Consciousness: Our Divine Patrimony

Ernest Becker, in his groundbreaking 1973 book The Denial of Death, famously says that “man is a god that shits.”

Becker’s way of expressing this might be off-putting to some, but I think he really hits a home run here. We are not apes and we are not angels, but there is some kind of bridge between the two that we exist on. That bridge is consciousness and the emergence of consciousness, introduced in the Adam and Eve story, is the pivotal issue which requires attention over the course of the entire biblical library.

In our last post we spoke about how consciousness is something that matters in a cosmic universal way. In the

story of Adam and Eve we see that consciousness is not something like passive observation. Consciousness is active. It is a forward-leaning engagement with potential as such. That modern quantum mechanics bears out that the world is something like undifferentiated potential until it is organized by conscious mirrors the Genesis accounts.

During the creation God sets a pattern for correct action in the world and that pattern has a lot to do with being conscious. As God speaks “let there be light” the Word generates reality by differentiating chaos into structured categories (e.q., separating light from darkness, waters above from waters below, etc.). Human beings will mirror this with their consciousness, dreaming up the world, formulating and modifying existence through truthful articulation.

Without consciousness, the world dissipates into undifferentiated chaos. Undifferentiated chaos is the tohu va bohu which God speaks order into at the beginning of time. The dragon of chaos, tehom, Tiamat, is always lurking and it is consciousness (paying attention, the eye of Horus, Marduk’s many eyes) which keeps it at bay. From the earliest stories in the near east we see the constant repetition that it is attention and articulation that create the habitable world. With the act of creation, the differentiating the undifferentiated, the structuring the orderless chaos, there is a declaration by God that it is good which underscores consciousness’s affirmative, value-creating role in the universe.

Humans have inherited this divine process. It is our attention and speech that allow us to negotiate order in the world from the unknown as such and this is all imbedded right in the first parts of Genesis. God’s creation of the world for us comes with it the responsibility to avoid the ordered world going back into the pre-cosmogonic chaos which underpins the structured order we inhabit.