Is Consciousness a Gift or a Curse?

And, is Michael Crighton's novel 'Sphere' an allegory for the root cause of human suffering?

I can’t claim to know much about you, dear reader, but I believe I can claim this: at some point in your life, you have suffered. Something, at some point, has gone wrong for you—perhaps even terribly, unbearably wrong. You didn’t deserve it, that’s for certain. But what choice did you have? It happened, and you had to endure the hardship and the heartbreak. Time has passed, but it’s left its mark on you. It might even be the case that not a day goes by where you don’t think about the fateful event, that loss, that trauma. And, though I don’t know you, I can say that we are the same.

This is the thread that binds us together: the pain of existence, the awareness of life not being as it should be. You’ve felt it as much as I. We’re both human—we both feel pain, anguish, fear, frustration. We know what it is to have our hopes dashed. We know what it is to look out upon the world and shake our heads at the state of it. Murder, suicide, rape, torture, war, and worse besides. Unspeakable tragedy abounds. Who can possibly account for the travesty that is this earthly existence we’ve created for ourselves—this cesspool of a society, this sinkhole of a civilization? It’s no wonder that so many people don’t believe in God, or a deity of any kind. What sort of omnipotent and supposedly omnibenevolent being would allow for such suffering to run rampant, especially when we’re meant to believe that said god or gods do, in fact, love their creation? That’s a tall order, I think, to believe a thing like that. Anyone who says otherwise is being disingenuous.

It’s enough to make any person question the very existence of the universe itself. What’s the point of any of this existing, when it can be so, so bad?

And, perhaps more crucially, who’s to blame for it all?

I hope I don’t come across as being unnecessarily maudlin. While I may have indulged in some of histrionics thus far, I’ll justify myself by noting the sheer scale, depth and breadth of human depravity. This is the way the world is. It’s the way we’ve always been. We do wrong to refuse to reckon with the darkness inside of ourselves. Don’t mistake my meaning: I’m not writing these things to give myself over to despair or misanthropy, or to argue that you should too. But if we are to discuss the cause of human suffering with any degree of appropriate seriousness, then I feel we must begin by solemnly acknowledging just how real and pervasive it is. The suffering of this world should not be held in abstract.

It seems to me to be a simple fact of life that all humans will suffer, one way or another. Some of us will bear quite a lot of suffering; others who are more fortunate may skirt by, enduring only the occasional bump and scrape. I’d count myself among the latter, judging by the life I’ve led thus far. But who’s to say what’s coming down the road for me?

I’d thought that question to be merely rhetorical when I first typed it some days ago. Revisiting it now as I continue drafting this essay, its poignancy has been brought into sharper focus. Just this past evening, I received startling news from my father concerning a tragic incident that occurred to a longstanding member of his congregation. Regular readers will know that my dad, a pastor, has been a key behind-the-scenes figure for this publication. The inception of each article I write is based upon a conversation I have with him some week prior, where we discuss what is perhaps best called ‘speculative theology’. The discussion that serves as the basis for this article took place over a fortnight ago—little did I know then that these themes of human suffering and the philosophical Problem of Evil would rear their ugly heads in such a clear and present manner.

Just yesterday, my dad learned that this member of his congregation—a faithful attendee of the church for over three decades—was brutally murdered outside of her home, in broad daylight, while tending to her front garden. A young person approached her and, after a brief conversation, stabbed her to death.

There was no cause. There was no reason. The assailant and victim were not known to one another. It was utterly senseless, horrific violence. It was as stark as evil can be.

And now she’s gone. The question that must be running through everyone’s mind who knew her, including myself, must be…why? What kind of world do we live in where this sort of thing is possible? We think ourselves safe and secure in our own homes, in our own front yards, and yet something like this can happen. Random acts of devastation. Hatred and filth bubbling up the surface and spilling over, lashing out blindly, scarring and maiming the innocent. None of us stand for this, yet it happens. Who allows it happen? Who’s got the power to stop it from happening?

That should be God, shouldn’t it? If it’s anybody’s responsibility to curtail evil and protect the vulnerable, isn’t it His? So where do all those believers get off, Christians and otherwise, saying that God’s got everything under control? How can they look themselves in the mirror and say, ‘I believe God has a plan for my life, and it is good,’ when at any moment, for no reason, their lives can be snatched away, or they can become afflicted by some terrible illness, or their loved ones can suddenly die in a tragic accident, or any number of equally terrible things that befall us here on this hellish planet can happen, without rhyme or reason?

