When a couple in the neighborhood brought home their newborn. I couldn't help but imagined how its new born consciousness had once animated my mother, my uncle, or any number of people living or dead.
I know this much. I know that the things going on around me aren’t me. They aren’t even about me. Nothing is personal. I am getting a better sense of how things are. I have journeyed through time only to realize time doesn’t exist, and I do not exist.
Sometimes, things around us have a way to spin out of control, so much so that it can feel nauseating. But other times, we are untouched. It is as if we are immovable within.
In many ways, we are like a mountain. We may be tripping over our awareness, but inside, if we look closely, there is persistent stillness.
There is always something transpiring, something changing or on the move. It seems the more things spin, the less I am able to keep up until, in the end, my heart just stays motionless.
I realize that even becoming still for a moment can leave me unexpectedly happy.
Have you noticed your own awareness? Right now, you may be hearing something, but who or what has actually heard? Hearing doesn’t mean much if you cannot pinpoint who or what heard it. It isn’t enough to point to yourself. You may be pointing at where the hearing occurs (within your auditory faculty), but no one can point to who heard it.
Things on the outside are constantly changing. The changes aren’t of your own making. They just happen—no different from how you, as a person, just happen.
You too, every bit of you, constantly change, mostly for the worse over time. Yet, there is a stability in you that you cannot explain. Like the eye of a storm, your consciousness is inwardly stable. You are a creature of constant change. Consciousness is not like that. It is something else. Its nature is different from you or the people or things around you.
Consciousness does not move at all. It is like a witness. It is always there, no matter what we do or what has been done to us—this quiet knowing of the comings and goings but without commentary.
Consciousness isn’t even thinking or reflecting. It is vastly different from anything that we have come across. Its existence is beyond dispute.
When you sleep (and not dreaming), you do not think, yet you remain conscious. You can prove that to yourself by waking somebody up. No matter how deep into the oblivion of sleep they have sunk, consciousness remains, to the extent that your can wake them instantly.
Even in dreamless, deep sleep devoid of “thinking,” consciousness is there. It tells you in no uncertain terms that consciousness isn’t arrived at via thinking. It is not part of your thinking process or your brain.
This is next-level craziness. I have lived long enough to know that no “me” is living inside my body. I am not really here, not the way we usually think. Consciousness isn’t confined to my body, even though I have gone into my body to try to find it. When I think I found it, all I got was a feeling of widespread knowing. I am consciousness, but consciousness isn’t just me.
If I come across the neighbor's newborn again, I will say hello to it and quietly wonder how, despite its being an infant, its consciousness is as old as the hills.
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