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Consciousness generally refers to a living being's awareness of several things about itself, its own existence, and the world around it, including but not restricted to sensations, perceptions, emotions and thoughts. Psychology and other sciences of mind also consider consciousness as being the quality or state of being aware. These common-sense definitions, however, are vague (circular), because awareness and consciousness are practically the same thing: awareness is a subproduct of consciousness. Therefore, let us stay away from orthodox and circular definitions and instead try to build a more natural approach to an explanation of consciousness.
To be conscious involves a lot of things. As conscious beings ourselves, we are trapped inside the consciousness phenomenon. Our intellect and perception are subject to consciousness, and not the other way around. This means that we cannot simply expect to fully define consciousness if we are not totally "above" and beyond it to see the entire process unfolding before our "eyes." Because of this, many people feel that consciousness has no place in the objective world of science, although a lot of "unobservables" in Nature can be and have been the targets of scientific investigations before. There are no boundaries for scientific inquiry, but the nature of consciousness seems to be just as unlimited.
One of the reasons why there is no scientifically acceptable definition or interpretation of consciousness is because it can mean several things to different people. Consciousness is ultimately a personal state, and there are even different states or levels of it, including those that are too subjective for a scientific (objective) analysis. However, the difficulty to define consciousness does not mean that consciousness is some kind of mysterious entity that escapes all forms of scientific analysis. Consciousness can be studied as a scientific problem like any other, but it eventually breaches the limits of philosophical thought and scientific analysis, mainly because it introduces a series of paradoxes, as for example the fact that consciousness seems to be caused by brain processes, but at the same time any causal relationship from a physical (third-person) perspective takes a first-person consciousness to be aware of it. Who came first, the egg or the chicken?
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Suffering arises from feelings that are stronger than the individual's capacity to assimilate them. Suffering is intense and obscure, and with causes that are unknown or ignored (denied) by the individual. Aspects of one's existence that cannot be understood nor accepted eventually become too intense to be ignored. It is only natural that suffering arises according to the sequence of Intentions of Creation: sensations (IC #7) increase (IC #8) internally (IC #9) until they become very intense (IC #10) to produce a personal singularity, an existential paradox (IC #10).
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