Am I being sensational? I’m sorry. I simply want to convey that the people who ask these questions through gritted teeth, angry and frustrated and dismayed and incensed at the injustice of it all are exactly right to feel as they do. If anything, I think Christians and people of faith too often dismiss the reality of suffering in the world as transient or somehow meaningless. Isn’t it fair to say that the idea of a perfect afterlife in heaven just doesn’t cut it when people have to square off against their own mortality every day of their earthly lives?

It’s enough to make a person wonder if we’re better off knowing all that we know; knowing about death, about pain. Knowing how to inflict it upon other people. We’ve a consciousness, yes—a truly amazing capacity to understand the world and ourselves. But it hurts us, doesn’t it, being conscious of just how awful the world can be? Of how awful we can be to one another?

So what was God thinking, giving us this knowledge—this consciousness? Is it a gift or a curse?

Strangely enough, I think a pulpy sci-fi novel from 1987 might point us in the right direction.

Uncredited cover artwork from the 1970 edition of Theodore Sturgeon’s A Touch of Strange

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An alien named Jerry

It’s a testament to how much I love a book if I read it twice, let alone thrice. There aren’t many stories I can say that for, but Michael Crighton’s Sphere is one. I don’t specifically recall how I came to possess my copy—likely picked up on a whim from a dusty secondhand store shelf because the artwork caught my teenage eye—but I do remember reading it, loving it, and reading it again. I remember being absolutely thrilled to discover that there was a movie version when I got a DVD copy as a gift in my stocking one Christmas. (Great gift—thanks, Mom.) I’d credit both the book and the movie with introducing me to my greatest literary fascination: the existential sci-fi thriller. I gather that the movie wasn’t well received and hasn’t left much of an impression on the public consciousness, but to me, that’s an injustice in need of rectification. Jurassic Park wasn’t Crighton’s only work of genius. Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson embodied the characters I’d read about so well, and the director—Barry Levinson—did a top notch job of capturing the pervading sense of dread and mystery that hooked me from the opening page.

All that to say, Sphere has been among my most favorite sci-fi works for so long that I’ve had near decades to ruminate upon it. It’s only been relatively recently that the ideas which I aim to explore here have finished gestating and are, I think, mature enough to be shared publicly. So, for you to be able to follow along, I will have to lay out the fundamental plot elements of the story plainly—including the ending.

I suppose this is my roundabout way of saying: SPOILER ALERT. And it’s a warning you should heed, because I believe both the book and movie are worth experiencing for yourself!

The essence of the novel is this: a group of American scientists are recruited in a top-secret military operation and whisked away to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They initially believe there has been a plane crash, and the main character—a psychologist—is under the impression he’s being brought out to offer psychiatric support to the victims.

However, it is soon revealed that the airplane crash story is simply a cover. The military’s real purpose in bringing them all to this remote location is to explore the wreckage of a spacecraft at the bottom of the ocean.

An alien spacecraft. Or, so it would appear.

Together, the scientists descend to a hidden underwater facility at the ocean’s base and begin to investigate. One of their earliest discoveries is that the craft is not (huge spoiler warning, again) actually of interstellar origin; it turns out that it’s of human design, and it has originated from the distant future. Through a process that we needn’t bother explaining here, the craft was catapulted into the past—as in, the scientists’ current time period—and has lain dormant ever since. There are no crew members, save the skeletal remains of some of the commanding officers. What happened to these interstellar travelers? The mystery only deepens.

Eventually, the scientists stumble upon what they believe to be the source of the calamity. A strange, unearthly artifact is discovered in the ship’s cargo hold. A sphere of perfect make. Its contours and dimensions are utterly precise, as if designed by godlike beings. One by one, as the scientists study this artifact, they are ‘invited’ inside of it. What they encounter within the sphere is never made entirely clear, but it changes them. Or rather, it changes part of them. Each of them emerges from the sphere none the wiser as to what has occurred, and so they fail to realize the ‘gift’ they’ve been granted. More on that in a moment.

Meanwhile, as they retreat to the undersea laboratory and conduct further experiments and investigations, they receive a message from an entity calling itself ‘Jerry’. Jerry has hacked into their communication systems and is apparently eager for some human company to converse with. They surmise that whatever Jerry is, he must have been inside the Sphere and has now somehow been let out. Shortly thereafter, they came under attack by an impossibly large monstrosity out in the pitch black depths. A squid, a jellyfish, a kraken—it’s never entirely clear just what is hunting them, but it terrorizes them and wrecks the entire facility. Several of the team members are killed over the course of the novel as they struggle to fend off these attacks. The horror only intensifies when the remaining survivors come to understand that it is Jerry who has ‘manifested’ the terror, and is now using his enigmatic powers to play god.

