Consciousness Country
1. The final version of this book came together in a dream. My wife, son, and I were watching a documentary in my dream. There was a sequence of events that conveyed how sad, beautiful, and unrelenting our lives were. We followed these scenes right to the conclusion. It was like a puzzle that needed to be peeled away layer by layer, and its solution was a number and a letter. It took me some time to get what it was trying to say. I saw the image of a person balancing a pencil on a finger; maybe he was even spinning it, and then it all stopped with the pencil impossibly suspended in midair.
At that point, I woke up from the dream feeling sad, but I understood the message well. It says: Know your existence through stillness.
2. At some point, we must prepare for the end. It isn’t complicated. It consists of getting rid of most of what we carry. I suspect that after we have shed enough of our burden, we may realize that we have believed the wrong thing. We may have labored under the illusion of movement, but we have never moved. Appearances around us are constantly shifting, but somehow, it is as though we have remained unmoved. Have we changed over the years? Or have we only adjusted to the changing circumstances? It is as though we have all along been rooted to the ground, more like a tree than an animal.
3. You are born into a life where you have no say about your arrival or departure. In fact, since the day of your birth, it has been as though you are caged, and you will live in that cage until you are dead. You plot and pray for an escape from that cage. You imagine getting out in some form, in the spirit or otherwise, and somehow remaining intact. But you will never escape. Your hopelessness is justified. The point, then, is this: Can you progress from hopelessness to a sense of equanimity?
4. Who are you? Can you tell me who you are without telling me what others think you are?
We are saddled (or blessed) with awareness, so, unlike other Earth creatures, we must know time, space, and inevitable doom.
Yet, when you ask a man how he feels about his life, he will most likely hesitate to reply.
“Are you sad?”
“Am I sad? No, I am not sad.”
But he’s not happy either.
Nothing. The man cannot feel himself. Put another way, he cannot find any feelings for his life. Isn’t it strange when he has a feeling, or at least an opinion, for almost everything else?
Without being able to feel our existence, is it any wonder we are lost? There may be a bit of pride somewhere. Some disgust. But nothing deep. Nothing memorable.
It is as though we are barely conscious.
5. A human being moves across her terrain like an automaton. Although she is conscious, she looks as though she is mesmerized. She has never known stillness. Her mind, focused on wants and desires, has a near-absolute hold on her. Rather than freeing her, her ability to interpret, project, and plan binds her. It tells her that what she sees is all there is.
Our intelligence has empowered us as a species, but it has also reduced us. It ushers in misery instead of liberating us with understanding and insight.
One man turns to the sky. He admires the stars, wide-eyed, much like an excited child.
Another man sees the same thing and wants to die. He wants to die into it, into the perceived glory. He scans the room for a sharp object.
Misery isn’t just a lack of happiness. It is what we feel when we are deeply unhappy, and the unhappiness chokes us.
It is easy to dismiss the misery of others but quite impossible to do so when it is one’s own.
Misery isn’t bad weather. It is a bolt of lightning, a prophet from the center of our being, to come out to scream at us for our indulgence and distracted mind and for being stuck on superficial thrills and differences.
6. One could easily have gone through life and be mostly unaware of consciousness. Then, difficulties arise. When one is sick, for example, one becomes something like a blind mole and must discover an internal source of light while ferreting a way out of darkness.
7. Some may have a problem seeing what consciousness is. Ask them if they sometimes feel as if they are playing a role. That may help. Or ask them if they do not think, at least now and then, that they are watching themselves from behind.
8. I needed dialysis to survive. To dialyze, I had to needle myself. Every other day, my wife unpacked the necessary supplies: gauzes, disinfecting wipes, saline flushes, and 16-gauge needles, all laid out before me like an invitation to a feast.
Then, when I pushed the needles in, my thinking was summarily stopped and purged—the needling demanded all my attention. Any frivolous thoughts that flowed through my mind were quickly burned and wiped away.
As I watched myself needle, I also watched myself watching myself needle. And it kept receding until my sense of self came loose, then was erased, like so many sketches of monkeys.
9. Pain and distress are hard to abide by, but sometimes, they are all we have. If pain is part of life, how painless do we want to be? Is it heartless to say that? I don’t want any pain, but I can see that it has its place.
Pain and discomfort are often useful. They don’t allow us to sleepwalk for long. They keep us awake when we least want to be.
Pain speaks the truth. Joy often crystallizes along the lines of pain. Pain is a name, a marker. One can sometimes cut joy out of a cloth of pain.
10. Reality is not a wishing well. It isn’t a storehouse of goods to meet our needs. It isn’t something to be dissected or peeled like an onion. Reality includes people, nature, the universe, and all that we can or cannot see or feel. But reality remains a list of things (though it may be a daily growing list), a mere enumeration, until we bring before it our fear, anxiety, and awareness, at which point it becomes something else—both potent and difficult to fathom. What is mundane is now awe-inspiring through our awareness.
