✴︎Being^Awareness^Wholeness

Reality is a funny word that, somehow, means just being, self-awareness, and also the wholeness of everything. This is not a poetic rendition or lines of self-help inspiration. It is a fundamental zero-dimensional field of existence–mentioned in the Indian Vedas (satchitananda) in which all potential subjective phenomena, objective noumena, and a total ground of transobjective plurality exist in/as an inseparable state of totality. It is important to note that, according to this and many other cosmologies which identify consciousness as a fundamental, a priori, or somehow inherent and integral property of reality, we really have to turn our worldview upside down. It is a valid worldview, but one that means we will need to be very careful about protecting it from the assumptions of science, religion, and politics.

Science wants us to start from the assumption that matter and energy are abiotic, and that life and consciousness are, more or less, spontaneous and random. We won’t go into what a massive assumption this really is, and that it uses a premise whose rationality is measured from the relative position of discreteness, not fundamental unity and emergence. Meanwhile, religion and spirituality want us to measure reality according to a subjective, mystical, devotional perspective–again, this appears rational if we start our measurements from our own inner experiences, which recognize a “higher power” in superior position to our own subjective sensation and perception. Politics meanwhile (and we are certainly a political species at heart) is pragmatic and selfish, simply wanting our species to apply what they know about science and religion to ensure a status quo reality self repeats, remaining continuous. These are more or less obvious reflections, but when we talk about the real it becomes very, very hard to keep these streams of influence separate, especially from their influence on our instinct and intuition.  

Back to the Vedas, which of course like many original scientific, religious, and political ideas, in their conception, were pure and genuine. It is not the Vedas telling us this actually, but all those perennial voices throughout the millenia that are skeptical, original, and intrinsically motivated in their pursuit of a fundamental ground of being. It could also be from a Tibetan Buddhist, Greek Stoic, Toltec Nagual, Taoist Alchemist, a flash of intuition from someone in prayer or a quantum field scientist synthesizing data about field phenomena. It is also an ordinary kind of inner experience we can, with the right approach, discover and experience everyday. It is a happening that can be readily observed and studied. And of course, with the right approach, it can also help us better govern our planet and its resources, bringing harmony to diversity and plurality. 

The right approach is one that begins at the beginning and stays there (did you think we would end at the end?). In the beginning, pure being/awareness/wholeness decides to conduct an interesting experiment upon itself. We can think of this exercise as the birth of a dreamer and their dreaming. The dream in this case represents fundamental particles which acquire mass (on loan) through their interactions with the dreamer, producing vibrations, forces, and mechanical systems. On the other hand, the dreamer observes (Catiously? With enjoyment? Nonchalant?) all this noumenal, atomic happening from a place of constant relativity and every changing relationship. However, the dreamer and dream cannot actually exist without each other, and to sustain their own existences must continuously enjoin and create, sustain, emerge, and embody together. (Meanwhile, there is pure being, which in this working model remains aloof, in superposition with the dreamer and the dreaming, yet unable to directly or indirectly participate. This is not entirely accurate, but that’s for another article and another conversation.)

This is a fundamentally different cosmology than the one proposed by science, religion, and politics, and will yield a radically coherent form of sensibility, instinct, and intuition. If something exists in the universe, that is because it always existed, as a potential and as a potentiator. We cannot point our finger at discrete properties and assume they are cumulative, statistical accidents formed through a nearly endless line of binary cause and effect chains. If consciousness exists today, it has always existed, and it has expressed itself through emergent timespace forces as an elastic, derivative condition called form. This is true for “us” as well. If “we” today it is because we have always existed, with more or less self-formation, or upon reactive thresholds of stable, individual and collective complexity. If matter exists today, it too has always existed as a potential, an ideal, as an abstract mathematical entity(ies). 

Can you imagine, right now, what it would be/feel/look like to exist as the precosmological substance-non-substance totality, in which everything exists at once? No time, no space, no relativity, no plurality, etc.? Would it be like yourself or like someone else? Would it feel like emptiness or fullness? Would it look like an infinite expanding perimeter or an infinitely contracting center? To answer these questions, we must invent new archetypes and methodologies, even if it is tempting to bypass an inverted worldview through the objectification of scientific inquiry, the subjectification of spiritual faith, and the immaturity of our political urge to survive and benefit at all costs. It is much harder to turn the entire universe on its head–rendering it and ourselves right-side-up. Taking a step back from ourselves and our worldviews, adopting greater anthropological curiosity toward our species and planet, we can try a new approach to consider what exists.

Perhaps the universe is a singular, organism-like, machine-like, lucid state of consciousness. In this worldview, there is no inanimate matter and there is no separation between humankind and the “natural” world. Our consciousness is shared with the consciousness of everything. We exist in a dream that is continuously dreamed, rather than set in motion like a domino chain that continues to fall. Instead, everything is re-created every instance. We exist as the dreamer of this dream, even if we are also separated by countless dimensions, fields, and membranes that give us the uncanny sensation of being a discrete observer. In short, we are at the elastic limit of ourselves, in which being has threshed itself into awareness and wholeness, into death and atoms, into reincarnation and galactic cycles, into sensation and perception… 

This is not a universe we can simply think or feel or act our way around in. If we want to develop new instruments and techniques capable of perceiving and entering reality, we will need to rediscover our superposition as companions of a living, lucid universe–as dreamers dreaming ourselves. It is a deceptively simple and yet challenging endeavor, one that will ask us to reevaluate the significance of ritual as an advanced technology. The same ritual movement that weaves massless, dimensionless singularity into relativity, form, and sentient individuality will need to be reconstituted at every level of society, both to cure us of the disease of our own misoriented perception, and also to invent new ways of being alive in a universe we created for ourselves–perhaps even to call home.