This cannot go on, or the scientists will all surely die. Yet confronting Jerry will not be so simple, as they come to understand that Jerry is not so much an alien entity as he is them. Jerry is the personification of their own unconscious minds unleashed upon the world, capable of making their dreams into nightmarish reality. The scientists realize they are locked in a battle with themselves—somehow, the Sphere has awakened the hidden parts of their minds, the unspeakable urges that they (and we) bury deep, deep down and refuse to let see the light of day.

There is only one way to stop the horror. The last remaining scientists, armed with the knowledge that they are torturing themselves with their own psychic disorder, resolve to ‘forget’ the power they have gained upon encountering the Sphere. One of them even remarks that, whatever gift the Sphere was meant to be for the intelligent species that discovered it drifting out in space, human beings are not ready for it. We are too underdeveloped, too ill-disciplined to master ourselves as needed to best make use of the Sphere’s abilities. We could make the world a paradise with nothing more than a thought, but we dream of war and famine and death. Some sickly part of us longs for blood. The terror that destroyed the undersea facility and caused the deaths of so many of their crew members was borne from their own disturbed consciousnesses. If it was evil, it was only so because they were evil first. And so, if they are to stop it, they must reject the mantle of godhood altogether—it is more than any of them can bear. They agree to do this just as the military returns to pluck them out of the sea and interrogate them about what happened to the multi-billion dollar, state-of-the-art research facility that was just blown to smithereens in a self-destruct sequence, as well as the priceless alien spacecraft caught in the blast radius. The recently forgetful survivors, of course, have no answers for them.

Not a bad yarn, no? Even though I’ve spoiled most of the story here, I’d still recommend reading it. But with all that ground covered, I imagine you’re eager for us to turn our attention to the question at hand: is human consciousness a gift or a curse?

Well, if the story of Sphere can be any lesson to us, it may be both.

Love versus unlove

A different way of framing the focal question might be, ‘Do we suffer because we know too much?’ We human beings are conscious in a way that appears to be unique; indeed, truly one-of-a-kind. Animals are conscious, yes, but not in the sense that we are. I’d wager that even the panpsychists (those who believe everything in the universe is conscious in some form, as ‘consciousness’ is rooted in a shared, collective experience that is then filtered by individual perception) would still admit that there is something special about how we humans experience the world. A bit of plankton might live and die, but it’s hard to state that it suffered in its life, given the limited awareness with which it perceives the world. Scale that up to shrimp, to shark, to sheepdog; do any of these creatures suffer as we do? Can any of them truly grasp the sheer depth and impenetrable darkness of the abyss as we can?

From a Biblical standpoint, the answer would appear to be ‘no’. The Genesis story offers us the clearest answers as to just how the universe came to be what it is, and why mankind’s relationship with this world (and his Creator) is so fraught. That isn’t to say that these answers are straightforward by any stretch. I’ve said before that I am not a literalist and don’t believe the proper approach to take to studying these stories is to assume that they must be taken at face value. Rather, I believe one must accept the stories for what they are—ancient oral traditions that were story-crafted and mythologized after millennia of telling, retelling, transformation, and cultural adaptation. I don’t for a minute contend that these stories are therefore untrue; instead, I uphold that, similar to reading a legal document, one must search for the ‘spirit’ of the story rather than obsess over the letter of it.

So, then: what ‘spirit’ is at work when we read about God making Man in His image? We know and have examined previously here that God intended humanity to have dominion over the Earth. There have been many distortions of this idea in Christianity over the centuries, but what it means in essence is that God intended humans to be the ultimate good stewards of his whole Creation. It must be the case that we were capable of this sort of stewardship—tending to the plants, animals, and pursuing harmony to live in balance and harmony in the natural world—because God clearly gave us this authority, not any other creature (leaving aside the idea that there might be Created aliens living on other planets…read more here if that topic sounds interesting to you!) How do we know that it is we who bear this special responsibility, and we alone? God imbued us with the ‘Spirit of Man’—the breath he breathed into the clay to animate it, the pneuma—which elevates us from mere beasts.

