I’ve been deliberately examining consciousness in one form or another since 1973. Before that, it seems that I was doing it but not with any overall self awareness of that fact. So, attempting to put the mammoth amount of thoughts on consciousness that have run through my head over all these years into written form is not possible.
What came to me recently was that it is possible that sharing is important to the structure of consciousness itself and that if the context from which I was speaking was not understood, that which I had to add to the evolving structure would be of little use. It then occurred to me that it was possible that all of the traits and patterns that I’d seen over the years could very well be pieces of a whole. So I decided to just start sorting and writing to see what happened.
Here I’ll insert a bit about my parents, since I swam in the cultural pond of their wonderful selves and thus reflect much of how they themselves looked at the world. At least that’s the original waters that I emerged into here in this place
My father taught Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew; specializing in Arabic and Syriac theology and philosophy at the Catholic University of America for his entire career. The majority of his students were nuns and priests, as were quite a few of his colleagues. As a result many theologians and philosophers, along with economists, sociologists and other varied professorial types, often inhabited our living room engaging in conversations both profound and mundane. My mother had a college degree, which was unusual for a woman born in 1922. And though she was a stay-at-home mom until after I’d moved out, she’d occasionally participate in those same conversations when they occurred at the dinner table, where these folks were often fed.
Though I frequently did not understand much of what was said, I loved the feel of what was going on in that room and at a very young age I would sit on the adjacent stairs, out of sight, and just absorb the feel of that space. I think that the resonance that I felt there was indicative of my inclination for reaching towards the fountainhead of that energy.