Art Reboot

63 manifest in philosophy and science in their perennial quest to reach ever more profound and essential levels of meaning. The first two states of consciousness are easy enough to conceptualise and separate. In the third state, consciousness reacquires long-lost harmony, but with the intellectual capacity to fully comprehend and delight in it. By transcending the limita- tions of the intellect while retaining its formidable powers, this third phase completes the bandwidth of consciousness. We have been flirting with this Age of Reacquired Harmony throughout recorded history; it just hasn’t yet acquired the critical weight to overcome the tenacity of egoic self-consciousness. If we exclude divine intention, since what is proposed here depends upon the transcendent source not being intellectual- ised at a human level, we can allow that the source had no means of recognising itself or its scope, no capacity for delight. And, without intention or creator, it is also self-evident that the evo- lution of consciousness has been a gradual and continual process. One way to think of the emergence of both our universe and our intellect is in terms of potential . Both always had the potential to exist. It took the existence of a universe seeded with the ingre- dients for intelligent life (and, of course, the non-trivial matter of a few billion years) for this potential to be realised, and for our capacity for recognition, delight, imagination and creativity to evolve. I prefer to see the evolution of consciousness not as a property merely of intelligent life, but as a continuum. The quark-gluon plasma that existed in the first micro-seconds of the universe immediately began to cool. As the universe became particulate, each particle carried with it a unit of information