Here we might pause to acknowledge that none of this is very scientific. So, let’s substitute this pneuma for something which scientists take for granted, though in actual fact, they struggle to explain in purely scientific terms: human consciousness. I forwarded a theory in my last essay that fully embraces the science of human evolution, but postulates the spark for our astounding advancement in cognitive capability—an event referred to as the ‘Great Leap Forward’ by anthropologists—was some manner of divine intervention in the very, very long evolutionary chain.

But we won’t repeat any of that here. We’ll focus on the idea that consciousness is this unique attribute that demarcates God’s stewards from the things they are meant to steward. To be effective at their job, the stewards need to have some self-awareness; they need to know who they are, what they’re doing and why. So God gifted us consciousness of these things, that we might live out our lives and fulfill our purpose as part of his great and good Creation.

Except, one doesn’t need to look far to know that we haven’t turned out to be the best of stewards. Not only have we grossly neglected our responsibilities to duly nurture and protect the Earth and its bounties, we have also neglected to nurture and protect one another. How do we account for this abject failure? We can’t attribute it to God, because if we did, then that would mean that He’d made a mistake or acted unfairly. And if those things were true, then He would be fallible. And a fallible God is no god at all—He’s only human. So, we can’t pursue that line of inquiry and hope to arrive at our answer (though many do, and I don’t blame them for trying.)

Is the fault our own, then? Isn’t that what ‘sin’ is all about?

Here’s where the picture gets more complicated. That spirit I just mentioned—our pneuma, our consciousness—seems to be corrupted. The issue appears to be that, though we were created with the intention to have dominion, we were never intended to exercise this authority independently. God has always desired to partner with us in Creation; to delight in His children delighting in the world, as a good father does when his children succeed in life. There’s a good reason why God refers to himself as a ‘Heavenly Father’: parenthood is the best analogy we have for understanding our relationship to the divine. We have inherited a great gift, being born with near-infinite potential; we’re practically gods in our own right in terms of the immeasurable depths of our own souls. But, gifted as we are, we are not God. We have limited understanding and limited capability on our own. Like children, we are meant to rely on Him to handle the things we can’t handle. Children shouldn’t need to worry about paying taxes or ensuring the car is properly gassed up or that the insurance is sorted out or anything else like that. These things are the domain of the adult—the one who has greater awareness, and thus, greater responsibility. A child’s domain is to delight in the world, and to grow and to thrive. That’s what God intended for us. But, like children, we desired something more.

Each of us has made decisions that, when we really drill down into it, were selfish. We chose to prioritize our own needs and wants over those of others. In a word, we chose ‘unlove’. Unlove is the opposite of love—it is the refusal to give of oneself for the benefit of another, expecting nothing in return. It is also the giving of oneself for another, expecting something in return. In either case, it’s not who we are meant to be. It’s beneath us. We can choose love, all the time (or, in theory, we can…human weakness is something we’ll address in a moment) so when we don’t choose love, we have failed in our ultimate purpose. God is love, let’s remember. Love is the ultimate reason for the universe’s existence. The world is our playground to love and be loved. It sounds like paradise when you put it like that! This is the gift we have received; being conscious is precisely what enables us to experience love in all its beauty and wonder.

But of course you will know, dear reader, that this world is anything but a paradise. Our consciousness has proven to be a double-edged sword because, for every good, loving thing it awakens us to, it also makes us excruciatingly aware of just how painful the lack of love can be. It appears to be as much a curse as anything else.

So where did this capacity for ‘unlove’ come from? How did the power to choose whether to love or not love come to rest with us? Were we doomed from the start, being given this capacity but not the self-control required to master it and channel it for the good, all the time?

It comes back to the idea of independence versus dependence. Unlove happens when we choose how to use our gift for ourselves, according to our own priorities and desires. The principles of love lay out plainly how the gift ought to be used—love your neighbour as yourself. When Christ walked the Earth, he made clear that our neighbour meant everyone on the entire planet. Everyone was a child of God. Everyone was equally deserving of perfect love, all the time. But of course, we humans have a lot of different ideas about that. These people deserve love; those ones don’t. I think this is right, or wrong, or I don’t care; it doesn’t matter what they think. And on and on it goes.

An ocean of suffering

I don’t think the fault lies with us, exclusively. The Creator’s intent for is was good; the gift itself we received was good, but a malign influence kicked in and hijacked it. This influence persuaded us that the gift of consciousness could be used in pursuit of our own ends. We could chase after wealth, power, prestige, harnessing our unmatched intelligence to construct for ourselves devices and schemes that would accomplish these goals. We invented war machines to devastate our enemies, set up the stock market to finagle economic systems for the benefit of select few, idolized celebrity influencers as they gloated in their opulence and made us feel like cretins in comparison. In all things, we cared only about how we might push ahead of the competition to benefit ourselves.

