The Mystery of Consciousness

When I was travelling in Australia in the year 1999 I bought this book in a bookshop close to the Coogee Beach Hotel, Sydney where I stayed a few months to visit my second ex-wife, former Misses L. Hontscharenko. (Tough forcefully divorced I am still proud she took my surname as her own, when she was working back in the 80’s as an archivist for the Ashfield Council on the bicentennial history). I have tried to read the book lying on the beach of Coogee, but the level of concentration was bad, I was in the middle of my lazy days, enjoying the time of just doing nothing, a little daydreaming, nothing much more to do than just enjoying being there, in my beloved Sydney, feeling good with the thick shimmering haze of heat that hangs heavy in the air of Australian summers, that merciless heat forced my body into more horizontal than vertical positions. Just lovely wasting time on the other side of the world, far away from where I was born, in one of the many cold corners of Northern Europe.

Later during my trip I moved to the Nan Tien Temple, in Wollongong, the biggest Buddhist Temple in the Souther hemisphere. There in my silent, serene, dedicated room of the Pelgrim Lodge I could read the book without any distraction, diving deep in the matters of how the human brain controles consciousness, but at the same time has no controle over all the subconscious stuff that is happening as an essential influence of psychological and social  behaviour. This fascinating pure rational study of the American philosopher Searle was a stark contrast with the teachings of Buddhist philosophy. I tried bridging two cultures.

Where does consciousness exactly reside in the brain, all our bundles of memories together with all the accumulated knowledge, important and useless, gathered over a lifetime? Does it has a fixed form and is there a kind of architectural structure? Do neurobiological processes in the brain actually cause consciousness? Though questions that were put forward by the philosophers in 1999 and it still is as we speak in 2026 very doubtful if we will ever know if consciousness, to put it in simple words, is located somewhere in the skull, if it does have its own little spot inside the brain much and much smaller than a microscopic chip. Over 100 billion neurons fill the brain each connected with other neurons, ranging from a few hundred to many tens of thousands. Its a huge indefinable network, hard to research.