You will never understand what is going on as long as you believe there is AN understanding. You can never understand what is going on as long as you believe that it can be explained. The situation is delicate, intricate, self-supporting, hidden from itself; and yet it can be fully comprehended in a millisecond.
Man is the only form of life that displays a desire to understand what is going on, both around him, and in him. Concluded from his own best thought-based inquiries, he is the sole creature with consciousness of the type to make such inquiries possible.
Simple observation shows that all animals have a consciousness of their environment, but man alone is also conscious of himself as something separate. Simply put: Man is conscious of being alive, and man wants to understand what being conscious is. As is observably obvious, men do not walk around constantly pondering this matter. Almost no one ever gives it any specific thought, yet the reality of this innate desire to understand what it means to BE a creature who can understand, manifests itself continually in their everyday lives.
As far back as records record, there has appeared a person here and there who was driven to devote their life specifically to this inquiry into the nature of consciousness and the mind; a task, singularly challenging, in that the subject to be studied also provides the only means available to do the studying.
Calling this situation merely “challenging,” verges on insult-by-understatement. From an honest view, “impossible” would comparably be a more accurate description than “challenging,” except that it too ultimately fails, in that anything conscious mind can conceive of cannot be conclusively deemed as incapable of some sort of realization.
J.