“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
What does it mean? Has it got anything to do with consciousness?

I wonder if you’ve ever heard of Carl Sagan. The guy was the world’s first mainstream media super-scientist capable of breaking down complex ideas for common folks like you and me.

Well, he once said, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Now, you can have multiple meanings out of it. But let’s not get into that.

In our modern world, one seemingly universal notion is this: consciousness is one of the most important and perplexing areas of philosophy.

That’s it? Did you just try to bring it up as a mere part of philosophy and end the whole discussion right there? Wait up!

Consciousness is a very popular term today, and there’s no doubt about it. Many people, in many different ways, use it to mean many different things.

So, who’s right? I’ll tell you what — forget everything. Finding out what’s important isn’t important at all. What’s important is what is right, not who is right.

While there’s at least a hint of awareness in some people’s minds, a whole bunch of individuals in this world still don’t have any idea what the evolution of consciousness actually means — or even consciousness itself, for that matter.

Even the ones who somehow believe in the theory of evolution don’t actually believe in the possibility of the evolution of their own consciousness. That’s something very interesting to think about.

It’s becoming more and more obvious for those who live in a culture of secular materialism that while our technological capacities are developing at a faster rate, our ethical, philosophical, moral, and spiritual development seems to be progressing painfully slow.

We could even say that our species is facing an evolutionary crisis in relation to moral development. And I think part of the problem is — we just really don’t know how to think about the problems we have. There’s no clear context that can help us make sense of our human experience to think for the better.

How on earth did we arrive in a situation like this? We’ve evolved so much and we’re still stuck in our own heads? Where did we fall short?

When we think about evolution — meaning a development in time, through time, or over a period of time — we always tend to think it’s something happening outside of ourselves. We think evolution happens out there. Oh, you think it’s true, but hey — that’s not it. Is it really that difficult to accept the fact that evolution is happening in here — inside you?

Let’s take a reference from cosmological evolution. We know the universe was born around 14 billion years ago and has been evolving over time from light, energy, and matter to life, to consciousness, and to who knows what next.

With the beginning of the universe so long ago, a process of development was initiated that has continued, leading up to this moment. The cosmos itself is in constant development, from lower levels to higher levels — and we’ve always been part of that. That’s not hard to understand, hard to believe, hard to accept, or even hard to imagine. Is it?

Now if we take an example of human development, we can talk about the evolution of our own species in relation to the evolution of cultures. You see — everything is in a continuous process.

Not only have we evolved physically — but culturally, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and in ways we don’t even realize — over a long period of time.

We know that if we went back 2000 years, the cultural context we’d be living in would be very, very different. Yet, we tend to take these developments for granted, treating them as just an “idea” or a concept some scholar talks about. This whole idea of the development of human beings, or any species, is so true yet so new to most people.

The way most of us tend to think about our experience, often unconsciously, presumes a static universe, a static world, even a static human context.

We are not static. Nothing is static.

No matter how educated we are, we tend to neglect the fact that we’re in the hands of change.

We used to think we were always like this. Deep down inside, we still think we’re at the center of the universe. It’s time we ditched that idea and shifted our consciousness. The moment we accept change, we unlock the doors of evolution in a new way.

Look at our past — we’ve always been changing for good, never aware of the fact that we were changing. But now, it’s time to take this change to a conscious level.

This is not something we can imagine or conceive of with the mind. The mind can only be confused. It’s about time we transcended the limitations of our minds for good.

Let consciousness rise, not the mind.