Chapter 1: Consciousnes, the Beginning

Do you ever get the feeling that there is something going on that are you not quite seeing? Some may feel as though there is a grander conspiracy going on in the world, while others have the sense that there is something deeper they are missing in the well known saying, “Reality is an illusion.” Whatever that inner desire or nagging feeling within you that stokes the flames of your curiosity the answer (or at least how to find it) is simple. In the end, and (as quantum physics is beginning to show) in the beginning what it all comes down to is consciousness.

When all the dimensions that we feel comprise our world are stripped away, what we are left with is pure, unadulterated consciousness. The beginning of all that is. So it seems just as well that consciousness is the best place to start when it comes to training oneself to master and effect the illusion that we call reality.

The Ghost in the Bio-organic Machine

Think about the state of the human baby when it is just born. What is the thing inside that little being that makes it one day capable of reading and comprehending this book? If you were to simply look at physical attributes, and survival was dependent upon that, humans would seemingly fall far below many of our fellow mammals who we inhabit this planet with. Within hours of birth, many species, such as horses, are up walking around and navigating their surroundings. But not us humans. When we are born we are basically capable of turning our head to the side when our cheek is brushed, holding our breath when we are dunked under water, and we suck on anything put into our mouths. Not exactly “top of the food chain,” at first glance. So what’s so special?

If you can for a moment, as the conscious being that you are now, imagine or try and think back to what it would be like to wake up in a world that made no sense, had no words or definitions, and simply existed, almost as a puzzle for you to figure out. The you that is figuring out the puzzle, at the deepest level, is consciousness. There is really no way to know what is going through a baby’s head in its first moments, minutes, months, or even years before they can communicate in a way that we understand. Thinking back on movies like Look Who’s Talking and Baby Geniuses, what if that is closer to the truth? Seeing the results from real world things like strokes and brain injury, the difficulty in relearning basic operation of this brain-body interface is difficult even for adults who’ve had a lifetime of practice.

This is where is starts to get tricky talking about this topic. This first chapter is dealing strictly with the concept/idea of consciousness as being the starting point for all that follows. The following chapters will get further into the topics of the mind, body, soul and how this all matters in the big scheme of things including the matrix we now find ourselves in, but we must start off with a strong foundation in consciousness if we are to make our way through the muddy waters of being.

The title of this section hints at the nature of consciousness. The bio-organic machine will be dealt with later, but the ghost is a matter of consciousness. It is consciousness in fact. I use the word ghost to help imply a few things. As if it is something that you know is there, and you swear that you have seen or caught glimpses of it, but when you go in for a further look, it seems ever elusive.

An interesting thought experiment or meditation is to sit, calm the mind, and then try to locate or feel exactly where your consciousness, or ‘you’ are. Where exactly do you exist in this thing you call your body? Where do you “plug in” so to speak? Much of what we understand through science points to the brain and say it exists in there. But where in there exactly, and what about the brain makes that the home of consciousness? If one of the big differences between the brain and other parts/organs in our bodies is its type of cells, neurons, then what about the discoveries of similar cells in both our heart/chest center region as well as our gut/stomach region?

I’ve had meditations where I was so mentally focused on an area in my lower leg that at that moment I would have said that my consciousness existed in that spot in my leg. That was that Now moment, and this is another. My logical mind has, since that meditation, seen numerous individuals that had lost their leg through various causes, and yet they still persist, so clearly consciousness is not solely located in the leg. Why then did it seem so all encompassing and emergent at that moment during that meditation?

One, Two, Me and You

Let’s take a moment here and talk about a topic that inevitably comes up when dealing with matters of consciousness and spirituality, and that is the topic of God. Trying to understand something so completely beyond what we experience as humans, from our human perspective, is inherently going to fall short, but that does not mean we should not try, nor is it in human nature to give up on the task. Using the tools we are given and the basic understanding of duality that is our dominant physical reality, we can try our best.

