Cave of our origins
Human soul: the abstract byproduct of the conscious mind
When one thinks of consciousness and wonders what it actually is, one can not at one point think of it as the human soul in an abstract way. It is, after all, all that we are. In it lies all our feelings, emotions, thoughts, memories and general depth of our persona. Is this what the religious see as the eternal soul that one day will see its way to heaven or hell, or to some other preconceived notion of the afterlife, the wheel – the river – the void and so on. I see consciousness as the source of everything. Everything is made from consciousness. Nothing can exist outside of consciousness; ergo, there is nothing beyond consciousness. In that manner, soul and consciousness are the same things. Everything that is anything is consciousness that has been ‘moulded’ into a distinct entity, or perhaps a deity; our God or gods are nothing but the extension of our collective consciousness as a species. On the flip side, the more religious could say the exact opposite, that our consciousness is the product of our eternal soul, that all that we are stems from the gift of God/gods and that the driving force behind our existence is the self-moving soul put in motion by an external force. However, this doesn’t satisfy me; the cop-out answer is that God willed it, and no further examination is needed. The puzzle that is the human mind is a puzzle worthy of the deepest probings and proddings. To unlock the secrets of our mind would be, in essence, finding our way home, back to the first cave of our origins.
Finding our way home
How can one find his way home if the path, map, or even the knowledge of a possibility of the veracity of the search is obfuscated by default state of mind? We live in a perpetual state of total darkness; everything is shrouded in the towering sandstorm of assuredness in ourselves without a filter to discern the truth from our own wrongheaded thoughts. We cannot with any absolute conviction say that the reality we are experiencing is actually objective; everything we perceive is mired in the mud of experience, trauma, inner knowledge of self and extreme ignorance of others – ignorance in the way that we are only capable of knowing what we know and be entirely blind to the experience of life from another’s perspective. It would be folly to say that at this point of our development or with the knowledge we possess, we could be able to put the finger on the pathway to discovery. All we have are rudimentary tools of the past generations, and not a single one could be called a scientific method. These tools are psychedelic drugs, meditation, asceticism, prayer, sex and other forms of pre-modern human activities. To be perfectly clear, I am not judging or in any way, shape or form disparaging these methods of discovery; quite the contrary, I, as many others before me, are a practitioner and proponent of some of these methods. However, the methodology of these methods is, on a surface level, nothing more than indulgence in the human experience at its most base stratum, as opposed to that on the lower degree, it shows signs of the deeper, more intrinsic causality for our present state as individuals and as a species.
Penumbra that surrounds us
The proverbial meat hooks ripping us are pretty visible and frivolous in their indifference to our suffering caused by the lack of knowledge of ourselves. It is hard not to fall into a nihilistic state after pontificating upon the, at face value, the hopeless situation of living in the dark. However, it could be even more futile to see what lies outside the shroud of this enveloping penumbra. None of the theories on the subject is what you would call a happy conclusion (not that one is merited or needed). From the existence of God /gods to the possibility of all this being just a high-level computer simulation (and this in itself is a sign of human hubris that this is a high-level computation and not just a pet project of a higher being – what to us humans is an ant colony).
Nuking the colony
To exit this shroud of darkness, we could envelop ourselves in the shroud of nuclear devastation. One assured single way out of the general shared consciousness. Total obliteration of the human race, or a discovery of the glitch in a system. Auto-deletion is denied by the greater sys-admins of the universe. This potentiality, even though Bostromian to the fullest extent, appeals most to me. The discovery of a space outside of space, what lies beyond the “physical” bounds of our optical field constrained by the limits of the human experience. Of course, this would mean the end of our lives as we know them. Extrapolated out of the flesh coffins that we call our bodies to a higher plain, or reduced to ashes left on a cinder of scorched earth, all life extinguished, procreation denied, the great filter set upon another planet.