I have been reading about consciousness lately. I was not aware of how difficult it is to define what consciousness is and how the way we view it depends on our definition. I have listened a couple of times to Annaka Harris’ audio documentary about the possibility of consciousness being fundamental, a sort of field where other things would appear, like matter. At the beginning I considered it an outlandish idea. I always thought that matter existed first, in space, and that carbon atoms formed complex forms that eventually precipitated life. Millions of years later, the nervous system and the brain evolved, and they eventually gave rise to consciousness. Consciousness would be a property of the brain. If instead it were fundamental, everything would be upside down, or wouldn’t it?
At about the same time, I listened to an interview with Rupert Spira, in which he made a similar claim: why would we think that matter came first and consciousness came second? The only first-hand knowledge we can have is our experience, which appears in consciousness. Everything else is conceptualisation. Why would we think that matter came first when in our own direct experience consciousness is there before we experience what we would later call matter (as a concept)? He had a point… In one of Spira’s book, I found this quote by Max Planck:
Max Planck, who coined the term ‘quantum’, insisted that ’Mind is the matrix of matter’. He elaborated on the point, speaking to a London reporter in 1931: ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.’
Ruppert Spira, The Nature of Consciousness
Annaka Harris’ documentary does not offer any specific answer to this issue, but it poses very interesting questions, accompanied by interviews that support or deny this view of consciousness as fundamental. In one of them, Annaka Harris interviews Carlo Rovelli and he explains how space was thought to be fundamental (as in space existed first and things appeared in space later), but now physicists know that space is not a fundamental property of the universe (as in being there first). Instead, space appears when particles (quantum fields) meet, as a result of the interaction between them. Particles are not in space, they are space. It is a “world of events, not things”, according to Rovelli. I wondered if something similar could be said about consciousness or awareness.
Where are these spatial quanta? Nowhere. They are not in a space, because space is themselves. Space is created by the interaction of individual gravitational quanta. Once again, the world appears to be about relationships rather than objects.
Carlo Rovelli, Seven brief lessons on physics (my own translation, sorry)
My mind brought me back to these ideas as I was reading Jung’s Answer to Job, one of Jung’s most personal works which in addition to radical proposals has a witty sense of humour not present in other works of his. The book offers a psychological (not metaphysical) interpretation of the development of God’s personality in the Bible. It is built around the idea that God is largely unconscious until His encounter with Job, whose superior moral clarity ultimately forces God to reflect upon Himself. And it proposes a radically different perspective that I had never considered before: that God needed man to become conscious, to be able to reflect upon Himself. Yes, Incarnation was beneficial to men too, of course, but Jung argues that it was mostly God’s necessity. He needed to become a man in order to become aware of Himself. Human consciousness would be the mirror in which God could look at himself and become conscious.
These same thoughts were echoed in Jung’s interviews with Aniela Jaffé for his memoirs:
The human being is the organ of reception, the perceiver. If the Tao is in nature or not, we don’t know. But it is the individual who makes the Tao, who makes God – existing and present in our existence – conscious. That is why God alone is not enough. We human beings are also necessary, an individual is needed for the experience of wholeness.
Aniela Jaffé, Reflections on the life and dreams of C. G. Jung
Incarnation of God in a human being represents a key moment. Symbolically, Jesus Christ represents the centre: he died on a cross, he resuscitated and is therefore between life and death, he also lies at the centre between man and God, etc. Incarnation is the end of duality between human and God, between creator and created. The human being is the interface that allows God to become conscious. The human being helps God become concrete, related. Christ is God as becoming.
Jung also argues that the act of incarnation was not a one-off event, that through the Holy Spirit it reached all human beings. It is a continuous concretisation of God in the human being. A continuous becoming. A process. A verb, not a noun. Happening now too, not only in the distant past.
My mind circled back to what I had read and heard about consciousness and space. What if somehow consciousness were indeed fundamental and concretised itself in humans? What if consciousness needed human beings to become aware of itself.
If we follow Rovelli’s lead, space isn’t a pre-existing container; it is a ‘happening’, a becoming that emerges only when two entities interact. This offers an interesting framework for Jung’s theory: God only becomes aware of Himself in his interaction or merging (or collision) with man.
If consciousness is fundamental, it exists as a field of pure potential, limitless. It is ‘everything’ and therefore, effectively, ‘no-thing.’ It just is. For this vast background silence to gain definition, to become aware of itself, it requires a collision. It needs the human experience to act as a local point of impact. Just as space comes into existence when particles meet, awareness comes into existence when the infinite field of consciousness meets the finite boundary of man.
If we are the interface where consciousness meets a finite point, we aren’t just inhabiting a pre-existing space. Instead, like Rovelli’s particles, our interaction is the event that enables awareness. We are the local coordinates where the infinite background finally gains the perspective to reflect upon itself. Consciousness becomes aware through its encounter with the human limit.
I have the feeling, though, that neither Jung nor Spira nor Rovelli nor Harris would agree with any of what I wrote here. I would have to admit myself that while the parallelism is attractive, it lacks sufficient substance. Maybe consciousness is already aware of itself and man is a limitation, a constraint, maybe the interface is just an illusion, or maybe consciousness doesn’t need to be aware of itself. Nevertheless, I will leave it here as food for thought for a Sunday afternoon. Thank you for bearing with my non-sense.
The Introverted Tree 