Consciousness and the Birth of the Thinker

Life is intelligent before the thinker appears.

This should astonish us. Because eventually this living organism will open its eyes upon a world. Someone will give it a name. Sounds will begin acquiring meaning. Faces will become mother, father, stranger. Objects will become chair, bottle, tree, moon. Sensations will become hunger, warmth, fear, comfort.

And somewhere in this extraordinary developmental movement, a someone begins appearing. Me. The biological life was already there. The consciousness was already receiving. But the person had not yet been constructed.

There was no political identity. No religion. No profession. No nationality understood as identity. No theory of reality. No scientific worldview. No résumé. No status. No carefully defended opinion about God. No story about whether life was successful. No image to protect. And yet almost everything from which that later person will be constructed is waiting to be learned.

We arrive alive before we arrive as somebody. That distinction may be one of the most important doors into human consciousness.

How the World Enters the Child

The developing human being begins receiving distinctions. A sound is repeated. Mother. Another sound. Water. Dog. Sky. Mine. No. Words begin dividing an undifferentiated field of experience into recognizable things.

The word is not the thing itself. But once the word enters the mind, an extraordinary structure begins forming around it. Tree gathers image, texture, memory, feeling, experience, association. Mother gathers an entire emotional universe. Home gathers safety or fear, belonging or instability, smell, room, family, memory. God may gather tenderness, authority, mystery, religion, fear, Love, rejection, or nothing at all depending upon what entered the child’s world.

Words become more than labels. They become coordinates in consciousness. The child is building a story and the illusion of life based on what it can muster up, placing idenity wth the word. It becomes our library of life. 

Every new experience enters somewhere within the developing architecture of knowing and not knowing. And eventually the library becomes so elaborate that the person forgets there was ever consciousness before the library. The map becomes reality.

The Birth of the Thinker

Thinking emerges within this architecture. A thought does not arrive naked. It carries language. Memory. Association. Emotion. Sensory history. Expectation. Meaning.

A single word can activate years of experience. Say father to ten people and the dictionary definition may be similar while ten completely different interior worlds appear. That tells us something profound.

We do not merely think words. We think through the accumulated energy and meaning attached to them.

Thought is transitory and composite. It appears. It moves. It changes. Another thought replaces it. Another meaning for a word is derived.  A thought believed completely at fifteen may seem absurd at forty. A worldview can collapse in an afternoon.

A person can abandon a religion, discover one, change political beliefs, leave a profession, rethink a childhood, forgive a parent, or discover that an identity defended for decades was never as permanent as it seemed.

Thought changes because thought belongs to the idea of the human story. But consciousness is the field in which we become aware that thought changed.

The thinker is not necessarily the deepest thing that is alive. Thought is matter’s level, and Consciousness is the Soul’s light. Thinking emerges out of consciousness. 

The thinker is what we develop for navigating this level of consciousness.

The Costume Called Self

Eventually, the developing human being has enough accumulated material to construct a remarkably convincing center. I am Mary. I am this body. This is my family. These are my beliefs. This happened to me. These are the things I like. This is what I am good at. These people approve of me. These people hurt me. This is what I want. This is who I am.

The costume has appeared. It exists at matter’s level. The mistake comes when consciousness assumes the costume is the totality of what is wearing it.

The face becomes self. Biography becomes self. Thought becomes self. And society becomes the reality in which this self must succeed. The little person is born. Not at biological birth.

The little person is born through identification. The organism arrived first. Consciousness was already present to experience. Then language, relationship, culture, memory, education, fear, desire, comparison, and social reflection gradually assembled the character. Eventually the character begins narrating everything. And because we hear the narrator constantly, we assume the narrator is who we are. We are not our thoughts; they are created light.

The human mind lives in incessant thinking, jumping from one thought to the next, mostly dreaming about the past and future. We don’t know being present because the mind is a storyteller, always talking about something or someone. 

Education Enters the Library

As the narrator walks, something particularly consequential happens. The child enters human education. We should recognize what education actually is.

It is not knowledge descending from an omniscient level of reality. It is humanity transmitting what humanity has presently learned to call knowledge. This distinction matters.

It places education honestly within consciousness. Mathematics gives extraordinary consistency to relationships humanity can describe. We go back to Sumerian days in Mesopotamia and find many mathematical ideas originated then. 

Science develops disciplined methods for observing patterns, testing explanations, and correcting error. It’s only observing what it can muster up as life. We only experience what we think is here, but there is more here beyond what we can think. 

Celestial History transmits records and interpretations of what human beings believe happened. Language gives consciousness increasingly sophisticated ways to communicate. Medicine learns the body. Engineering learns structures. These are extraordinary achievements through a pool of consciousness, Conscious Energy, Celestial Light, and the heavenly side of living.  Every one of them exists inside a larger condition: the knower remains mysterious.

The student learning biology is biological life that did not consciously construct itself. The student learning neuroscience is consciousness studying the organ through which human cognition appears. The scientist studying matter is made of matter whose ultimate existence remains an open philosophical and physical question.

Human knowledge becomes extraordinarily sophisticated while the fundamental mystery of being alive remains underneath the entire enterprise. Education therefore does not give us knowledge itself. It gives us a temporal structured inheritance of what human consciousness has been able to make intelligible at this level of thinking. 

That is much more interesting.

The Human Knowledge Loop

Every scientist was once the infant without words. Every professor. Every philosopher. Every theologian. Every Nobel laureate. Before any of them became an authority, they entered the same human process.

They learned language. They learned categories. They learned what their civilization considered real. They learned mathematics from someone who had learned mathematics.