What is the difference between animalistic primal consciousness and intelligent, enlightened, enlivened soulful human consciousness?

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Animals differ mainly from humans in degree, not in kind. Meaning they are sentient, feeling, problem-solving beings, they just don’t have the same level of consciousness that humans do.

Humans have to wrangle with self-doubt, regret, impossibly complicated situations. If animals have to deal with such things, it’s never for very long. Animals could never contemplate the dilemmas of Hamlet.

Humans can provide for the entirety of the things an animal needs to survive and thrive. The reverse could never be entirely true. A human raised by animals in the first few months learns during it’s crucial, formative years, how to adapt to animal society, not human society. When later introduced to human life, the kids have serious problems that they, in most cases, never completely overcome.

You could say the reverse is true, that dogs raised in human society never can thrive in the wild. But human ingenuity allows us the resources to actually accomplish this, whereas animals never could do the reverse. Sure, Fluffy the Maltese will never make it on the mean streets of the Appalachian Foothills. But we can rehab effing condors back to killing machines.

Human society is simply more complex in every way to animal social strata. To say otherwise is to insult both animals and humans. Human enlightenment encompasses the idea that someone can literally outgrow human society. Someone who can walk through both human situations and animal situations and walk out beloved by both.

“Mere” animal consciousness is an evolutionary adaptation. It was done to make animals of all stripes more effective at surviving and thriving. It’s hard to stay alive in a brutal natural setting when you’re plagued by self-doubt and worry. Animal neural evolution didn’t allow for such frivolities.

Humans had to learn how to completely dominate their environment before they could evolve “real” altruism. They had to literally get to the point where other humans posed more of a threat to them then effing lions and tigers. Animals have it too, but if you go hanging out with gorillas, you better be real careful otherwise one of those gorillas will eat your face one day and not even feel bad about it.

As anyone whose critically read my answers would know, I’m not the hugest fan of the concept of enlightenment. It encapsulates an idea that is way bigger than people think it is. And it’s horribly susceptible to misrepresentation. But any person who is enlightened can make more of a difference in literally millions of primitive unencumbered animal consciousnesses than they will ever make in the enlightened person’s.

When you’re talking animals vs. humans, the difference is of magnitude and not kind. But when you’re talking enlightened humans vs even regular humans, the difference is still just magnitude, but it amounts to so much magnitude that it might as well be kind.

If there’s one thing Hawkins taught me is that consciousness growth truly has exponential effects. They can be difficult to see, but they’re there.