Merry Christmas, all the world!

Rejoice that we are now living AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD as allegedly predicted by the Mayans! We have survived yet another end of the world!

Now we can celebrate not ends, but beginnings. Of course every beginning has an end just before it. Consider your own birth: it was the end of being nothing and the beginning of being something...as far as you KNOW, that is, because you can't trust your hard drive to search for signs of existence before your own birth.

You can't trace the beginning of consciousness, because consciousness doesn't necessarily have a memory attached. I believe some people whose memories are wiped out by Alzheimer's are powerfully conscious.

When your television goes wrong, you'll perhaps see meaningless shapes on the screen or nothing at all, and a visiting alien might suspect that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the BBC is dead and gone. But it isn't. It's in the air, alive and kicking, right in front of our and the alien's noses. It's simply that he doesn't have a working apparatus to perceive it.

Consciousness is unique. There is nothing in the entire universe that can be known to exist without it.
You can't stretch out and touch consciousness with your hand, but you can only know your hand with your consciousness. As I have said many times, I am not at all convinced that everyone is conscious, that is, that they know the difference between I am and I am not. A computer can work out many things, but it is very doubtful that it knows it is working them out.

So when you consider the Nativity, think of the jump from is not to is and from not here to here. Why do you think a baby is fascinated by the 'joke' of peekaboo? Now you can't see me, now you can. Now I can't see you, now I can. Now I am not, now I am. Is it surprising that a baby finds this funny and amazing? It is the riddle of incarnation, the incarnation of consciousness.