About consciousness

Consciousness is a state of being aware. Consciousness is a state where you can make decisions based on certain influences. You are conscious when you are aware of, you are cognitive of your surroundings, you are aware of your own thoughts, and you are aware of the implications of yours and others’ actions.

It is believed in many thought segments that consciousness takes place at the soul level, and not at the biological, the intellectual level. Biology and the intellect go as far as our life, but soul transcends the boundary of life and death — it is independent of the body. This implies that consciousness too is independent of the body. A good example is, your consciousness of your own existence. Assuming you are of an averagely sound mind, your perception of yourself relative to your circumstance is mostly well-defined. At any stage you can view yourself from a distance and be conscious of your presence. Of course this consciousness is clouded by your own knowledge of yourself in particular and the world in general. You view yourself according to the sum total of your achievements and failures, and how you evaluate yourself vis-? -vis the others you take into account.

Consciousness is also about taking decisions. You may call it an “inactive” consciousness if decisions are absent from the event of consciousness. Merely being conscious of something doesn’t matter much. What matters is, how you handle the ifs of your consciousness. For instance, if you are conscious of the dangers lurking around, you try to place yourself in a safer environment. Then this becomes “active” consciousness. This active consciousness is present in all living beings, down till the single-celled organisms. Animals are conscious of their hunger (you may call it “instinct”), they are conscious of finding the food, and if they find the food they are conscious of eating it. Consciousness in humans, on the other hand, is manifest at a more evolved level in the sense that we are conscious about the consciousness itself and then we act or modify our act accordingly. Our consciousness is more piquantly decisive.

So is nature conscious? Or does it act upon certain laws set forth at the inception of existence? This could be interesting because it is not yet known. We only know nature within the streams of our current knowledge, and our current knowledge tells us that nature is governed by certain laws. Why does a storm occur? We know it happens when the wind moves from a high-pressure area to a low pressure area with great force. It always happens this way, it has been happening this way since eternity and it happens across the universe. Does nature have a say in it? What if some day nature decides that the wind shouldn’t flow according to the pressure variations? What if the wind goes from low-pressure to high-pressure (I know there might be no wind to go anywhere in the low-pressure area — it’s hypothetical, just to make a point), or neither to low-pressure nor to high-pressure but in some other, random direction? Well, in such a conscious nature the universe itself might collapse because it can only survive due to certain, “unconscious” laws that it has to follow in order to survive. Nature is a colossal conglomeration of well-defined laws. If it is conscious, nature at best is conscious in an “inactive” state.

For all we know, consciousness might be shaped as many times as there are conscious beings alive at this very moment, wherever they are, in whatever part of the universe (or some other place or dimension if it exists) because we all see the world according to our own views. And herein lies the beauty of consciousness because this fact renders it limitless, infinite, and precisely this is the reason why philosophers throughout the history have never been able to come up with a concrete definition of consciousness.