The Importance of Being Conscious

What's the point of it all if we're nothing more than isolated creatures? Our connections are obvious; the people we interact with on a daily basis. We recognize the interplay, the cause and effect. But there are billions of people who are not only occupying the same earthly space at the same time we are, but are also in a condition we know as living. Existence is an either/or proposition. We either are or we are not. Time may pass or may just seem to pass, but our existence is static. For however long we live, our consciousness does not change. Your body may grow, your mind may acquire knowledge, but not your consciousness. It is forever the same. Once activated it knows no end. It does not recognize death. It does not recognize sleep. It is totally self-aware. All it knows is itself and it refuses to be extinguished.

I'm not talking about an immortal soul. I'm talking about something that ignores time. We may lose consciousness. Consciousness does not know it's not conscious. It only knows when it's conscious. To say that once your consciousness is activated is not to say that it continues in an uninterrupted state. Far from it. There are many interruptions, one of them daily for seven to eight hours. Another one is rather long, in most cases thousands of years. But since your consciousness does not know it's not conscious, who cares? Of course, many people do care, and they have cared as long as they've been building fires and looking up at the stars. All kinds of ridiculous theories have been concocted to explain man's destiny. I found none of them satisfactory, so I came up with one of my own.

Just kidding (well, almost).

One thing I am certain of though is the reason why there are so many billions of humans, past, present and hopefully future. It is to experience everything a human can experience. Now I say this somewhat tongue in cheek, but in some small way it makes sense. I'm glad that my font of experiences is miniscule in scope because at even that rate they're really more than I can handle. But of some of life's experiences I can agree with the sentiment of a fictional character who said, "The worst meal I ever had was wonderful."

To live for warm, sunny days is not a bad way to go. To live for them a hundred years ago was probably even better since the ozone hole had not yet been invented. But to live for clarity these days is to live for the impossible. Nothing is clear and about everything there is argument. Why do we argue? I can only guess it's because we no longer grow our own food.

Enough whining. We're trying to establish a reason for being. At some point I'm going to have to introduce God into this discussion. Why not now? Does God exist? Of course he does. The tiniest imagination can figure that one out. Relate to it this way. Ants exist. So do humans. Believers, as well as non-believers, in evolution can agree that superior intellect does occur. If human intellect is superior to an ant's, why can't there exist an intellect superior to a human's? There can, and as far we're concerned, that is God.

God being God, it is probably reasonable to assume that he was all sufficient and therefore lacking in nothing. Why then did he create us? The question of why is not a bad one. In fact, it is very good one. I think the answer lies in the thought that God neither lost nor gained anything when he created the universe and us. If God is everything (and no other definition will do for me) the act of creation was merely God transforming parts of himself. But then you have to ask, for what purpose? To know the purpose, we have to know the motivation.

I'm willing to speculate on the motivation. God did lack something. This something had to involve an intrinsic part of his being. Maybe it was the most intrinsic part. Maybe it was God's raison d'etre. But whatever it was it motivated God to bring the universe and us into existence. Somewhere, sometime, somehow God made a conscious decision to create the cosmos. At some point, and it wasn't long before the decision, God himself became conscious. Once God became conscious, there was no doubt that one day we too would become conscious. It was just a matter of time.

Time began when God became conscious of himself. This was no mean trick. When you are all that there is you have no reference points, no lines of demarcation. What a feat of intellect and will to bring identity and consciousness to that all-encompassing entity. No one there to talk to, no one there to guide your steps. Everything must be done for the first time. All you have to go by is yourself. God proved himself with this first tremendous act. All else must have seemed easy after that.

So here you are, this being of unlimited mind and power. You now have consciousness, but you have no one to talk to. Can God be lonely? Looks like it. Perhaps he still is. I, for one, would not consider myself a worthy conversational companion for him. What lesser being would be? But wait, if God is at the top rung of the celestial ladder, it's probably safe to say that man is not at the next rung. In fact, there may be several rungs between God and man. Makes sense and if that's the case, there may be some rungs occupied by beings with high enough intellect to keep God company.

The world is such a small place. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is just that. To replace someone is usually an easy task. None of us are invaluable, none of us are irreplaceable. We breathe and occupy space. That's about the best thing that can be said about us.

People talk about living forever (forever defined as being without end). I'd be more inclined to say that is living in a subtler sense. Yet, the great paradox is that every life is precious because it is part of the collective life force. The source of all life is God. God is life.i

All of us make do with crumbs. It's as if the powers that be that reside beyond the atmosphere are throwing us scraps from their sumptuous, grandiose meals. But I can say with a little bit of pride that humanity has welcomed these scraps and made the most of them.

