Consciousness is often correlated with the ability to feel pain. This latter measure seems to be at the heart of typical scales of consciousness diagrams that plot all living beings from the least conscious (single cellular organisms? non-living things?) to the most conscious (humans).

I can’t find a good representative image but typically the boundaries that such a scale goes through are non-living vs living, single cellular vs multi cellular, trees vs animals, invertebrates vs vertebrates, non-mammals vs mammals, mammals vs humans, in order of increasing consciousness.

This ability to feel pain seems to assume a human centric view of expression of pain. The scale could as well be labelled ‘beings arranged in order of increasing similarities to humans’. Hence, vertebrates are assumed to be more conscious than invertebrates. Mammals more conscious than fish.

You can almost sense traces of human Egotism in how this scale is laid out.

According to Wikipedia, the word ‘consciousness’ came into being around 1500 — overlapping with the Renaissance. A critical aspect of the Renaissance was the emergence of humanism. Art moved away from depicting Gods to depicting humans. This coupled with a crazy pace of scientific and technological since then has contributed to the collective human Ego.

I was wondering how much this historical context of the resurgence of collective human Ego has fed into some innate assumptions we’ve made about Consciousness.

Which is a bit funny if you think of the Ego and Consciousness as foes.

Consciousness is closely associated with awareness. One could say that self-awareness is rooted in consciousness. Spiritual practices encourage tapping into self-awareness to observe Egotic reactions so as to overcome them over time to attain Enlightenment. In that sense, Consciousness and the Ego are foes.

I wonder then if Enlightenment is a hyped up term to describe something that’s stupidly simple once you achieve it. If you ask people around you whether Enlightenment is attainable, I’m willing to bet that the typical response you’d get is a strong no. But the way we, humans, evaluate possibility of accomplishing a task is flawed. We evaluate it by looking at a heuristic — number of people that we’ve heard of who have accomplished it. In the case of Enlightenment, that typically gives us a single digit number across the multiple billions of humans that have existed. So it seems improbable. It’s tricky to evaluate the existence of Enlightenment though — because it’s not a very visible trait. What if Enlightenment was actually all around us, and because adult humans are so far away from it, that it’s omnipresence remains blind to us?

Working on the Consciousness vs Ego idea, what if the scale of increasing Consciousness is also the scale of increasing Ego and the scale of decreasing Enlightenment. This fits in with some simple observations eg. dogs and babies are considered to be ‘more present’ than humans. Enlightenment is also synonymous with a state of Presentness. Perhaps lack of expression of pain is also a trait of an Enlightened state of being — because perhaps when you know and accept that the pain trigger is impermanent, why would you bother reacting to it?

In that sense, then non-living things are steeped in Enlightenment — forever present, never reacting. And humans are furthest away from it. So may be, Enlightenment isn’t a big deal and is actually surrounds us?

Presenting some draft ideas on this thought exercise, perhaps there exists a duality of Ego and Consciousness. They both arise together as they feed into each other and they both disappear together. So at birth, your Ego and Consciousness are both born and then they increase in size and then they diminish together at death. What we consider as non-living things don’t need Consciousness because they lack Ego. This idea seems to also resonate with my preliminary understanding of the concept of psychedelic Ego Death — which can lead to a state of being where the boundaries of one’s self disappear. There’s notions of fear associated with it in the little I’ve learnt about it because it can be accompanied with a complete lack of desire to act. If there is no you, what will you act for? The absence of action could be perceived by an observer as unconsciousness. Another hint that the Ego and Consciousness die together? Are they the same thing?

My readings on consciousness are very preliminary so I’d love any insights that you could provide or thoughts that this post evoked in you.