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Originally posted by Trancer-X Much to someone's chagrin, that's where I was trying to chime in. I don't personally subscribe to the scientific oversimplification that is venomX's definition of consciousness. I think that there has to be a lot more to it than it's simply being a construct of our neurological mechanism.

I think it's kind of obvious that there's more to consciousness than neurological mechanism.

There are entire layers of ethereal abstract reality going on around us all the time, mostly ignored for various reasons. The collective is one example: look how economies become their own organism, or nations... like cells in a body binding together, unknowing perhaps of purpose, but solid in the structure of the overall motion of the larger organism itself.

It's really nuts to think about, because it's happening in millions of different ways in every moment, crossing and recombining in new ways.

And somewhere therein, consciousness naturally seems to arise.

I can't help but wonder what technology we are... or the planets... or any of the billions of suns...

While still being somewhat on-topic, I transcribed this little tidbit from one of Manly P. Hall's lectures, entitled 'Jacob’s Ladder That Leads To The Stars'

The full audio lecture can be found here

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We have numerous pictures of our solar system (...) We get no assurance or insight into what lies beyond. The ancients had one up on us. They recognized that there was something that we didn't see, that we couldn't see under normal conditions and that the visible universe is only a manifestation or a tail-end appendage of something infinitely greater. Now this infinitely greater has up to now defied scientific investigation although every once in a while somebody lifts a corner of the mystery, takes a quick look and drops the corner again. We do not know exactly what is out there but it is becoming more evident that there is something beyond what we can see. If there is something that we can't see then we are not in the condition to come to final estimations of the world in which we live. If we cannot see beyond the physical and THERE IS SOMETHING beyond the physical, it becomes more or less probable that whatever that is that we don't see is the cause of that which we do see. This is an irritating thought but still you can't completely disregard it. So we come to the idea that the ancients had and we had ourselves down to the time of Copernicus and Galileo that the physical universe was only a small part of creation. That the rest of is was just as real but not within the range of our sensory perceptions under normal conditions. Occasionally someone with an extra sense brought back information with great interest but it wasn't possible to settle it down into science.