Mosquito and Consciousness

When you are deep into some work, then the mosquitoes start to rub your skin. The rubbing alerts you and you sway a bat. Mosquitoes are creatures which never connect these two actions. On the range of the moment they begin to interact with their immediate situations. When they find a lazy leg they start playing. But it is inviting their own death sweep is a matter they never connect. May be they learn some alternatives like which way to take flight to escape getting caught, but all such things are based on immediate situations. Whereas some other beings which are more endowed react in different ways and evince different levels, which sometimes are simulative enough for us to read as conscious activities. 

Consciousness is in the essence connecting different points in our time, in our actions, in our surroundings. A big and intricate memory is involved, pattern recognition always being bettered continuously. Deduction, speculation and induction are various items in our toolkit. So we read and so the meaning occurs to us as human beings. In most instances of persons this remains a high possibility and never realised to any justifiable level. Connecting things, connecting means and ends, connecting the immediate and the distanced, connecting today and tomorrow, pattern recognizing with the past, all these constitute what it is being a conscious entity as human beings. Are the various levels we see in other beings just approximations to the level of consciousness which we evince in our living or whether our own level just a more complicated and nuanced and sophisticated version of the same kind basically with other beings is a question. Consciousness is entity in itself. It cannot be explained by nature as objectively read by us. This is one view. Consciousness is only an emergent phenomenon in the ongoing complexity of the structure of beings. What looks mechanical or instinct or mere impulse-response in early evolved beings begins to assume meaning as autonomous consciousness in the level of human beings. This is one view. Whatever may be the benefits of understanding in each view, 'to whom it is meaningful' or 'who reads ultimately the report sheets' is something hard to crack. Only very few scientists even like to face this hard problem and say that they are facing it. Mostly the problem is shirked off by saying 'don't ask questions which should not be asked'. After all tactics of ignorance come handy in trying to escape knowing what is real. 

But on the other hand however much we like to stress that we are unique beings of consciousness, if we patiently check how we interpret the very phenomenon of our being conscious or our fact of knowing, we face another issue. What is our understanding of our being conscious? When we try to explain this to our own selves, we find that we are arriving at the picture of our being conscious only recursively, sharing with all the features of foregone beings in evolution and we begin to doubt whether we can ever attain a unique and autonomous explanation for this question. But right from our Rishis upto Sri Ramana Maharishi, they say that there is a non-dependent core of autonomous consciousness. And Sri Ramana Maharishi will say with a pinch of humour, 'you cannot realise that. Because it is always there. Only you have to stop realising unnecessary things heaping over and above.' 

Whether the slipping mosquito ever understands these things or whether the chasing human being will ever become a total being of pure autonomous consciousness, the swaying bat has no such problems. As long as the charge is there, as long as it connects with the flying, so long it cracks its cruel jokes, of course much to the relief of the owner.
Srirangam Mohanarangan
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