As awareness, we both arbitrate and are arbitrated.
No amount of false humility can erase our role in reality.
Equally, no amount of pride can cover our insignificance.
11. In the end, our understanding is more psychological than philosophical. We have no access to the larger meanings of existence. In other words, we cannot confidently say what our purposes are. We can only access our feelings on the subject.
I am not even sure who or what I am. Even in the bright light of consciousness, I do not know who I am. Maybe there is nothing to know. The notion of being an independent entity is an illusion; our sense of self, which we so treasure, is but debris scattered in the light of consciousness. Maybe I am only a habit of perception.
I don’t want to go any further in my speculation.
I am wary of those who go about mapping everything in sight and believe that they can get to the promised land with enough diligence and following a detailed rendering of some map.
One cannot, of course, when we are so finite and small and caught up in a reality that runs away from us. And the more we hope to frame it in words, the more we know it is beyond capture.
12. When I gaze within, I am still. Being still, I am unobstructed. Consciousness can only be reliably found inwardly. It is as if all the difficulties in life have the cumulative effect of turning our gaze inward.
When I collapse in sleep, sickness, or, one day, death, all that I think I am, my notion of duty and obligation, my sense of who I am, or my purposes or missions come to a halt. Not only have I withdrawn all my tentacles and feelers, but I have, in fact, neither tentacles nor feelers.
When I simply breathe, does what is all around me, its concrete appearance, and my experience of it wilt a little and become more penetrable?
13. Indian saint Ramana Maharshi said (from The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi), “There is no happiness in any object of the world. We imagine through our ignorance that we derive happiness from objects. When the mind goes out, it experiences misery.”
14. In sickness, one becomes acutely aware that there are no hard boundaries. One may even suspect that the substance that purportedly makes up those boundaries is not as it appears.
I once wrote elsewhere that a sick person can come across as strange. Unlike someone healthy, her wants will have transmuted. They still take the forms of ordinary desires, but they have subtly changed. Their constituent parts may still fit together well, but there is now a slight discordance. The heart isn’t a heart anymore but a slow-moving fire. The bright lights are no longer as welcoming and are, in fact, showing all of the flaws. They are too bright. Even one’s loved ones have altered. They are no longer individuals but classes of concern.
Her senses, moreover, seem to have less regard for borders or demarcations. She may even be able to transgress those at will. For a sick person, this is necessary. Unlike others, she is running out of time, and there is a pressing need to feel more, hear more, and do so with greater understanding.
15. Life viewed within life is full of lurches and insults. When viewed from deep in consciousness, does life become serene, even radiant?
16. We are constantly moving, jumping, running, and dodging. Of course, it is our fate that we have to do these things to live, love, and somehow survive another day. But what if it is an illusion? Not that we don’t have to do these things to live, but they are not all there is. While immersed in the world and the events that unfold in it, we have neglected the consciousness that allows us to be aware of these things in the first place.
Consciousness is constant. It suffers no interruption, even as you move between dreams or between dreaming and wakefulness. (We do not lose our awareness even in dreams.)
A 40-year-old woman is not more or less aware than when she was four.
Consciousness is unchanging. It does not grow or diminish. Even for someone who has suffered a catastrophic injury and whose memory and sense of self have changed, base awareness—the ability to see, hear, and feel—remains unchanged. What they know may have changed, but awareness itself is intact.
Something that begins with life must fluctuate with life, such as our senses and bodily functions. Consciousness is unchanging throughout life. One may wonder if it even has a point of origin.
17. If God existed, would it change anything? Would it make life any different from what it is now? Most likely not. Things are as they are and perfect in their way, even when they are difficult and hopeless. Even God, if it did exist, would be powerless against this perfection.
That which we cannot alter by an iota is necessarily perfect. Maybe not perfect compared to all that we can imagine. But it is perfect in its natural configuration.
Even wars are natural and perfectly suited to our avarice and selfish and jealous nature.
The way we are, the way we cannot change what goes on around us, we must be as gods!
How can it have gone so wrong for us? How can there be so much heartache when we should have been happy and carefree?
18. One night, in a pitch black punctuated by the occasional headlights reflected off the blinds, I reached into the center of my being for the quivering core. I could feel my inside quiver. I looked at my hands and fingers, but they were not shaking.
Only my heart was fluttering, the flighty rabbit.
No food should come between my rabbit and me, I decided. Nor comfort. Nor security of home or dogma.
Is this what happens when consciousness finds itself in existence?
Our understanding of reality is too fixed, too static. We wrap our arms too tightly around our chests. It’s not enough that we have built shelters around ourselves so that we are almost entirely boxed in; we also lock down our minds by seeing reality as composed only of desires and frustrations.
