What raises us above other known sentient beings is our ability to be conscious of our own consciousness. Awareness is, therefore, only a part of consciousness. The first concept associated with consciousness is 'awareness'. We are conscious when we are aware. This is not quite true. We may be aware, without really being conscious of being aware. Other known aspects of consciousness are free will, reasoning, visual imagery, recalling and making choices.

Human consciousness is a cerebral ability with inputs from the approximately 50,000 million cells that constitute an adult body. There is a growing understanding of the intelligence in individual cells in living matter. The human body is incredibly complex and each of its cells is in constant communication not only with cells that perform similar functions but also with every other cell in the body. Our consciousness probably results from assimilating all this data and arriving at choices or solutions. Our present state of consciousness may be likened to the tip of the iceberg of potential human awareness, of itself and of the universe.

To know consciousness, we have to enter the areas of the brain that contain memory, information and emotion. Human memories go back, to the primal soup and perhaps beyond, to the void before material creation. All knowledge from the beginning of time, is available to each of us, an intelligence that is carried at the cellular, subatomic level. Highly evolved individuals, who have touched the eternal and communed with the Infinite through their higher consciousness, made that quantum leap but have been unable to transfer their understanding due to limitations imposed by language. Because language is incomplete and fragmentary. Nevertheless all of us do have flashes of insight beyond meanings.

"Man's mind mirrors a universe that mirrors man's mind." Our brain is domineering when it comes to coping with Reality. To recognize that what we call Reality is only what we have agreed to call reality, is to recognize that we can perceive only what we can conceive.

The framework of consciousness is thought. It is random selection and its weaving with it is are memories and emotions. Human consciousness, unlike awareness, includes a series of choices. This is the method of trial, error, and accidental success. Artificial intelligence calls it 'generate and test'. Applied to our thought process, the chance creation concept goes back to ancient eras.

Our thoughts begin at random, our mind taking the first opening before it. Perceiving a false route, it retraces its steps, taking another direction. By a kind of artificial selection we perfect our thought substantially, making it logical as we go along. With enough experience, the brain comes to contain a model of the world. In an average day, we are conscious of several million things. Further, the conscious mind at a higher level is able to free itself from order and predictability to explore every possibility with its rich variety of choices and opportunities. This leads us to levels of consciousness.

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