Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about - yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries of time, space, and gravity. These were not just areas of scientific ignorance, but of utter bafflement and wonder. We do not yet have all the answers to any of the questions of cosmology and particle physics, molecular genetics and evolutionary theory, but we do know how to think about them .... With consciousness, however, we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist -- and hope -- that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.
Freak:
Hey my mom gave me some advice today; she said there are four stages of consciousness development: stage one is when you're like a kid, ya know, everything is new, nothing really bothers ya, you're not self conscious but you're little; stage two is the existential stage when you like become aware of your own existence, ya know, you look around, everything seems hopeless, ya know? You're like, "Ah whats the point in doing anything, man? We're all gonna die anyway," and all that shit; and then there's stage three where you realize that everything isn't hopeless and you get a glimmer of it, you just gotta get there.
David Keenan:
Get where?
Freak:
To stage four, nirvana.
David Keenan:
So, ok, so like that make me what like a stage two and I suppose you're like a stage four.
Freak:
No man, I'm a stage one.
David Keenan:
You're so full of shit!
Freak:
Its just some shit my mom told me; you use it as you will.
There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us; and if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibilty to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon, incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced, and materially influenced, by the mere silent presence of some external object: which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness.
