Look around. The world surrounding us is made of physical stuff. It’s everywhere. Everything, including our bodies and brains, is made of this substance. We call it matter.
Physical matter can be solid, or liquid, or whatever. But according to science’s “first law of motion,” material objects like rocks tend to sit there until another force pushes or pulls on them: “A body at rest remains at rest until an outside force acts on it.” The world around us is made of such inanimate stuff.
But there’s something else, something dramatically different. It doesn’t weigh anything, have any color or shape, or take up space like physical matter. You can’t see, hear, feel, taste or smell it. In fact, you can’t even directly think about it because it’s always the thing doing the thinking. It is your own individual conscious awareness.
This consciousness is totally unlike physical matter in every possible way. But the most important difference is that consciousness has experiences, a sense of individual selfhood complete with multi-dimensional surround-sound, a panoramic visual field, myriad emotions, and limitless experiential potential.
Consider this thing called consciousness. NOTHING is more important. If your consciousness vanishes, you vanish. Lights out. End of discussion … all discussion. Period.
And if that’s not enough, there’s another amazing thing about consciousness—we can’t explain it, even after thousands of years of trying. No researchers have any working idea of what produces it, where it comes from, how it got here, how it works, or what it’s made of.
Although conscious selfhood is the most important thing to us, the very essence of what we are, it’s the thing we know least about. Something is wrong with this picture!