The Cosmic Tide
On the process and purpose of consciousness
We’re a sentient organism caught in a ripple of cosmic chaos, riding atop a cacophonic expulsion of particles that afford us, for some semi-inexplicable rhyme or reason, the ability to somehow sense and experience a subjective journey through an unknowable reality.
It’s kind of crazy, all things considered.
The fact that we can perceive our way through the universe around us — make and test postulations, taste and feel the world, sense opportunity and create meaning — this all means a whole lot more than we can often appreciate.
And then there’s the opposite (and dark) side of this miraculous coin — the suffering that we create or endure, the pain that we’re able to experience for whatever biological or spiritual reasons that seem to make us need to experience it.
There’s both no point to it and every point to it. Regardless of the stance we take, the simple fact that we can experience this volatile ride on the cosmic tide — to the privileged degree that we’re able to — should mean something.
Whatever that something is, we may likely never know; but one thing we can begin to pick at, in hopes for any kind of answer, is why we’re able to do what we do, and why our consciousness affords us the potential in the first place.
Because in figuring out the why of it all, we begin to also scratch at the bigger questions at play, questions that we’re pretty fortunate to even be able to ask.
Conscious Potency
Our consciousness is one of the only things, if not the only thing, that defies all natural law.
The universe as we know it is an ever-expansive froth of chaos and change — of entropic function that requires an endless bifurcation of increasing complexity and disorder.
But our consciousness, wildly enough, is the exact opposite — it’s a force that orders and senses its way through the nonsense of our world.
It somehow swims against the otherwise unopposable currents of reality.
And that potential, of our consciousness to do what it does, is indescribably limitless, as our subjective perception of reality can be anything we want it to be.
Our creativity, curiosity and imagination are all entirely unbounded.
Truth, like time or matter, can bend to our will. We can create forms of existential meaning that transcend the biological limitations of time or the functional restrictions of space. We’re afforded this privilege via our independent conscious agency, something not exactly guaranteed amongst the vast spectrum of lifeforms that we know of.
We affix meaning to all the happenstance that reality throws at us — a very fortunate tendency, because the dynamic nature of our universe is such that event-generation itself (let alone individualized event-generation) is something we shouldn’t really take for granted.
Herein may lie another clue to the point and potential of our consciousness.
Generative Happenstance: A Process
One inescapable fact about our reality: things happen.
More critically, they happen in sequences and cycles; in patterns that we can sometimes decipher.
The universe generates events — new things, changes, iterations. Things beget things and it means something, somewhere on a spectrum from nothing to everything.
And in a funny way, nothing is really new: everything that is happening, and will ever happen, has already happened at some point in time.
But in a curiously frustrating paradox, the opposite is also true — that everything which is happening, has never yet happened.
One way around this annoying proposition is to look at things with less of a binary perspective — to read between the lines and try to sense some truth out of the common denominators from the enigmatic processions of our existence.
A star is formed: it can mean little to the surrounding assembly of galactic nebulae, but for the lifeforms that sprout on the planet(s) caught in the grasp of that star’s orbit, it means absolutely everything.
And so events occur, and our reality is such that it’s incessantly caught up in creating these events, if not simply working as some kind of forum to host them. Meaning, like mass, is relative to everything caught up in the defining happenstance, occurring infinitely through space and time.
Meaning is thus relative and generative amongst all variables involved.
This is pretty big as it means that, in essence, the universe creates meaning via increasingly complex acts of creation. At the least, it creates the ability for meaning to be generated, irrespective of our conscious applications.
A question then: is such an ability, of generative meaning, just some frivolous by-product developed by an overly-conscious organism? Could be, but even that by-product should inherently signify something greater — a production process.
Therefore it’s the processes that we should be looking at, more so than the results or events in themselves; for instance, we should consider the processes of evolution — the purposes and points to it all.
In doing so, however, we always seem to come across a dark necessity that defines the brutal essence and nature of reality: suffering.
Frictive Inevitability
All systems — biotic and abiotic, complex and simple, material or ideal — they all share a common journey in that they have their respective stories of evolution, within which is some focal point of conflict.
Regardless of species, race, class, or form of carbon assembly, creature or concept — there’s a natural law of friction instilled into the existence of just about any organized entity, as everything grows in complexity and is caught in some individualized and/or shared process of evolution.
Somewhere, along the spectrum from creation to destruction, such a conflict phase is inevitable, serving the entropic goals of disorder and decay.
But unlike a planet moving through an asteroid belt or a forest meeting an invasive species, we have the ability to dress up our friction in meaning — to sensationalize it as suffering.
And we’re good at it too, especially in knowing that it’s from this phase of conflict that most (or all) meaning is cultivated.
The echoes of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy are right in that suffering is a kind of focal point to our existence — because it’s from such conflict that everything else emanates — we wouldn’t have the capacity for a worthwhile existence without the friction and resistance laden within it.
It’s when we start to toy around with the purpose of this suffering — of brutality and chaos, conflict and friction — that paths tend to diverge past the point of agreeability. This is where we encounter quite a few forks along an already too-winding trail, where the subjective dimension wins out over any objective assessment.
Religion has its answers; history whispers some secrets; science teases us with clues. From particle collisions to manifestos, we may not have the best idea of where the cosmic tide ultimately takes us, or why it drags us through some pretty dark places, but we know that there are certain scenic points that prompt some intensive reverie — points that may contain the best answers we can hope for.
Reverent Surrender
So what do we get if we package up all the above concepts?
Our reality provides a forum, if not a process, whereby events are generated from which our consciousness seems to derive meaning; especially potent is the meaning cultivated from those events that entail friction or some form of conflict.
Ergo, the meaning of consciousness, or at least a meaningful part of consciousness, is to seemingly reverse the entropic function of reality by way of a contextualization process — by bringing order to the disordered world and by deriving meaning from it all.
But it doesn’t seem to end there. At least, not from our perspective.
Our consciousness, while equipping us with many things like pattern-recognition and creative intellect, also grants us the ability to understand and appreciate our unique position relative to all the chaos that we’re part and parcel of.
It allows us to process the processes in our own kind of way, and that’s something that should never be under-appreciated.
While such an appreciation is definitely not the most useful of dispositions (as it’s pretty hard to get any worthwhile neurochemical feedback from a humbled love of our own existence), it affords us the perspective to truly make sense of the bigger picture(s) at play — at least the kind of sense that can actually mean something to us.
We see, from such a vantage point, that conflicts are inevitable; that everything cycles and that our perceptions seem to take priority above all else. We see that friction builds meaning and that any control we seek will begin and end within the parameters of our own potential.
We see that life’s some kind of strange miracle, made exponentially more strange and more miraculous by our own conscious agency within it.
Our ability to live, to know, to want to know, to want, to be a conscious and creative part of this weird explosion through space and time — it’s a privilege that remains and always will remain, unparalleled.
And we see this as something of a golden rule inherent within every religious doctrine or folklorical tale: to surrender in awe to the greatness of whatever it is we’re part of, and that such a greatness must be felt, not only deduced; sensed, not only believed.
Such reverence culminates into a certain respect and awe for our existence, enabled and propagated via an expanded perspective of the cycles and patterns interwoven into all dimensions of our experience through space and time.
Think of every ‘answer’ that has ever been generated; relative to the bigger picture, it’s just another clue to a bigger question. We still know little about our planet, our minds, our cosmos, let alone the elemental fabric of our reality.
Ultimately, we’ll come to learn that the process doesn’t really need to contain any answers — it may just be all about the questions, and our ability to ask them.
