For most of our history on this planet when we haven’t known the reason for something we have made one up. It isn’t that we enjoy lying to ourselves, although myth making is rather fun, but because to have a vacuum in our knowledge frightens us. Not to know is to have no power, not to have the facts is to be unable to control events even with some agreed superstitions like knocking on wood, and so consistent are we in wanting to know that we remember when the superstitious behaviour worked more than when it didn’t.
The scientific and philosophic advances of knowledge and mind have given us a method we are able to rely upon because we know it is flawed but we can check up on its ability to procure facts for us, and because it gives us concrete answers at times we are able to hold for the first time in our history, a degree of ignorance. This is tremendously important for our intellectual good health because we no longer look to a god or an outside power to guide us, but knowledge itself.
We are finding out that mind is not about self awareness as much as awareness itself. It is not so much about our place in the Universe but that there is a Universe in which we can exist. Or as a physicist once said, human beings are one way in which the universe can know itself.