Category: Consciousness
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Consciousness, Mind and Whirlpools
My previous post was about Panpsychism, a long held, newly resurgent view of mind, consciousness or awareness. Consciousness, I suggested, should neither be regarded as an illusion, nor as miraculously ’emerging’ from unconscious matter. Rather, it should be viewed as ‘built in’ with the bricks of the universe – a ‘given’, like photons, electrons and…
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Where does Consciousness come from?
Materialism continues to be the view of ‘how things are’ for a great many people. They see themselves as material beings who live in a world of material things which obey the laws of physics, and can be weighed and measured. They seem to forget that there are ‘things’ that aren’t things. There are thoughts…
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William Wordsworth’s God
It seems to me that Wordsworth, in these “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, is describing a kind of experience that lies, for more than a few people, at the root of what could be called ‘a religious sensibility’. Once upon a time, human beings thought the universe was very small – a…
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Trees and Us – William Blake and Martin Buber
WILLIAM BLAKE, poet : about awakening to an awareness of belonging to the one totally interwoven web of all life and being … “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” “The tree which moves some to tears of joy, is in the eyes of others only a green thing which…
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VOICES in the wilderness?
DAVID ABRAM, ecologist … “Magic .. is the intuition that every form one perceives – from the swallow swooping overhead, to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself – is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from…
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Death needn’t be a Sidestepped Word!
In a recent post, I wrote about Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember me’. This poem is a companion piece, with similarities and differences. Anticipating her death, the poet, in the 1st verse, thinks about the loved one who is her ‘dearest’. He is not to sing any ‘songs’ for her, for they would most likely be ‘sad’,…
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Mahler and Timelessness
There was an occasion when the composer Gustav Mahler was taking a train journey. Not only was he director of the Vienna State Opera, all the way down from orchestra, singers, scenery and lighting, and stage hands, to box office returns, but in his ‘spare time’ (otherwise known as summer ‘holidays’) he also composed ten…
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Thales and Water
It’s generally thought that Thales was the first Greek philosopher-cum-scientist. I like the story in which he’s walking along a path with an old lady, pointing up to, and telling her all about, the stars – when he trips and falls into the ditch. The old lady looks pityingly, but scornfully, down at him and…
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Believing in God
Do I believe in God? This question is perhaps next door to meaningless and therefore unanswerable. There are probably as many meanings for the word God, as there are people in the world. Let’s start with the fact that God is a three-letter word. Grammatically, it’s a noun and, in my schooldays at any rate,…
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Consciousness, Mind and God
What precisely is ‘consciousness’? On the one hand, we know exactly what it is. It is ‘what it feels like to be us’ in our every moment of wakefulness. It’s the contents of what we call our ‘minds’. But on the other hand, we haven’t the slightest clue what it is. It’s a complete mystery. …
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