The Origin of Consciousness

Leonardo da Vinci dissected bodies of men and beasts with surgical precision, searching for consciousness’s physical location. He traced optic nerves into the brain, examined eyes, tongues, and intestines, following each thread like Theseus in the labyrinth, hoping to find at the center the minotaur of selfhood.

Anyone investigating consciousness encounters this paradox: something watches the watching. Leonardo found it, neuroscientists face it, meditators experience it. The observer—the soul, self, awareness—always retreats one layer deeper than investigation can reach.

Anyone attempting to understand consciousness through rational analysis encounters this barrier. Leonardo found it dissecting bodies, philosophers face it constructing theories, scientists confront it seeking neural correlates. Logic itself becomes the obstacle when investigating phenomena that transcends logical frameworks.

Nagarjuna, the Buddhist “madman of logic,” was a demolition expert of existence. Not a philosopher debating over tea, but a deconstructionist who took existence apart like a clock, gear by gear, until time itself lost meaning. He wielded paradox as a scalpel, slicing through reality with surgical precision.

Buddhist philosophers, particularly Nagarjuna, articulate dependent origination (pratityasamutpada) as reality’s fundamental structure. It challenges thinkers who assume neat cause-effect chains where cause precedes effect like ancestor to descendant.

Each person experiencing themselves as independent, bounded entity faces this revelation: what we think is “us”—body, thoughts, desires—represents constructed illusion. This applies to everyone who assumes their self is solid, permanent, and separate.

Nagarjuna and other wisdom teachers understood that seekers chasing certainty remain trapped in the game. Those who stop seeking, who no longer chase the rabbit of certainty, have already grasped the greatest paradox: the question itself is the answer, and the answer is not in any answer—it’s in the absence of one.

People who take salvia divinorum report becoming other people entirely—experiencing detailed lives complete with memories, bodies, and emotions of strangers. They shift through multiple identities: child in Mexico, old man in France, mother in India, sometimes even objects, with no memory of original identity.