Currently viewing the tag: "awareness"

All is OneWe often hear we are all one, but in which way are we so? Have you ever considered it? Clearly, we are all human, but within the physical domain we are assured, through genetics, an infinite variety. How then are we the same? Well, in actuality we are all the same, and it is to this sameness that great spiritual teachers have, throughout history, attempted to awaken us.

The material world is born of variety – different elements, different rock and metal composition, different phases of matter, different life forms, different species, and different environments. Every species has morphological and behavioral differences as well, which are only compounded by their relation to the environment. So between genetics and natural selection, then, the magnitude of variety is endless. For the human life form, there are also mental, emotional, and spiritual differences, that shape the temperament of the individual, as well as cultural and socioeconomic factors which act as strong influencers. Every distinct component of an individual leads to that person’s many-ness – their gender, race, national origin, sexual preference, personal style, musical taste, and palate to name but a few. Every person is unique and distinct when taking into account each difference that makes up that individual’s nuances.

On some levels, human beings celebrate differences. Most people want to be recognized and loved for “who” they are, their unique selves. While one may be proud of one’s heritage, one’s hometown, or one’s alma mater, most people want to be seen and appreciated for their authentic selves. As a result of this ubiquitous human drive, it is only natural for people to attach to the blueprint of their nuances – that is, to believe that their unique composition of differences is what makes them them. People attach to their personas to such a degree that if one or the other gets disrupted, the individual might fall victim to an identity crisis. Loss of job, death of a loved one, relationship changes are only a few of the great many changes that routinely disrupt people’s lives.

All is OneBut great spiritual wisdom teaches that none of these different elements are the actual us. Underneath lies something else, the true fabric of our authentic selves. This something else is precisely what the great sages claimed makes every living being the same in essence: an endless light, spark or spirit which sits underneath all those things we assume make us the psycho-spiritual-material entities we are. Not even the mind – our thoughts, perceptions, or emotions – are us. These things, too, come and go, so they cannot be our true selves by their sheer transience. The actuality of our essence is said to be eternal – existing before the current material form was born, and long after it will burn out – to either merge with the Absolute oneness (God, Tao, The Absolute, or Plotinus’ The One) or to inhabit a new life form, over and over again (samsara), until the final yoking (Yoga) of individual essence (Atman) with the absolute reality (Brahman). So the goal of Yoga, then, is to realize this individual essence through devotion (to Self-realization), duty* (dharma or purpose) and/or right discrimination (jnana or knowledge).

*Which includes action (karma)

But devotion, duty, and right discrimination are not the tools most often employed by the masses, even though the Bhagavad Gita stresses them (not enough people have taken the time to read/study the Gita). The tool most often associated with awareness of the Self is meditation. Now, let it be said that Self-realization is virtually impossible without devotion, dedication to duty and knowledge. Nonetheless, meditation is effective in bringing our consciousness in tune with our essence from a physical, mental, and conceptual standpoint. It may sound counter-intuitive to more discerning minds as to how we might tune-in to our true essence with machinery (our brains and minds) that I have already pointed out is NOT what we are in actuality; but if we consider which layers of awareness are available to us – sensory/motor, consciousness, and essence – in order of decreasing complexity and refinement, we can see how we must peel off each successive layer of attachment (or what some might call illusion –maya), from what we sense (see, hear, touch, smell, taste), feel or think…the forms of awareness we most generally use to distinguish self from other.

All is OneThrough meditation we can get underneath each successive layer of illusory self, sometimes by negating (neti-neti) – “I am not this; I am not that,” – and sometimes by simply knowing that anything transient (thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, memory, and imagination) is not us. This is what the Yogis call jnana – a knowingness of Self and non-self, a right discrimination between reality and illusion. When we sit quietly, and it may take some time to develop*, we have a greater ability to dive to the depths of our being, that simple yet refined essence, which is buried beneath the increasing layers of complexity, diversity and baggage that many call the ego.