In essence, we failed to love as we ought to love.

But we should remember that we are a young species, and there is much more to this world than just ourselves. Though we hold a special position within Creation, we are not all of Creation. There are spiritual forces at work which predate us—or rather, being timeless, have existed before either us or the universe itself ever did. I won’t go too far down this road, as I am far from an expert on such matters (not that I’m making myself out to be an expert on much of anything) but it does appear to be the case that angels, so far as we understand them, have independence of being just as we do. We can read in the Genesis account of how the influence of Evil, personified in the snake in the Garden, found its way to us, not the other way around.

Again, I don’t want to get too deep into the symbology or *shudder* demonology, because I can’t claim to know my right from my left about such things, but it seems safe enough to say that the potential for ‘wrong choice’ existed before we humans were ever on the scene. If Evil truly is a cosmic force—and in a moment, I’ll make an argument that it is—then it exists everywhere, has existed forever, and I suppose, will exist in some sense until the end of time. We, being temporal creatures relegated to a mortal existence, live under its influence, not above it. Whatever the moment in time was when we received the gift and became conscious, the potential for Evil was already there. The snake was already in the Garden; we didn’t create him. Now, with us humans freshly awakened and full of promise, the snake saw an opportunity to open up a new front in the war between Good and Evil—the human soul.

If each of us pauses and reflects on how it came to be that we committed those selfish, unloving acts we’re all guilty of, doesn’t it make sense that we were, in some way, acting under a bad influence? We didn’t make those choices in a vacuum; somewhere along the way, as we’d grown and matured and developed our understanding of the world, we’d come to realize what a good thing is, versus an evil thing. We had to learn to tell the two apart by observing, listening, and taking it all in. Being influenced. Gaining knowledge! Yes, there were the individual, specific acts that taught us right from wrong—lessons from our parents, our teachers, our friends—but each of them had only internalized those lessons from outside influences, which can then be traced back to other influences, ad nauseum. We could even go so far back as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil itself. Whatever that ‘tree’ was, it was the moment we claimed more than we could handle; when we took up the mantle of godhood, believing ourselves to be knowledgeable enough to distinguish between right and wrong for ourselves. But, knowledgeable as we are, we don’t know everything.

What I’m trying to illustrate is the impossible complexity of it all—the scale, the depth of all that makes us who we are and explains how we’ve gotten here. Insofar as we are ‘conscious’ of ourselves, the world, and how we should behave in it, we are only aware of an infinitesimally small fraction of all that there is to be aware of. All of the forces shaping and moving the world toward good ends are beyond our comprehension, just as the ones dragging it down into darkness are. Each of us only ever gets to play our little, tiny part in the much greater whole. A single thread woven into a tapestry that tells the sublime, heart-wrenching story of humanity.

I’ll be blunt: suffering exists because metaphysical evil exists. (Evil being unlove in all its shades and degrees.) There is the personal evil that we experience when another person harms us, or perhaps, when we harm someone else. These little sufferings we experience are very real, and we carry them with us like scars. But taken together, they are mere drops in the ocean of suffering that all of us are at risk of drowning in. Human suffering exists on a cosmic scale if we adopt a grand enough view. We’ve a tendency to conceptualize evil foremost as ‘sin’, and a very specific, personalized sin at that. We often frame it as our personal failings, and sometimes even equate these failings to the consequences we suffer personally. But we are caught up in something much, much greater than ourselves. The universe we inhabit is bleaker and more chaotic than we grasp. We often try to use logic to work out a chain of events to explain the terrible things that happen to us. In doing do, we commit the same mistakes as many ancient Israelites, who believed that when calamity befell a family, it was because God was punishing them for sinning. Christ challenged this notion when he healed the blind man whom everyone assumed ‘deserved’ his suffering, saying:

Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.

John 9:3

At first glance, it might appear that death reigns supreme. A man kills his neighbour in cold blood, setting off an unforeseeable chain of events where brother is turned against brother, sister against sister. An eye is exchanged for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. As generations go by, those embroiled in the conflict lose track of just what started it, of who deserved what, of why terrible things keep happening to seemingly uninvolved, innocent people. Suffering indeed spirals out forever, begetting more and more of itself for every soul whom it touches—even if they had nothing to do with where it all began. It can be likened to a morass, trapping us all and threatening to drag us below, to choose out the potential in us to resist and to choose to love in response to hate.