If consciousness is what we are in the beginning, then perhaps that too is what God is, or at least for argument's sake, what God exists as in this dimension.  Delving into the strange and fascinating world of quantum mechanics, as best as we can tell, in this field of energy in which everything exists, it only exists when we (consciousness) look at it. And often times, when we look with a certain expectation, what we find is exactly what we would expect. But how does the concept of God fit into all of this?

If things only exist when consciousness ‘looks’ at them, does the same thing apply to ‘consciousness’ itself? It would seem as though the only way for consciousness to exist is if Consciousness looks at itself and decides, or at least acknowledges, that it is or does. If God is this grand being, or grand consciousness just floating around in what we can best call space, perhaps it was only through the creation of something else, the other, was the mirror made and consciousness able to reflect upon itself and see that it truly does exist.

Looking at things from this perspective, perhaps the books of faith out there would be interpreted a little differently. “Let there be light… and there was light.” Rather than some thunderous voice from the abyss, perhaps instead it was an early conscious philosopher human trying to do exactly what I am doing now. Trying to describe consciousness and our state of being. I can use modern language and scientific understandings to paint my picture, whereas they used the fundamentals of what they knew. As far as life on this planet is concerned (from the human perspective at that time) the sun brought life. It is the beginning of what we know. In our early attempts to explain our inner truth, it was expressed through our outer understandings.

But the first line in the Bible is not let there be light. The first line is, “In the beginning God Created the Heavens and the Earth.” Right off the bat we are thrust into the human perspective of reality and the creation of duality. As if duality existed and consciousness (at least our human consciousness since this is something that God is creating) was thrust upon it.

[Now, as an aside from a purely philosophical standpoint, this could be exactly the case. But that pushes us into a realm of not only multiple universes, but multiple dimensions of reality not limited to just duality, but also triality and quadrality, etc. As we are trying to keep it to the simple basics of consciousness in this book, we’ll stick with this dualistic dimension we are currently experiencing.]

But opening with the creation of heaven and earth, and then giving it light, it’s pointing to the fact that duality is a given, and consciousness is tasked with navigating it’s treacherous waters. And from the human perspective, it is. Think again on about being that baby just born into this world. Duality and it’s full palette of sensations was thrust upon you, and not an owner’s manual in sight. As best as we can tell, consciousness simply watches the life around it, learns to interface and operate with this body that it inhabits, and through mimicry and growth continues to function from there. As I mentioned in Manual for the Soul: A Beginner’s Guide, from there you go through life and have experiences you deem as good or bad, and at some point you have your Conscious Awakening after which the real work begins. Duality is just the current training ground for our consciousness.

It’s my theory that all these things we do, including meditation, yoga, prayer, fasting, canting, etc., and things we ponder such as duality, non-dualism, the middle path, and inner peace are all an attempt to direct us back to the all encompassing oneness that is consciousness. Consciousness is capable of understanding and comprehending anything presented it, the task of life is really about choice based on your current Now moment…. Now, if you are like me, you might have gone back and read that last statement to get a better understanding. Immediately following that, a minion in my head said, “Well that’s easy to say, but what does that really even mean?” And thus the game of consciousness, the other(s), and “Everything’s a Sensation.”

It’s Just a Sensation

After I had my conscious awakening and delved into the world of meditation and metaphysics, my studies led me to the teachings of S.N. Goenka and Vipassana meditation. What had attracted me the most at the time was the fact that I was a college student (i.e. poor) and you could attend a 10-day meditation retreat with room and board completely free. Thinking on it now, I can see why it’s free… it’s no vacation. But while it is indeed “hard” inner work, I maintain to this day that the 10-day retreats that I have attended have been some of the best experiences of my life. And I share this little tidbit not as an outright endorsement, but to introduce one of the main concepts I first experiences through Vipassana, and is something that is repeated frequently. Everything you experience is just a sensation.

Remember now, we are starting at the very beginning. Tabula rasa, a blank slate. One of the hardest things to understand and accept is this: From a pure consciousness standpoint, in this physical dimension, everything you experience is a signal coming from your surroundings to your consciousness which your consciousness uses to better understand its surroundings. And I mean Everything. Every sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, vibration, thought, feeling, sensation, and inner awakening is consciousness receiving and interpreting a signal from every direction out from it’s localized point.