We think we are either the center of the world or we are nothing. While we may be truly nothing, we are also everything, as we, being nothing, also channel the world, nay, the universe.
Instead, we are left with fear and anxiety and a universe that can be explained away by graphs and numbers (or likes and dislikes). Do we already have a universe that can be wholly replaced by numbers? How alive or livable is a reality like that?
What if what we are and what the universe is are much more mysterious? Can we make room in our minds for that?
19. The ample heartache, the suffering, the disappointment, and for what? Whatever we may come across, they are inconsequential in the long run. They can hurt or harm us for a time. They stay with us only because we let them.
Suffering is a given. The world can be hard, but it is also a gift because of its transitory nature. Although we cannot dwell forever in this world, it also does not detain us long.
20. When you listen, who or what is listening?
When you listen with your eyes closed, and if you pay attention, you may feel that the listening occurs in places less than well defined.
We are imbued with awareness. However, this does not mean that we are fit to understand.
You know you are not alone in this life; sometimes, you even feel a deep connection to the people and things around you.
In fact, at some point, you may even suspect that you are not confined to your body.
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine that you are at a point just before your birth. (Hold that feeling for a moment or two.) Then you are born. Now, open your eyes. Isn’t the world bright? Maybe too bright? You briefly squint your eyes. The world is full of colors. Some things even take your breath away; the world is full of such powerful pulls. But there are also things that repel you.
We move through our lives, elated and disgusted by turns, all the time thinking infantilely that the world is a plaything and should yield to us what we desire.
But the world is not a plaything.
It is a mysterious place hot enough to cook our minds.
We are not here to play. We are here to deepen the colors and to be fuel. All the time here, we think we are consuming, but we are being consumed. As we tear the world apart, we tear ourselves apart.
Now, close your eyes again. Where are you now? You are on the verge of death. You just closed your eyes for the last time while dying. All the lights that have distracted you throughout your life are gone. You will soon be back to where you were before you were born.
Is it a long dream between life and death? Or is it momentary forgetfulness? We thought we were this and that when life and death are but bookends.
21. Of course, I am as limited as the next person. I don’t know more about reality than anyone else. I accept that. I prefer to know my limited reality by way of awareness. Others may prefer the physical or the mystical, which is also fine. There isn’t just one way to understand it.
Maybe we are all equally correct. Or maybe we are all wrong. Sometimes, we are right or wrong, but not all the time.
Do we have to get to the bottom of reality? Or is it more meaningful to learn to navigate it?
22. Our understanding is illusory. We understand precious little. Our so-called objectivity is overstated. What is said to be knowledge is understanding in isolation. Is it genuine knowledge if you are isolated from what you think you know?
There can, of course, be no knowledge without awareness.
Even if we think we know who we are and what the world is, few conclusions hold permanently and indisputably. So, what do we really know? If we say I know what this is, but I cannot see beyond this thing that I know, do I really know anything?
The fact that there is consciousness does not mean our present reality is only a dream. All I am saying is that I rely on consciousness.
How one chooses to discover reality is a personal choice. While one may prefer experimentation, another may find her way forward through awareness.
23. We work hard, get a job, have friends, and try to make a life for ourselves and our loved ones. This is said to be normal. Yet, we are no happier. It seems the route to happiness does not lead us anywhere but back to the starting point of trying to be happy.
24. All these years, I acted without knowing I was acting. I was not much more than an automaton. It was as though someone was dreaming but thought he was not dreaming, yet behaving as though he was. The worst was that I had failed to see the malleable nature of reality. I did not see how the world and consciousness fuel each other.
Life is a stage. We were young once. Some of us must now act the part of old people. I am increasingly detached from the roles I play in life. I seldom get excited or anxious now. I like it like that. In this state of mind, even death is acceptable.
25. My mind tells me that I am having a small meal or walking the path of life with my wife E. by my side. But what is it not telling me?
26. Once angered, our emotions can grip us. Or we may step back and watch angry thoughts flash through our minds. If we manage the latter, we may realize we are no longer angry.
This is true space, I say. It is sometimes more real than any physical space around us.
27. Thoughts can be convoluted and often unnecessarily complex. In fact, they can become so complex that sometimes you may have trouble seeing through your thoughts. But when you observe your thoughts as an observer, they become simple again.
(“I see my thoughts. I see their rise and fall. I can dive in with them, or I can refrain.”)
28. In deep sleep, our awareness continues unabated, though dormant.
Then, upon waking, consciousness returns with such a speed that it’s as though we have been caught by surprise.
We may feel the body before realizing it is ours. Oh, here I am in bed. Or I am moving my arms now. And we would be moving the arms and legs as though they were only marginally ours.
