Freedom in Consciousness
How do I describe a vast moving sky of clouds, ever moving, reshaping, appearing and disappearing? The moment to moment reality of my thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations seem to appear and disappear as clouds in the sky, sometimes following a recognizable pattern but mostly appearing as a random movement.
In the midst of these waves there is the “me”, “the one who watches all this”, “the one who chooses from these thoughts”, the one who believes to have the remote control in the display of the stream of consciousness.
Time and again, transiting through the space between thoughts, a direct perception unmasks this “watcher”, “the chooser” as just being another channel in the same stream. These moments remind me of the strength of the illusionary world my brain is capable of creating and how little access I have to the process that creates this world of illusion.
Clarity and insight into consciousness seem to come about only when there is spaciousness and when there is no deliberate attempt to pursue clarity. And in this piece I would like to share what I harvested in these moments of spaciousness.
I want this piece to remain fluid, something in motion, no final statements or conclusions.
An attempt to make explicit our shared humanness and pointing to these processes in all of us.
I use the word “my” and “our” interchangeably here to emphasize my understanding and my experience that we share the fabric of a common human consciousness and that the individual differences of personal history and idiosyncrasies, which appear huge, are in fact superficial.
Our brains, our thought, need order, safety and space. When danger is perceived it will allocate it's energy to meet these needs. I would like to draw attention to our perception of danger itself because, as I understand it, the origin of our human suffering lies in our perception rather than in the objects of danger.
Just the other day I felt contracted and tense and my brain was spinning. All the channels of my stream of consciousness played scary programs: I saw people not understanding me and thinking the worst. I saw a future of not meeting my financial needs. I saw my self in places where there was no choice.
The thoughts; “I won't be understood”, “there will not be enough money”, “I have to do things I don't like” were alive and triggered feelings of fear. These thought-feeling's created a flood of unpleasant sensations in the stomach and other parts of my body. The thought-feeling “I am afraid” emerged and consequently my brain contracted and went into its fight/flight/freeze mode, projecting a scary dangerous world on the screen of my consciousness.
This familiar and apparent logical response pattern easily escapes my awareness and scrutiny. I notice an insensitivity in me for habitual and familiar patterns. The fact of being familiar with a pattern creates some sense of safety and acceptance, even if they are harmful to my well-being.
The moment thought responses like “I am afraid” appear the less transparent nature of our thought processes are exposed: “I am afraid” is a reflective position, thought (“I”) is reflecting on itself (“am afraid”), the sensation of an entity in our thinking that is in control of the thought process. It also reveals that the thought “I am afraid” is perceived as being part of me, this involves some kind of decision. And lastly, by using the word “afraid” the thought response is framed in the context of all the memories, beliefs, values and associations that comes with this word.
In summary the response pattern after the trigger is; a thought-feeling, the rise of an observer (the “I”, the “self”) in thought, the identification with the thought-feeling and a translation of the perception by framing it into words. These response patterns escape awareness because most of our energy goes into an “emergency scramble” in thought to find a way out.
This pattern is my life, our life, and seems to me the bedrock of our human suffering.
What happens to a brain when it's deeply discontented with churning over the various objects of danger? Where the process of thought responding to thought, responding to itself, is seen for what is is. As I understand it it is in this discontent that space emerges where one can observe the thought processes that creates the sense of “I”, the identification and the framing in words. And these processes can only exist in the dark, in the light of observation they cannot exist. And it is in this space where Freedom starts, outside the known.