Consciousness: The Greatest Mystery of Human Existence

There is a question that was asked by a priest in the temple of ancient Ur four thousand years before you, by a monk in the middle of the night, by a physicist in a laboratory, and by you, whenever you wake up in the morning and for a fraction of a second don't know who you are. What is consciousness? To this day, science has no single answer. Neuroscientists have mapped the brain down to the last neuron and have found no place where consciousness resides. Philosophers have been arguing about it for over two thousand years. Physicists are looking for it in microtubules inside cells. Each field holds only a piece of the puzzle, and none of them has yet had the courage to put it all together.

Jana Horkelová has spent more than six years reading and researching across fields that don't normally talk to each other, from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, through the Egyptian Books of the Dead, Indian texts from the Ganges, and Greek philosophy, to the latest findings in neuroscience and quantum physics. The result is a book that, for the first time, assembles these scattered fragments into a single, coherent picture, understandable even without an academic background in any of these fields.

The book does not leave you in the role of an observer. It speaks directly to you, guiding you through your own morning today, your own car journey, your own decision-making, and at the end, it returns what you have learned about ancient history back to you as a question about yourself: who is it that is reading this sentence right now?

No reassuring phrases about peace and balance. Just a precise, well-thought-out path to the closest thing you have, your own consciousness. If you have ever woken up in the night with the question of who you really are, this book will give you the answer you have been looking for.