by Bianquita

Created on: November 13, 2008

The Human Mind. What is it and where does it come from? For the purpose of such exploration let me begin by conjuring up an image of our origins, since I believe that everything we are at the moment must have existed, in its potential, at the beginning.

Imagine the earth. A living globe, endlessly spinning around itself and the sun, covered with a layer of water upon which vast chunks of hardened volcanic sludge have been floating, after emerging from our planet's depth millions of years ago and forming the semi-stable land masses we call continents.

Thanks to modern technology, whereby we are able to explore our planet back in time, we now know of a distant past, when continents had not yet been formed, the earth's surface was entirely covered with water and where primordial life had not yet outgrown its liquid cradle. What kind of life are we talking about? Unicellular, mostly, with some relatively simple multicellular aggregations perhaps, but nothing fancy, at least not in comparison to what came next.

Simplistic as it may be, the image evoked by the previous paragraph facilitates an apprehension of the initial conditions that eventually brought terrestrial evolution forth, all the way to human.

I want to clarify that, for my purposes, it isn't necessary to qualify or take sides in the creationist debate at this time. Whether humans have evolved from green algae or were "gifted" to the planetary ecosystem by way of a somewhat conflicted divine intent is irrelevant to my aim for this dissertation. I don't see how anyone could deny, however, that humans are made of the same "stuff" as the rest of the planet and its other, non-human components, or elements, as they are called in chemistry, at least on the physical level.

Like Legos, assembled and disassembled by a toddler's creativity, these elementary atomic blocks in different combinations, are what we, and everything else, are made of. This is true, in spite of the fact that, beguiled as we are by commercially concocted "newageries", and I am certainly not exempt, we may be reluctant to assign animistic qualities to molecular structures.

But even as I steadfastedly hold on to plain and simple logic, I would have to admit one thing: if we are made of elements and we are aware that we have an unconscious mind, it follows that the two factors in this equation are not mutually exclusive or even antithetical.

Let me see if I can express myself more clearly: what I mean to say is that these elements, the flesh and blood

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