My claim throughout these pages is that the grammar for our thinking about the transcendent is given to us in the immanent, in the most humbly ordinary and familiar experiences of reality; in the case of our experience of consciousness, however, the familiarity can easily overwhelm our sense of the essential mystery. There is no meaningful distinction between the subject and the object of experience here, and so the mystery is hidden by its own ubiquity. One extremely good way, then, to appreciate the utter strangeness of consciousness–the hither side, so to speak, of the moment of existential wonder that wakens us to the strangeness of all things–is to consider the extraordinary labors required to describe the mind in purely material terms.
–David Bentley Hart,
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