It’s all the ebb and flow of appearances, in and out, in and out, as natural as breathing.
29. When awareness rises, we have a newborn. When it recedes, we are left with a corpse.
30. Sometimes, when I wake up, I do not immediately know who I am, where I am, or what I did before sleeping. Things must be put back together in the mind. I piece them together like a detective. (Clues: I am in bed, so I have been sleeping. What did I do yesterday? What was I feeling before going to bed? Was I angry, sad, or disappointed? The sun is out, so it is late. My wife is no longer at my side, so the day’s activities have started.) It’s as if all of reality has just exploded out of me instantly and must now be picked up piece by piece.
31. We constantly vacillate between hope and disappointment, yearning and disgust, as well as brief satisfaction and feelings of emptiness. It is as if some internal calculus is continuously at work. And we devote all our energy to having this calculation reach a certain configuration to approximate, in our minds, happiness. But in the end, there is only disillusionment with how happiness has again eluded us.
32. If you say there is a creator, then you must assume there is something created and that the created is not intrinsically a part of the creator.
Alternatively, there is no creator, and nothing is created. We are here and will always be here in one form or another.
33. In the long years of my infirmity and needless preoccupations, I have neglected the passage of time. I barely realize I have become an old man, the same sort of old man I once pitied. People have repeatedly remarked how my hair has thinned out. Do I see an old man in the mirror? When I take the time to look, I see a strange fellow looking back. He seems unsteady, even shifty. I must admit that I do not like that face. He—this reflection of myself in the mirror—would not be someone I wanted to approach as being possibly friendly.
For a long time, I didn't know what it was about the image that repulsed me. It wasn’t simply that my hair was thinner or I had gained weight. Then it hits me: There is a young man still trapped in this old man’s body, the young man who used to be me but can no longer find expression in this feeble and aged shell. The young man wants to be as he always was: foolish, expectant, hopeful, argumentative, always with a dash of deviance.
How could what once mattered to a 16-year-old boy matter to me now? Yet, I continue to behave as if they do, as if I am still dependent on the goodwill of others, as if I still need to belong, and as if I still have a whole life ahead of me.
When this juvenile mood takes hold, I go sit by a window and reflect.
For a 16-year-old, this world was radiant and full of goodness and comfort. He did not yet see that it was all part of a grand unfolding he could not control.
34. Ramana Maharshi said, “There is no difference between the dream and waking states except that the former is short and the latter long. Both are the product of the mind. Because the waking state lasts longer, we imagine it to be our real state; but actually, our real state is what is sometimes called the Fourth State, which is always as it is, and is unaffected by waking, dream or sleep.” (A quote from The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words, edited by Arthur Osborne.)
I used to have a problem accepting that. It had seemed absurd to me. Of course, a dream is nothing like the waking state. One, to me, is unreal; the other is not. Apart from being factually questionable, it seemed to disagree with what I thought was my rational outlook. How could it be said that my life was a dream when I bled and was sometimes hobbled by sickness? Yet, strangely, as I got older, I began to see it his way.
Do you think you have control over your life? Or do you think it has swept you along? Do you have a say in who you meet? What about the circumstances of your life? The parents you were born to? How about how you met your spouse? Was that your choice? How did someone end up being a friend or a foe? Was that of your own volition?
Some of us have had success in life; others have not. Did you arrive at your station in life on your own? Was it your doing, or were you swept along?
If you have been swept along or think you have, you may understand someone who says life is a dream. As in a dream, you cannot change anything but must react to what is in front of you.
35. I am daydreaming about an ancient Chinese astronomer who looks up at the night sky, being carried off by ethereal concerns and away from earthly ones.
A child is crying in the background. It is his granddaughter. Maybe she is hungry again. The infant’s mother is out at work, trying to gather some coins for the next meal. His own aged mother is, as usual, in bed. She can no longer get out of bed.
Why do we keep wanting to go back to our needs and desires? Are we better than a moth disoriented by fire? The sky still hangs over our heads, whether we are rich or poor, healthy or sick.
The astronomer turns and looks up at the night sky once more. He finds this simple act of staring a good way to dissipate nervous energy.
36. Suppose you are dreaming and suddenly realize you are in a dream. Do you wake up with a start? You may. Or you may stay in the dream, knowing full well what it is, and participate in what unfolds.
37. A vision: a woman alone in a collapsed world, but she isn’t dispirited. She is a warrior, and her mind has turned inward. Every sound, sight, or tactile sensation takes her further within.
In another part of the world, a man is dying. He too has turned inward. The world as he knows it is falling apart, but he isn’t frightened by that. He has withdrawn all his tentacles and feelers. He can no longer see or hear like he used to, but his inner view remains intact. The passage out of life leaves him feeling moved and unreasonably happy.
