The universe has its reality, and life has its;
life (through man’s consciousness) can make reliable predictions about the universe, but not about itself;
mind can forecast how magnesium will react under various conditions, but about itself, its predictions do not even achieve the level of pathetic,
(but which functionally is unimportant in that mind has no recognition thereof).
 

The universe has its reality, and life has its;
the universe’s reality includes no consciousness  --  no awareness of itself;
part of life’s reality is man’s consciousness, indeed without it,
life would have no awareness OF its reality;
query: how can something have a reality without being conscious of it?
answer: only by a form of life attaching itself to it
whose consciousness ascribes to it  --  a reality.
Raise-the-ante-query: how are you conscious that you exist in a reality?
There appears to be animate and inanimate matter;
man and magnesium seem different in their very essence  --   one alive, one not;
query: is your ordinary mind really alive, or is it just a convenient illusion,
like how, activity at the atomic level in magnesium could allow you to say that
it is not literally, inanimate (without movement);
query: can you assure yourself that the normal running of your mind
rises above such a picture;
if you say that electrons circling around a nucleus (in some fashion)
equates with living matter, in that movement at some level is occurring,
then why can not the equally mechanical activity occurring in the brain
at the cellular level be what men call their living, consciousness.
 

The universe has its reality, and life has its;
the universe has no complaint with its;
life’s reality of itself (via human consciousness)
consists in large part OF its complaints thereabout;
magnesium exists in the universe’s reality,
and will continue to exist whether men like it or not   --
can you say the same for man’s consciousness in life’s reality;
consciousness’ complaining about itself is, in major part,
the reality OF consciousness.
How the universe came into being  --  no life form knows;
how life itself came to be here in this universe  --  no one knows,
but how consciousness came into being, consciousness pretends to know;
it is patently foolish  --  yet seems to make life feel good,
doesn’t your mind feel good when it pretends to know what is going on?  --
sure it does! --  you and life enjoy pretending to know,
while old man magnesium just keeps silently rolling on  (okay: just keeps lying there).
 

There are no signs of the universe engaged in pretending –
magnesium does not try to pass itself off as aluminum, nor planets as suns,
and life (without human consciousness) shows no signs either –
no worms trying to pass for wrens, nor ferns for ferrets,
but consciousness, looked at separately, is a different story;
the thoughts of men, by their nature, continually present themselves to be things which they clearly are not,
and pretend to abilities which they plainly lack, but query:
can you picture what ordinary consciousness would BE
if its pretending were taken from it?  --   no you can’t!  --  and do you know why?   --  you can’t picture what it would then be, because it would then cease TO be.
 

Metaphorically: the brain has its reality, and consciousness has its,
and the brain (just like the universe) does not engage in pretending,
while consciousness depends on it;
the brain can exist without consciousness just as can the universe without life,
but neither life nor consciousness can exist without the universe and the brain.
Make-the-game-more-expensive, interesting-and-profitable note:
some men’s nervous systems are so wired to make their brain capable of
supporting two consciousnesses;
the standard one, which depends in substantial part on pretending to exist
and function, and another unconventional consciousness which does not;
just as magnesium might exist on this planet or that other one,
and life itself might travel from this world to another,
the men with those nervous systems can, in their brain,
move from a place of pretense to another one,
resulting in such men being thus describable:
one of their consciousnesses has its reality,
and their other consciousness has its,
and comparably speaking: one is like inanimate matter, and the other, animate;
query: which do you imagine he favors?
Crunch-time query: how can you know of this possibility,
                                   and sit still for your present condition?
 
 
 

For quite some time, one man’s operational approach was:
“When among squirrels  --  speak squirrel” --
but resulting from his expanded consciousness, he later revised it:
“Stay away from squirrels.”
 
 

One man who lives alone and fixes all of his own meals,
says he becomes exorbitantly ill whenever he finds a hair in his food  --
he says he wishes he felt the same way about finding hairs in his thoughts.
 
 
 
 
 
 

One man has adopted as his guiding principle a revamped version of an old saying:
“Live as though there is no right now” --   he says he might as well,
since that’s the way his mind seems determined to do it anyway.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Soliloquies one man:
“There’s something that holds my guts in  --  skin,
and there’s something that keeps me from getting in: the me that’s already there  --   --  the me I was born with.

A man with the liking of and knack to kvetch
will never lose his place in humanity’s collective conversation.
  “Only mongooses bother to criticize mongooses.”
       “Paw, you figure he’s really talking about fools?!”
               “Now boy, don’t be ill mannered.”