Friday, February 11, 2011

World Without End. Amen

In a panel at The Philoctetes Center with the ambitious title “The Nature of Reality,” Deepak Chopra said that consciousness, at least the kind he was talking about, was not the product of evolution. What Chopra was referring to was a cosmic consciousness that might be tantamount to the G word. Biologists generally regard consciousness as the product of an evolution that went hand in hand with the advent of prehensile, tool-making creatures and the development of the cerebral cortex, that element of the so-called upper brain responsible for reasoning and intuition (depending on which side—right or left—we are talking about). “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.” Such were Rod Serling’s words of introduction to his classic weekly series. But isn’t there enough mystery in knowable things, in the elementary particles of matter (like the Higgs boson)the coveted treasure that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are seeking to find as they reduplicate the conditions of the Big Bang? Why can’t we enjoy consciousness for what it is? A product of puny man, helpless and lost within a “world without end. Amen” (Ephesians 3:21). 

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