…CONSCIOUS…
Stage 75 / Friday 10 July / from Cacabelos to Vega del Valcarce / 28 km
The swifts are circling in the sky and it vibrates with their high frequency whistling. These are magnificent birds to observe. They gobble gnats while flying at high speed, slaloming at the last minute to catch them. Apparently they are capable of sleeping in flight during their long migrations between the temperate zones of Europe and those of southern Africa. I myself must lay my body on a bed in order to restore order in my body and my little brain. Last night, I did that at the municipal hostel of Cacabelos, a strange name that makes French pilgrims snicker [because, in French language, cacabelos sounds like "beautiful shit”, please, excuse my dirty language!].
Sleep is naturally imposed on all animal creatures, and to a certain degree on vegetal life in the winter. It confirms the state of periodic tension to which every living creature is subject. It seems that awakening, the search for combustibles necessary for the metabolism of the organism, the pursuit of activities linked to survival and reproduction, rapidly abuse and fatigue the spirit.
The masses of information in transit by the neurons in the matter-spirit tandem of the brain abuse its absorption capacity. Periodically the latter needs a lethargic state to filter and reorganize all the information and thoughts that have accumulated there. The organism becomes unconscious and only regains consciousness after sleeping! Therefore consciousness is not easily localizable, since the whole body participates in its regular restoration, in sleep that must be regular in order to be efficient. This said, if my consciousness is spread through my whole body, I have the feeling that my little brain is more conscious than my Achilles heel. Although a painful tendonitis might well overturn these degrees of perception in the localization of my consciousness!
And if one prevents sleep, torturers know it well, one considerably weakens the ability of the individual to be coherent, even to survive: weakened, he will be less capable of willpower. His whole body will fairly quickly enter a state of notable and eventually fatal decay. He will become easily manipulated and exploited. He will turn vulnerable to the point of abandoning his last hope of survival and desiring death in preference to the lack of sleep!.
There are differences, therefore, in the levels of consciousness of an individual based on his ability to rest. There are also differences among individuals. One knows the assertive influence that adults can take over children, for example, in exchanges of information necessary to the survival of those less adapted. This is observed just as much in the animal kingdom within the same species. And one can no doubt categorize the levels of consciousness more or less strong from one living species to another. The swift seems to have more consciousness than its food, the gnat, with which it nourishes itself, the lizard more than the ant, the ant more than the plane tree.
These degrees of greater or lesser consciousness extend to the plant kingdom: carnivorous plants that know how to close around an insect are no doubt more conscious than a sunflower that knows how to pivot to better turn its corolla to the sun. I don’t know if anyone has tried to make a classification of the levels of consciousness among all living things, but one thing seems sure: I have more consciousness than any of those stones deposited in front of the Cruz de Ferro (Iron Cross) the day before yesterday.
The sharper consciousness of species called “superior” permits then the exchanges of information among individuals, mutual influences. The human is distinguished by his aptitude to be conscious of being conscious: a sort of squared consciousness! Consciousness is a bit like the DNA of the spirit: activated by the living being who is its object, it retroacts in the perspective of a continual flowering. It pushes the neurons to deploy in such a way as to render the activity of thinking more and more adapted and performing.
Thought becomes more and more efficient, to the point of accessing the consciousness of being conscious, all that at the cost of spending energy that scientists consider not insignificant. A little glimmer at the heart of the matter-spirit immensity of the universe, consciousness which is manifested in my little brain is no more than a locally excited state of the total field of information. Would that mean that in this little singular point, the universe thinks in me? It would give me a wee little bit of its latent energy for such purpose!
