A Science of Consciousness

INTRODUCTION When we begin a discussion about Consciousness, what it is, its relevance to us in our lives today and all the other facets of how we are influenced and made by our own Essence, we find we are drawn into a discussion about ourselves that quickly becomes more broad and larger than we may have ever before imagined. I am reminded of a concept of myself I had once held as a child where I had wondered how it had come to be that I found myself in this or any particular physical body. Of all the people in the world or for that matter all the animals and plants and elements present in our world, how could it have come to be that this awareness that I seemed to be identified with had found itself not only in any bodily form at all, but also in this one in particular. This was a question that I pondered upon and remembered for many years growing up and I believe has influenced me profoundly throughout my life since. To be sure it has been a major sub-conscious motivator in my personal spiritual quest to discover the answer to the fundamental question of “Who am I”, and clearly in retrospect for the yearning for a reunification with That ultimate Being that I must have even then known innately I was always a part of. This eternal quest for Yoga, Union with the Divine is such a deeply set condition within this Thing that we call Essence that there is simply no escaping it in any ultimate sense. It can be suppressed, put off and procrastinated, even denied and betrayed in the short term, but ultimately we are irresistibly returned to it, like a river that can meander about for thousands of miles but eventually must return to the ocean from which it originally came, as evaporation that formed into clouds that rained down upon the highlands that collected into streams and found its long slow trek back to the sea. So it has been and so it will be, for these are patterns of evolution that are reflected above and below from the metaphysical plains of Being through the natural physical worlds of nature and all the layers of spirit and mind and feeling in between. As we embark upon a new millennium, in which first our own Universe is being opened to us and then even the existence of other Universes as well, all the marvels of an entire Creation in which we Live and Breath and Have Our Being, we are to come to a series of great awakening in answer to that question of “Who we really are” and with them also to an unbounded knowing of what this Creation is and Its Creator as well. This new century is just the beginning of a quest that will take us through at least the next thousand years to a new level of Being that we might only guess at now and could not even begin to imagine. Let us begin to take our first steps; it is the right time for us to do so, and what better beginning than a renewal of the age old study of Consciousness itself the Essence of who and what we are revisited, refreshed and reawakened. Come with me upon a journey of Body, Soul and Spirit, Soma, Psyche, Pneuma, as St. Paul called us so long ago; this study of Spirit, Pneumatology, this study of Consciousness, as I call it for our scientific age, and let us see where it leads.