The very size of the universe is a testimony to power and speed. The speed of light is incredibly fast, but gravity moves almost instantaneously. Celestial beings either move like gravity or use gravity itself to travel. The universe is littered with intelligence. Why else do the stars sparkle?

Knowing that God has created himself, at least the identity part, I feel safe in saying that each one of us is a microcosm of God. I'm not talking about our physical attributes or our daily actions. I'm talking about our consciousness. Without the spark from God, we would be lifeless clay.

Shakespeare could have said all the universe is but a stage, but with one glaring omission. There is no audience. Everyone, including God, is an actor in the cosmic play. Yes, there is no audience, but the play goes on anyway. If we were to stop and watch it, it would be a different play.

How big is God? How big is the universe? On earth, creatures or entities exist in a wide variety of sizes. What should be the largest entity in the universe? Logically, the answer is God. God and the boundaries of the universe are the same. As the universe grows (if it does) so does God. What exists outside God and the universe? Nothing. Nothing not only in the sense of the absence of physical objects, but also nothing in the sense of the absence of consciousness. We live in a closed universe. Its immense size is mind boggling. Yes, as the prefix implies, it is of one piece. God both covers and fills the universe. There is no place in the universe that you can go that God is not there. Just as God, at any one point in time, blankets the universe, so also does he blanket time itself. Time began when God activated his consciousness. Time will end when every individual consciousness is in a state of activation. At time's end there will be no deactivated consciousnesses. Think of time's beginning to time's end as a straight line: Point A (time's beginning) to Point Z (time's end). Now think of God as a cloud that the timeline runs straight through. Point A (to your right) begins slightly inside the edge of the cloud while Point Z (to your left) ends exactly where the cloud ends. Between Point A and Point Z (depending on the measure between any two points) is an incredibly large but finite number of points. These points are the evolving consciousness of God. Time is nothing more than an apparatus that allows God to be transformed from a single point of light into a universe of lights.

Why do we act disappointed when it rains on a day there's a 20% chance? Wasn't there a chance all along? As we grow older, we witness the decay of our bodies. There's a 100% chance that we're all going to die someday. But if a chance is 100%, is it really a chance? Isn't it a certainty? How many certainties do we actually have in life? It seems the most certain one is the one that deactivates our consciousness.

Some people though, may welcome oblivion. Eternal rest and peace, they say. But they're fooling themselves. Rest and peace can only come to those who have the consciousness to experience them. Every one of us alive today had billions of years of de-activation. While there was no pain or misery, neither were there rest and peace.

Why are we afraid to be conscious? Why do we prefer a mindless state of being or even oblivion itself? Is it because when we are conscious, we are aware (at the famous so-called sub-conscious level) that our consciousness is in a sense "on loan from God"? Do we fear such intimacy with a higher intellect? Such a concept may mean there's no magic carpet ride to heaven. There may be some work involved. This is what scares us. For many of us, our greatest sense of relaxation comes when we sit virtually mindless on a sofa watching television.

What I am speaking of is the struggle of each consciousness to reach some sort of parity with God. Now the part can never be greater than the whole, but there's no reason the part can't form lines of communication with the whole. But what a task that would be. No wonder we shrink from it.

Did you ever compare the average length of a human life to the life spans of various phenomena throughout the universe? Is the sun a living thing? No, but when we speak of the , we use terms common to life. E.g., the sun was "born" a billion years ago, the sun will "die" a billion years hence. If the sun is "born" at some point and then "dies" at another point, doesn't it "live" in between? We know the universe has been operating for billions of years. Each human being's life is a minute percentage of that time. Doesn't it stand to reason that an individual consciousness, which is by the far the greatest creation of God, is destined for something longer that can't be counted in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years? If mankind operated the same way people think God does, then we would be driving brand new automobiles off of bridges.

Our home is in the stars. It has never been anywhere else. The stars forever surround us. Doesn't matter if they're blocked by the light of the sun or the clouds at night, they are there. Each individual consciousness is its own star, and whether it shines from near or from afar, it nonetheless shines.

Hard intellect, logic, and reason must sometimes yield to imagination, instinct, and insight. Logic and reason appraise the past to understand the present. When God created himself, he had no past to work with. Creating himself, and as a consequence the universe, was a supreme act of imagination.

It should be our imaginations that rule our days. Our deterioration continues apace. We continue on mostly because of the ones who follow us to earth. For them, the cows are being milked, the assembly lines are cranking, and the librarians are maintaining the books. But these cycles too will someday end.