(*This is why I recommend dedicating oneself to learning and practicing means of Self-realization, uncovering one’s purpose and living by service and duty, and constantly discerning between truth and illusion through right knowledge [some call it rationality, some call it intuition, but it is both, together])

The ego makes up our individuality, and thus, our sense of separateness from others; essentially it is responsible for the many-ness that populates the world. But the oneness which universally and eternally underlies all individuals making up the many at every level of existence is what the great teachers of history have referred to when they have said we are all one. We ARE all one …in essence. Our cells make up our organs, which make up our bodies. From the many to one. Our thoughts make up our personas, which make up our personalities. From the many to one. To understand this, and to use this knowledge to detach from the individual elements that we generally mistake for ourselves, is the true goal of meditation, and ultimately of Yoga. When the individual quiets the brain noise by focusing on the usual elements of illusion, labels them, acknowledges their transient nature, and negates them as Self, they start to merge with, and are engulfed by, an indescribable experience (not quite feeling, not quite conception) of oneness (which is both nothingness and everythingness in paradoxical synchronicity).

All is OneOver time, the ability to drop beneath the layers of consciousness allows the true Self to become aware of itself in every interaction and every dynamic. The Self recognizes it is the source of every experience, every relationship, and every sense of meaning. The Self knows that bliss is born of perception and attitude, which can be changed, and not the desires (and fears) typically inflicted upon consciousness. Replacing the self-love of the individual with love of the Self – the essence common to all things – changes our experience: desires are left unpursued, fears are discarded, and pleasures and pains are recognized as inextricably linked in space and time. By attuning to the Self, life can unfold spontaneously, without the pressure of needing this or that to happen. What is required is to simply discard the notion of individuation based on the transient elements of body, mind, and emotion, and to attune to what lies beneath them, and beneath consciousness itself. The essence of our authentic selves is what is common to all people. It is a pure awareness, in pure neutrality, bathed in unconditional love and appreciation for all things. Until we can look beyond the seeming many-ness of material individuation and attune to our underlying oneness, we will forever obsess over differences which separate us in the illusion we call “being ourselves.”

Consciousness - AwarenessIf a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? This long-standing philosophical question is the basis of many theories of ontology, the study of the essence of being. It basically points out the difficulty in determining whether things exist outside of their being perceived. In other words, without an observer, can there really be any phenomena at all?

The 18th century philosopher Bishop George Berkeley thought not: He believed material substance to be an illusion, and that all things existed only in the mind where they are perceived. No perception – no existence. He said:

“The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden… no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.” ~ Bishop George Berkeley

The twentieth century saw the advent of quantum physics, which seemed to corroborate Bishop Berkeley’s immaterialism. Quantum data showed evidence that things are not always as they seem. One major conundrum inherent in quantum theory was that particles did not occupy any definitive space, that is, not until a measurement was taken, at which time the particle would collapse to a specific point in space. This collapse occurred due to an interaction called an observation, whereby the measurement, or act of observing, interacted physically with the object being measured, affecting its properties through the interaction itself. Quantum physical observation, by some interpretations at least, appeared to confirm Berkeley’s philosophy: Truly nothing exists materially without it being perceived.

Even Albert Einstein was perplexed by the perception-necessitates-existence puzzle. His paradigm-changing theory of relativity sought to establish locality as the indisputable principle of reality. Locality means that an object is influenced directly only by its surroundings. In other words, an object cannot be influenced by something in another part of space without a wave or particle travelling through space between the two points to influence it. Locality, in a sense, describes a universe where things have their place relative to other things, regardless of who perceives them. Along with localization, Einstein became a strong advocate of the concept of realism, a belief that there exists “a real factual situation,” which is “independent of our observations.” To fellow physicist Abraham Pais, Einstein once remarked. “Do you really believe that the moon only exists if you look at it?”

Consciousness - AwarenessTo counter this conundrum, some have turned to an ancient philosophy which proposes that consciousness permeates the entire universe. Known as panpsychism, this viewpoint believes that all things possess consciousness, including inanimate objects such as rocks, clouds, and even man-made instruments like thermostats. This philosophy has iterations in Ancient Greek, Hindu, and Native American thought, among others. It is not too hard to imagine other life forms like lower animals (insects, for instance), plants, and even individual human cells having some form of consciousness. Native Americans expressed panpsychism as a profound reverence for nature, whereby they believed that all natural objects possessed sentience – that they were alive in a real sense. Panpsychism, then, offers a solution to Einstein’s disbelief of perception-necessitates-existence by providing an omnipresent consciousness to act as the observer necessary to maintain a continuous localized universe.

