The Pool of Consciousness

Description

Where is our consciousness? Why are we conscious? What makes us conscious? Are we conscious when we dream? Simple questions about something we have been familiar with every day of our lives. But a moment’s thought shows them to be harder questions than they seem.

Following recent thinking about the nature of Consciousness and where our consciousness comes from, the author draws on life experience, dreams, reading and psychoanalytic practice to throw some light on the hard problem of Consciousness. What is it like to experience the sharp taste of a lemon or the scent of hay? Such questions are all about the experience of Consciousness. As the mythical Perseus had it revealed to him that the way to master the Gorgon’s deathly gaze was to look at its reflection in his shield, so the author offers a more indirect, reflective approach to the hard problem than the usual methods of scientific enquiry.  Indeed he suggests that the penetrating gaze of science may  make Consciousness seem more mysterious, and so be as mind-numbing  as the Gorgon. He shows that, since Adam and Eve, Consciousness itself has been demonstrating its own nature to those who know how to listen to silence. Relationships such as analogy, metaphor and myths reveal more about the fundamental nature of Consciousness than scientific measurement can. But paradoxically, Mathematics, Chemistry, Quantum Physics, Plato, Theology and Psychoanalysis have in different ways inadvertently reflected essential aspects of Consciousness itself, while apparently directing their gaze towards the nature of the external material world.