Section 10: Guests Replacing the Hosts
There is a growing trend in modern magic shows towards smaller and more relatable performances that resemble everyday life. As audiences become more aware of the use of large stage props and machinery in magic, they are becoming more interested in the skillful and subtle sleight of hand techniques used by magicians, such as retrieving something out of thin air, glass penetration, and teleportation. The audience is attracted to what seems impossible in everyday life. "The impossible happening" is a consensus among all audience's life experiences. The universe is a shared living environment for humans. All matter must follow certain laws of behavior, and personal growth experiences make "possible" and "impossible" a part of our perception of the living environment.
From birth, humans interact with this environment, and sensory information such as hunger, the smell of breast milk, and others enter our consciousness. We establish self-awareness based on survival in a world of limited resources and competition for survival. We seek good luck and avoid bad luck and fear death because death represents the eternal disappearance of consciousness.
The author writes and the reader reads due to consciousness. Except for deep sleep, we cannot evade consciousness even in our dreams. Our connection with consciousness is deep, yet it remains the most challenging to comprehend, and it is often said that "consciousness cannot comprehend itself."
What is the essence of consciousness?
Does the complex neural network activity in the brain cause consciousness? Can it exist independently of matter?
Is consciousness the origin of everything? What is its place in the universe?
The nature of consciousness is a question that we don't have an answer to in today's materialistic scientific field. We don't understand why "everything follows the laws of physics," and we don't understand what "consciousness" is. However, one thing remains certain - consciousness arises from life experiences, which are derived from interactions with the environment. Each person's five senses, including "sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch," generate sensations such as "color, sound, smell, taste, and touch," respectively, which form unique experiences in the brain and create consciousness.
Unlike birds, fish swimming leisurely in water can never experience the sensation of soaring into the sky.
If someone were to ask me which ancient civilization, I admire the most, without hesitation, I would recommend the Buddhist scriptures, which proclaim, "Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form" and "All phenomena are illusory."
More than 1,500 years ago, which great monk or scholar could have realized the essence of the universe beyond what can be understood through life experience?
Only recently, cosmologists established the "Zero Energy Universe Model": the total energy of the universe is constant, with a value of zero; the positive energy of matter is perfectly balanced by the negative energy of the gravitational field, and all matter in the universe was created out of nothing.
Hence, all matter in the universe is created through physical laws such as "mass-energy conversion" and "potential energy," which can be considered massive magic. These laws were established by the consciousness of the Creator.
"Consciousness" is the source of the universe, originating from God, and cannot be fully comprehended through scientific analysis of the material world alone.
God's consciousness is non-living. The reason why God created the material universe was to provide a living stage for all creatures, endowing them with consciousness, and allowing it to evolve. Our consciousness, which comes from the soul given by the Creator, enables us to weave stories made up of seven emotions and six desires. It is through this process that we can appreciate great works of art such as Beethoven's symphonies and Picasso's abstract paintings.
Our consciousness is eternal, as it reflects our immortal soul. Even after our physical body dies, our consciousness will continue to function. When our soul leaves the body, it returns to its homeland, and each reincarnation serves as a learning process.
But how can fish in water see beyond the surface? Living in the material world, self- consciousness faces the joys, anger, sorrows, and hardships of life, with the fear of death and the misconception that life is everything. We treat guests as hosts, thinking that the journey is home.
Although humans have established countless religions and exhausted their imaginations in attempts to break out of the material world and find the meaning of life, it is like a blind person touching an elephant, trying to view the whole universe through a narrow perspective. Where can we find the answers?
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