The Yogic philosophy, particularly Advaita Vedanta, teaches that the entire universe is cradled in consciousness. Aligned with the modern scientific concepts of entropy and emergence, the yogic philosophy explains that consciousness requires order (negentropy) and harmony (syntropy), such that consciousness can only be expressed through vehicles of varied complex systems (emergence). Some of these systems are simple and have simple levels of consciousness, while other are more complex, like the human mind, and have a more refined form of consciousness. In other words, consciousness exists on a spectrum according to the system that is transmitting it.

But Advaita Vedanta takes things a step further by pointing out that what underlies even consciousness is awareness. So, while consciousness is responsible for all things physical and mental, those things themselves merely float like waves in the ocean of awareness (which engulfs consciousness, and its constructs, completely). This is an important concept to understand, as some real distinctions separate consciousness from awareness. According to the Yogic philosophy (among others), these differences are what separate the illusions of reality from the truth of actuality. For instance, it is consciousness which is responsible for the ego, or the sense of “I”-ness. Our conception of separateness from all other things in the universe begins with our sense of individuation, or our identification of being a distinct entity. Awareness, on the other hand, knows no distinction or individuation, but only wholeness and syntropy. To be separate from the rest of existence is an illusion, while a cohesive oneness with all things is the truth of actuality.

Both the conscious and unconscious minds exist in awareness, as well. They are not separate entities, despite their very monikers delineating the mind’s isolation of one from the other, while focusing conscious awareness on only half the equation. Nonetheless, what the yogis call awareness, or the Absolute, is the totality of all that is; it is what they describe as beyond existence. Nisargadatta Maharaj said of awareness, “It is the changeless reality itself.”

Consciousness - AwarenessThe ultimate message from all this is that there’s no real separation between us and the rest of our experience. We are literally one with the people in our lives and everyone we encounter –what we might call a form of quantum entanglement. We are also one with the world in which we walk, such that everything we perceive as being “out there” is actually a reflection of what we have inside us. So the statement, “We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are,” is a truth we would be wise to acknowledge, like the idealists and various interpreters of quantum physics had before us, that nothing exists outside of our perception. And thus, every experience we have is in actuality a dynamic in which we are a player along with other people, things, and experiences of the world. This is in stark contrast to the perception of an “individual acting within the external world” in which things simply “happen to us,” an illusion of conscious reality. When we shift our perceptual understanding in this way, pain and suffering which we experience from the vacillations of isolation/togetherness, winning/losing, successes/failures, pleasures/pains, and people coming/going ease away. We come to a certain knowingness of the importance that every person, thing and experience plays in the unfolding of our magnificent lives.

Consciousness really is at the heart of our worldly experience. And the life we create is a function of our consciousness in complete alignment with our underlying awareness (conscious and unconscious together as a whole). Meditation, as a tool, gives us an outlet for which to go beyond consciousness, beyond the “I,” and beyond ego attachment. It allows us to bring the unconscious and conscious into complete wholeness, the inseparable state of awareness. You will never fully understand the body, mind, or consciousness until you go beyond them into awareness. Know the source of all experience, which is in yourself, and you will find no question left unanswered. This is what leads to bliss.

Some things are just not what they seem. The world is filled with illusion for the non-discerning mind. It’s not that we are dimwitted creatures we humans, but we want to believe, often in things in which we have a psychological investment…things perhaps lacking clear evidence of validity, or even lacking rationality. Take the video below for example–it shows you just how easy it is to be distracted…mmm, better to say caught unaware. And keep in mind that there are plenty of things in life we take for granted, or maybe even don’t really think about…but should. Yes, watch the video and be prepared to be blown away. Ha ha haaaaaaaa…..


Copyright © 2013 Dr. Nick Campos - All Rights Reserved.