At first this might seem like a very cold, or logically minded way to look at it, and in many ways it is. Everything that we experience is simply a sensation or signal helping us get a read on our environment? What about feelings like love, hate, passion, and anger? This concept will be revisited throughout this manual to help further explain it from different perspectives, including how it relates to the body and mind, but let me provide an example to help introduce the concept. (See if you can identify different concepts related to The Grand Show interlaced in this example)

You and a group of friends are having a get together and the mood is pleasant and relaxed. A few more people show up, and soon you start to feel different, as if something has changed. You find yourself a little more agitated or irritated, and little things are starting to get you angry. You notice this change but try to just brush it off because you clearly have nothing to be angry about at that moment and just want to enjoy the company of your friends. A couple minutes later an argument and fight ensue between one of the recent arrivals and someone who had been there a while. So what really happened with your experience in this scenario?

This is where the sneaky, lazy enlightenment (From A Beginner’s Guide) becomes not so sneaky and lazy. In fact this part of the process requires quite a bit of work that is uniquely challenging: Unlearning what you have previously learned. As you will further explore in later chapters, (1) while it is true that this is your body, this body is not who you are, and (2) everything is connected. Now let’s bridge some gaps.

All sensations are s signal to our consciousness about our environment. When you were at the party, before the new guests arrived, the various signals in the room, especially the mindstates’ of the people there were generally mellow and cohesive. When the new guests arrived, the person who eventually got into a fight was already in an agitated state from an encounter earlier in the day. The reason that you started to angry and agitated was due to this fact. The problem with this scenario and modern thinking is that most people assume that, when they feel an emotion, it is automatically coming from them.

Up to that moment you have had a lifetime of experiencing life from your unique perspective. You’ve run the full gambit of the feelings and emotions that you are capable of, and you have a database of memories to pull from to understand your future experiences. You have felt anger before, and it manifested a certain way in your body. Maybe your heart starts beating faster, or you get a knot in your stomach and lump in your throat or your hands start trembling. Whatever your specific symptoms, you’ve felt anger. And for some reason, even though you saw no reason at all, you felt anger. But the anger wasn’t coming from you. That was your body’s way of telling your consciousness that somewhere in your environment, anger had shown up.

Now you, being a more conscious person (or just lucky that you weren’t the closest in proximity to the anger emitter), were able to examine the feelings/sensations of anger that arose inside of you and dismiss it away, but not all were as successful. The old saying, “It takes two to tango,” comes to mind. The person with whom the newcomer fought with was simply willing to engage and exchange with that anger energy being emitted, and thus their consciousness was pulled into the feuding world of the minions (The Ego voices inside of your head).

The Ultimate Wish

Try and remember back to when you were a child and you first heard of the concept of a genie (or some other representation) granting you three wishes. Can you remember what that earliest version of you wished for? While I cannot definitely say that I know the first answers that I gave to that question, I can honestly tell you the answers that I had come up with when I had actually put some time and thought into it. The first wish that I came up with would be very telling of the path I would take later in life. My first wish was that I could understand/speak every language that had or would ever exist. That way I would be able to communicate with anyone, and I would always be able to understand what someone was trying to say.

I’ll admit, I was pretty pleased with myself when I came up with that wish, and I remember telling anyone who would listen so they could confirm that it was, indeed, a well thought out wish. But it was soon trumped by the second wish, the ultimate wish, which is still the best wish I have been able to come up with. And that wish was this: I wished I could be the best at anything that I wanted to be (and later I added the stipulation “if that is what I truly wanted.”) Think about it, it trumps wish number one because I would simply have to want (intend) to understand or speak any language and it would be so. I could be the best athlete, teacher, writer, jungle gym player (I was a child), couch potato or homeless person I wanted to be. Did you notice those last two? This wish covers all bases. It even includes the opposite end of the spectrum we normally think about. I could be the best and losing or forgetting or being mean or being a poor athlete/teacher/writer if I so choose to be.

