Consciousness

Despite all the achievements of modern times, and although we mostly do not recognize this fact, they still are a topic: World riddles, i.e. phenomena in nature and life that are inexplicable to natural sciences. Consciousness is such a phenomenon. How is it that as a result of mere physical and chemical processes within the nervous system our subjective perception comes into being? How is it that we experience the world? How is mind created?

Since ancient times, all of the great explorers of the mind – Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton and Einstein, just to name of few – have been fascinated by consciousness and its many different facets, i.e. thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, sensory impressions, etc. And although, to the best of their ability, they have all contributed to clarifying the mystery of consciousness, it still remains to be one of the last world riddles. More than three centuries after the initiation of the Age of Enlightenment and despite all the scientific achievements of Modern Age, the phenomenon of consciousness is still not explained by science or by philosophy.

So let’s join forces and make a new attempt, let’s get back to the great beginning and see whether it is there that we can find something to solve the riddle.

In the beginning, as is known, was the Word, or rather the lógos. But even though thousands of years have passed since Abraham walked this Earth and even though almost 2000 years have passed since the high ideals of Christian religion were set up, humans to this very day have not learned how to really make use of their share in the potential of lógos, i.e. how to translate their logical capabilities into a true, all-encompassing wellbeing of humanity. – Talk about humanity: What about the Christian teaching of Love Thy Neighbor, one of the grandest ideals of Christianity? When did you last practice it? Do we really practice compassion in our lives? Instead, we rather use our logical capabilities to attain short-sighted goals. You can take the consequences of this behavior towards life from your daily newspapers. And the ecosystems that have preserved life on this planet for millions of years are now on the brink of collapse because of our refusal to take on a more respectful and responsible attitude towards ourselves and life as a whole.  

So let’s go even further back in time. To the point in our evolution when nature put forth homo sapiens, i.e. to the point in evolution when human consciousness awoke out of the eternity of existence. Maybe this was at a time when we lay down after a hard day’s work, content with ourselves, happy for having escaped the saber-toothed tiger for one more time and – turned our gaze SKYWARDS – to the stars. The grand quest of searching for a purpose in existence began. It was in search for answers to the big questions that humans developed astrology. A kind of astrology, however, that soon became overwhelmed by superstition and manipulation. We now need an enlightened and at the same time intuitive astrology. We now need to integrate the findings of natural sciences and the intuitive nature of human subjectivity into a new kind of “astrological science”. We need a new astrology pioneering the trail in order for us to emerge from our “self-incurred immaturity” (Immanuel Kant) and thereby surpassing all of intellectual history and creating something completely new in mind.

For when we turned our gaze skywards, we became aware of something:

Heaven is a Part of Us.