Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself

Though in the past I've dismissed sentiments such as the title of this blog post as being unduly New Age'y, today I changed my mind. I guess it depends on the context of sayings such as Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself. 

So here's the context for my newfound positive feeling toward those words.

A few days ago I saw a mention in the book I've been writing about recently, The Elephant and the Blind by Thomas Metzinger, of a book by David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. Since I'm attracted both to Chinese philosophy (Taoism and Zen, mainly) and poetry in general, I decided to order the book from Amazon.

I started reading it today. The book starts out with:

Poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space.

But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities -- for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive that that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself.

At least this is true for classical Chinese poetry, shaped as it is by Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist thought into a form of spiritual practice. In its deepest possibilities, its inner wilds, poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself -- and the history of that awakening begins where the Cosmos begins.

Hinton then spends a couple of pages describing that beginning, and what came after the beginning, in pleasingly scientific terms that struck me as almost completely accurate (maybe I'm wrong about the "almost"), given our current understanding of the Cosmos -- or at least that possibly limited corner of the Cosmos that is our universe. The multiverse is a distinct, though unproven, possibility.

In the beginning, there was neither light nor space -- and for consciousness, they are the essentials. During its first moments, the Cosmos was a primordial plasma of subatomic particles. The particles expanded and cooled until the particles could bond to form the lightest atoms, hydrogen and helium, whereupon the Cosmos became transparent to radiation such as light.

Eventually, hydrogen and helium began condensing into proto-galactic clouds under the gossamer influence of gravity, and chance fluctuations in the density of those clouds led some local areas to intensify their condensation until pressure and heat became so fierce that hydrogen atoms began fusing together. 

In that process, which can only be described as magical, stars were born. And with those stars came the elemental dimensions of consciousness: space and light and the visible.

Those dimensions began to evolve. The stars grew old, like anything else, and died. In the furnace of their old age and explosive deaths, they forged heavier elements and scattered them into space, forming nebular clouds that in turn condensed into new stars.

It is the heartbeat of the Cosmos, that steady pulse of stellar birth and death, gravity's long swell and rhythm of absence and presence, presence and absence. And in the third star generation, our planet was formed, rich in those heavy elements. It cooled and evolved until eventually water appeared: hydrogen, created during the original cosmic expansion, combining with oxygen, one of those heavier elements created in the cauldrons of dying stars.

Water formed mirrored pools in hollows on the planet's rocky surface, and in these pools the Cosmos turned toward itself for the first time here. It became "aware" of itself in those mirrored openings deep as all space and light, deep as the visible itself. 

Living organisms evolved and eventually developed receptors that allowed them to sense whether or not light was present. Those light receptors provided decisive selective advantages and so developed into more and more sophisticated forms. The lens evolved as a means to concentrate light on receptor cells, thereby making creatures more sensitive to weak light. 

This innovation eventually led to image-forming eyes, which combine a lens with highly specialized receptor cells. And with that, the Cosmos turned toward itself once again, eventually giving shape to consciousness, that spatiality the eye's mirrored transparency conjures inside animals.

It was a miraculous development: the material universe, which had been perfectly opaque, was now open to itself, awakened to itself!

Although ancient Chinese poets and philosophers didn't describe it in these scientific terms, this same sense of consciousness as the Cosmos open to itself was an operating assumption for them -- though perhaps here existence is a better word than Cosmos, as it suggests the sense of all reality as a single tissue.

...The abiding aspiration of spiritual and artistic practice in ancient China was to cultivate consciousness as that existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself: looking at itself, hearing and touching itself, tasting and smelling itself, and also thinking itself, feeling itself -- all in the singular ways made possible by the individuality of each particular person.

This is consciousness in the open, wild and woven into the generative Cosmos: wholesale belonging. As we will see, it was recognized as our most essential nature in Taoist and Ch'an Buddhist thought, the foundational structure of consciousness for artist-intellectuals in ancient China: poets, painters, calligraphers, philosophers.

And it seems a beautiful, even essential alternative -- both philosophical and ecological -- to the disconnectedness that structures consciousness in the West.

Comments

[Ron E.]

I’m an advocate of the evolutionary basis of consciousness and resonate with the evolutionary description expressed by David Hinton: -
“In the beginning, there was neither light nor space -- and for consciousness, they are the essentials.”
He describes how “Living organisms evolved and eventually developed receptors that allowed them to sense whether or not light was present. Those light receptors provided decisive selective advantages and so developed into more and more sophisticated forms.” And: “This innovation eventually led to image-forming eyes, which combine a lens with highly specialized receptor cells. And with that, the Cosmos turned toward itself once again, eventually giving shape to consciousness, that spatiality the eye's mirrored transparency conjures inside animals.”

It’s always seemed sense to me that as life forms evolved from organisms that extracted nutrients from their environment to organisms that began feeding on one another, a primitive sense of ‘me’ and ‘not me’ emerged enabling these early creatures to purse prey and evade predators. Becoming aware of something other than ‘me’ seems to be the basis of being conscious.

We have evolved to the point where not only can we distinguish ‘me’ and ‘not me’, we are able to consciously predict and plan our actions through the process of forming and projecting ideas or concepts to execute such behaviour.

And, we have gone further (albeit unconsciously) by forming a concept of self in addition to the awareness of simply being an individual physical organism. All this to our advantage; except that in tasting of this tree of knowledge we have effectively separated ourselves from one another and the world about us.

[sant64]

"Hinton then spends a couple of pages describing that beginning, and what came after the beginning, in pleasingly scientific terms that struck me as almost completely accurate (maybe I'm wrong about the "almost"), given our current understanding of the Cosmos -- or at least that possibly limited corner of the Cosmos that is our universe. The multiverse is a distinct, though unproven, possibility."

"In the beginning, there was neither light nor space -- and for consciousness, they are the essentials. During its first moments, the Cosmos was a primordial plasma of subatomic particles. The particles expanded and cooled until the particles could bond to form the lightest atoms, hydrogen and helium, whereupon the Cosmos became transparent to radiation such as light."

In the beginning, there was no matter, energy, space or time. So where did these subatomic particles come from?

The only explanation is that some kind of intelligent consciousness preceded the universe's beginning. How else can the manifold "miraculous developments" of the cosmos be explained? Intelligent consciousness must precede intelligent design.

Moreover, belief that the universe functions via reliable physical laws must be a belief in an intelligent creator of those laws.

[Appreciative Reader]

facepalm

Completely, entirely, wholly unteachable! Wondrously so.