Now you might be thinking, why would you wish to be bad at something? Well, of the variety of reasons I can come up with off the top my head, one of the least sinister would be the ability to be so bad at a sport that it enables another person, who usually gets bullied and made fun of for being a poor athlete, to win and gain some valuable social credibility in an otherwise bleak landscape. Putting aside all issues of morals, ethics and the ridiculousness of thinking you can ever know what is truly better for another person, it still really does seem like the ultimate wish to me. But you know what, it’s clearly not my own original thought. Simply stated, being the best at anything and everything is what consciousness does.

God, Coma’s, and Prisoners

The first time I remember “bumping” into this consciousness idea came from an unlikely source. There are many marvelous and awe inspiring human creations around the world, including cloud surpassing skyscrapers, ancient pyramids, CERN, and global connection through the internet, but it was another human ability that caught my attention. I remember reading and hearing stories, or watching documentaries about prisoners, their lives and prison escapes and being astounded. Sure, there are people of all levels of intelligence in the various socio-cultural roles we place on people, including those that wind up in prisons, but the ability for some humans to escape situations specifically designed to be inescapable is nothing short of magical. Or genius. Or fast forward to the end… consciousness. You put a person or a group of people in a room or puzzle for long enough, and eventually, they will figure a way out.

This reminds me of a metaphor a spiritual teacher of mine would use to help explain god, consciousness, and the nature of reality. Starting with the perspective most familiar to us, imagine you are a person lying in a hospital bed. The reason you are in that hospital bed is because you were in some sort of accident. This accident has left you without any of the senses with which you have learned to navigate life with. You can no longer: see any light, smell any scents in your environment, hear anything from the monitors in the room to the sound of your own heartbeat, taste even the simple ‘nothing’ taste of water, or even feel the sensation of your back side being in contact with the hospital bed. For all intensive purposes, you are cut off. What do you feel? What do you do?

If you push into this exercise and give it some deep thought, I would say that you are actually starting to push more towards what it would actually feel like to be pure consciousness, and towards a better understanding of what it would actually be like to be God. Really think about what your mind would do if you were in that state. The different voices or minions inside your head would still be there, at least at first, and there would likely be some intense inner dialogue going on as your awareness comes to grips with the truth of your new reality. The ability to end your life is not within your control, so eventually acceptance would come. What would come next?

A good possibility of what would follow can be observed by watching a child alone at play. Free from the awareness of and observers eye, especially that of an adult consciousness, fantastical lands only surpassed by the stories that occur within them emerge out of the child imagination. Something similar is what would eventually be rediscovered were you to find yourself in the state described. Trapped without the senses it’s had all along, your consciousness would be forced to use it’s most powerful tool, imagination. And out of that, your own universe could be formed. Perhaps a better way to look at the statement, “Our world is an illusion,” could be to say that our world exists in the imagination of Consciousness. As Einstein famously put it, “Imagination is more important that knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there will ever be to know and understand.”

All Paths Lead to Consciousness

In the end, whatever insights, understandings or enlightenment you feel you have gotten from your life experiences, beliefs, pursuits, religion, and other points of focus, the thing that will have gotten or understood them will be your consciousness. Even understanding those last two words, your consciousness, is truly the task of our lifetime, as I will further explain in this manual.

In Manual for the Soul: A Beginner’s Guide, I put forth a basic understanding of enlightenment as being the journey of life, and not some end goal or destination. Following the thread laid out so far in this manual, you might begin to see the end goal as pure, unadulterated consciousness, simply observing all aspects of life. And that, indeed, is where this path may lead to eventually, but always remember we are here for this human life as well. Being the all knowing, omnipresent, all encompassing consciousness that we may feel represents God may seem like the ultimate goal, but this current illusion we find ourselves in exists for a reason. Having all that consciousness with nothing to pay attention to seems kind of pointless and boring. Instead, it’s about finding a way to integrate these truths and understandings into your everyday human life, thus seeing and helping return the magic that exists in our world. That is the goal of this Manual, and the entire Manual for the Soul series, so prepare to open your minds and see all that you are capable of, and that capability starts with the simplicity of consciousness.