ the car simile, promptly, because it is like conceding things too quickly, or far too hurriedly to modifying the crux, or context, of your thought – although it could possibly help you to fix things, or disagreement, make friends, or bridge the breach, among others. Yet, all said and done, and divergent to popular thought, the car ‘paradigm’ helps us to think without tinted glasses, while accommodating things as they are. It also relates to the belief that all values, including higher principles, are not merely phrases, or maxims, but also the vital cogs of our conscious existence.