What good news, then, that God makes it possible for us to love! He’s working to pull us out of the muck, to redeem the world and bring beauty out of the ashes. Even in the darkest hours, God sees the good that can be drawn out. Consider the story of Noah, as we have before, whom God recognized as the one righteous person on Earth. For one person alone, God spared his Creation ultimate destruction. If the ancient stories are anything to go by, we should be appalled at the violence and depravity that human beings were exhibiting toward one another. Had we seen everything that God had seen, we might have easily agreed with His assessment: burn it all down! This world is beyond saving!

But of course, most of us don’t hold this view. We know the intrinsic value of a human life. We see the good and the bad, and we choose to focus on the good. We know the power of love to conquer all. So does God, thankfully. Even a lifetime of suffering cannot extinguish the innate dignity of the human spirit.

So, are we blessed to know this—that love is the greatest force in the universe, and that we can partake freely in it? Or are we cursed with the knowledge of how it feels to be unloved?

The unripened fruit

I think Michael Crighton’s Sphere, intentionally or not, portrays this conundrum of consciousness as a blessing and a curse in clear detail. The scientists who serve as the story’s main protagonists are human beings who receive an amazing gift; they are empowered to be as gods, capable of bending reality to their every whim. At face value, this seems a wonderful thing, because these scientists—being fair-minded, educated, well-meaning people—now have the means to make everything perfect. If they willed it, they could correct every wrong in the world. They could construct a utopia, if only they had the will (and intelligence) to do so.

But they don’t. Instead they are haunted by their failings, and they succumb to paranoia and malevolence. The potential for good is squandered. Is it their fault that this happens? It’s complicated—a bit of a yes and no. The scientists are not gods, and do not have full control over their own faculties. Their worst fears and urges get the better of them. I didn’t get into an specifics in my summary earlier, but it is the case that their leader—the psychologist—committed some immoral acts with a younger, vulnerable female member of the team. A fair amount of the suffering he endures is resultant from the horrific manifestations he is forced to encounter because of his lingering feelings over this indecency. The gift he has received has been turned against him and others, not because the gift itself is evil, but because he is a fallible person who cannot consistently choose to do right over wrong.

What is the solution, then, for these poor creatures caught in a trap not entirely of their own making, but certainly perpetuated by their own personal failings? They must relinquish their control—or lack thereof—over to one who can wield it. In this case, it is the Sphere itself. Whatever alien species designed it intended it to be used for good. The scientists even remark about how ‘perfect’ the Sphere is when they first behold it. But the receivers have realized that they are not equipped to utilize their gift on their own; they lack the wisdom and insight to truly exert mastery over it, and so give over their authority to one who can. One scientist at the end of the story mentions how humanity is not ready for this kind of power, and so they agree to ‘forget’ that they ever had it at all.

Not a spot-on analogy, exactly, but very close. The gift offered by a vastly advanced intelligent race of aliens (ie. God) is offered freely to humanity, but in ignorance and arrogance, ends up being is misused. It would be understandable for the humans who received it to say to their benefactors, ‘How could you do this? You’ve cursed us with more than we can bear!’ We might understand how they could even come to hate their gift, which has brought about such suffering for them. But even though the pain is very real, we shouldn’t lose sight of the truth—the gift is indeed a gift, if it only were to be used for good. To spurn it is to sink into despair and defeat, rather than rise above and pursue the good.

As the novel closes, Crighton leaves with the idea that perhaps one day, when humanity is ready and it has learned to govern itself properly, the gift might be received again. This time, it could be used as was intended: for the benefit of all, equally. An evolved, ascended humanity might be able to fully unlock its true potential with the help of the ones who have gone before, their great Sphere guiding us along our journey.

Is our consciousness, then, a kind a Sphere? Have we received a gift beyond even our own comprehension? Have we taken more than what was intended, reaching for the forbidden Tree and partaking of unripened fruit, elevating ourselves to a point where we have greater Knowledge than we have wisdom? Is this imbalance, then, the root of our suffering?

Perhaps the answer can be summed up with this simple observation: we know what death is, yet we lack the wisdom to avoid it. Too often we choose unlove over love, adding to the ocean that roils all around us.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. You have your gift. Don’t despise it—use it as it was intended.

Be conscious of what it is to love and be loved.

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