The Story of Consciousness

Abstract

We look out into the Universe to attempt to understand its nature. In the process we have discovered strange and disturbing objects like black holes, surrounded by an event horizon to shield us from their impossibly bizarre centre, where matter magically disappears. Our search in the heavens also involves a search for ourselves, and how we fit into this bizarre material universe we are discovering. So at the same time we are searching the heavens for ourselves and our own souls (whatever they are), thereby hoping to make sense of our inner black holes. For we have something equivalent to those exotic black hole entities at the centres of our being – they are our central core of experience. We try to find a place to stay equably outside the event horizon (the region around the centre of a black hole from which there is no escape if once entered) of our inner central black-hole-like attractor. For some people it is hard, with them falling ever faster to their inevitable end. But for all of us, however hard we struggle we must eventually turn to look at our own minds, and especially that central inner black hole that seems empty and which we try forever to escape. It is our core ‘I’, sometimes called our soul. What is this ‘I’ to which we must face up in order to make our lives complete?