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Once Mysterious...

From the subjective side, consciousness presents no mystery.  Consciousness is found to exist not just among its other objects but even as the a priori possibility of finding such objects.  Consciousness is a given whose structure and elements present themselves to consciousness.  Consciousness knows itself and, for itself, is objective.

The mystery of consciousness is only discovered from the objective side.  Through an eternity (which means through the progress of a world order) there was only motion and mobile, a universe of pure and unreflective impulse. Then, one day, as if a spark were struck, awareness flamed into existence.

Was this extra existence, which is admittedly so different from matter (as different as we believe life to be from death) a possibility of that same matter all along?  This mystery is felt in the question, "Where did it come from?"  The thought that it could arise through some coincidence, a brute coordination in the nature of things, a switch that flips when shapes are coordinated properly, beggars the imagination.  The whole thing seems too fortuitous to have occurred by chance, and so we reach out for a cause: why was consciousness, which otherwise might never have existed, tied to just this, and not anything else?  And if it didn't exist originally, why need it ever have existed at all?

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