NAVYTOWN
Such details are not my focus. Question is His existence and His style of funcitioning!
Consciousness (or God) can never be studied by a reductionist approach. The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws, does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. Consciousness is more an emergent phenomenon wherein, the whole is not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts.
Cognition presupposes duality, that is, a subject becoming conscious of an object or its own self. Self-awareness, we would presume, mandates a form, a discrete entity. However, consciousness as a state of awareness, an am-ness can exist in the absence of any form, or attribute.
There is no visible difference between two men sitting at a table and having a coffee if one is Self-aware and the other is not. So yes, why would we want to know ourselves? Because we must, because there is no God beyond awareness of God, and no man beyond awareness of man, regardless of choice of belief, if we do not make the effort to add awareness to belief, no one else will and no one else can. No one else can live for us, die for us or awaken for us, and awakening the most essential outcome of Self-awareness is not seen. It sees, and this clarifies the problem. Why, in a material world, should we give value, to invisible goods?
From the ancient Egyptian: "Man, know thyself", to the oft quoted Delphic maxim: "Know thyself", we have been advised for millennia to strive for Self-knowledge and Selfawareness because in the absence of these augmentations, it matters not who we are because we are not. Nor does it matter what will happen after death because we have not lived. And it matters not whether God is or is Self-aware or not or aware of us personally, because there is not enough enlightenment in us to know the difference. Enlightenment, awakening, mindfulness higher states all imply that identity beyond the physical world exists without mass, that such identity has no name, no home, no possessions and no need of life as we know it. For this reason awareness has value and is not given value.
Yes, we do believe in God, through multiple faiths for thousands of years. But for most of us belief is physical and i-centred. We are ego-driven and our opinions fixed in our ego like stones in cement. We are more unaware than aware, less like God and more like man. But we can change!
