The Essence of Consciousness
It is the experience of discontent that gives rise to the creative impulse, to the thirst for making something new that will improve or perfect life. The human being is a protest, a creature in rebellion against the world it finds itself in: everything can be questioned; everything bears the possibility for change. One of humanity’s most significant responses to the creative impulse is the technology with which it is transforming the earth, and the historical record bears witness to its record of overcoming all natural barriers, breaking the boundaries of time and space and distance. Thus, humanity is now creating a second world out of the materials of the first: erecting great cities, and connecting them through a vast array of computers, electronic devices, and earth-orbiting satellites; bringing into being a planetary city, an earthopolis.
No creation speaks more tellingly of the possibilities spawned by consciousness than the great rockets that hurdle forth from the face of the earth into outer space. We have sent spacecraft out of the solar system to report its discoveries, and with plans to colonize Mars, are signaling our desire to humanize and thus transform the entire universe. Because the mind brings forth a limitless number of possibilities, it is humanity’s destiny to keep moving onward, forward into the future, to be an explorer whose identity is always evolving, always incomplete.