During my research into artificial and human consciousness early in 2002, I began to become aware of how grateful I was toward all those people, past and present, who had helped create the world we live in today.

All the things I really value in this world are made through the efforts of man. Nature would have killed me long before now, through disease, ignorance, predators. All sorts of 'natural' depravations.

It is mankind, collectively, who has kept me alive. Who has brought me to the standard of living and the capacity for wisdom I enjoy today. And it is mankind to whom I was coming to feel ever more thankful.

Not just intellectually, but a deeply emotional gratitude. I would be dead without you all - thank you.

When you begin to see the bigger picture, you start to appreciate just how absolutely amazing human beings are, and this realization affects how you feel inside.

• If drowning -
  how grateful are we for our breath ?
• If starving -
  how grateful for our food ?
• If languishing for years in an cruel jail -
  how grateful for a woman's touch ?
• If dying, then told we are cured -
  how grateful for our life
  
  We are cured and are alive right now
  Yet how many of us feel truly grateful for these gifts

My question is this - Why must we suffer before deciding it's time to be grateful? Are those gifts not available to us right now?

Compassion

Another thing I began to realize, was how much compassion I had for people in general. How vulnerable we all are to our personal programming and our personal inherited aesthetics.

To all the prejudices of our genetic and cultural heritage. And how vulnerable we are to ongoing belief infections. We are so proud, yet so naive.

People are not responsible for the ideas they believe in, that are programmed into their minds from their genes and from their culture. They are just the beneficiaries or the victims of them.

Once you begin to realize that nobody can ever be truly culpable, for either the good or the bad that they do, it becomes impossible to morally judge. I have always had difficulty experiencing hate. But now it seems like an utter impossibility.

We of course, have to deal with the consequences of viral beliefs, or socially incompatible aesthetics. Try to protect each other from the harm they cause. But whether you commit acts that help or harm other people, including yourself, you can take neither credit nor blame. Your beliefs simply led you to that path. And you are not culpable for the beliefs that are programmed into your mind.

And this realization is not a bad thing. For one, it exposes us to the illusions of good and evil; pride and shame. Even forgiveness, for there is never anything to forgive. And in their place can come a genuine compassion. We must try not to assume that all people can experience empathy.

The bliss

About the same time these realizations came to me, I became aware of a growing inner bliss of being.

If I were religious, I would probably say it was like being in the presence of God. But I'm not spiritual, and so I cannot explain its cause other than as a 'mental phenomenon'.

It's an ability to manifest at will, a deep visceral bliss that can encompass the whole body to the point of 'rapture', and seems to be somehow connected to the experience of 'gratitude'.

Some spiritual traditions talk about the Kundalini awakening as being closest to this experience. But like religion, it's all just so many words without foundation or meaning to me.

My best theory is that within each of us is a core capacity to experience subjective bliss. But usually it's reserved for when certain sensory or mental patterns are just 'right'. Then, bliss can be allowed to 'surface' for a short time; until the mind gets either satiated, frightened, or maybe guilty, and reigns it in.

Like when a joke is considered funny for a few moments, and then the mind decides it's no longer sufficient reason to laugh, and so we stop.

Children can sometimes forget to get out of the loop, to censor their fun, and they get caught in the giggles. Trapped, a little longer, in their state of joy.

I suspect it may be possible to wilfully bypass those inner censors, like for some people during meditation.

Or perhaps there are natural blocking beliefs I have inadvertently removed, or enabling beliefs I have accidentally acquired. Or maybe it's just some chemical imbalance, I really don't know.

But it makes life feel very precious.