(the realization you’ve been ‘rabbit-holing’ all your life…)
Not every day that I sleep in past 7 a.m. this time finishing with an elaborate dream about going to Washington to speak to the House about the Impeachment proceedings.
Then, hearing from my wife about certain sleep issues like waking up and the surface mind is racing with problems and anxieties while the rational part is sleepy-tired, not yet roused. How scientists have found that imagining a huge whiteboard of problems and issues can be semi-consciously wiped clean, making it possible to go back to sleep.
As CNN broke the news about a possible terrorist incident on London Bridge ‘later today’ across the pond. Which got me thinking about all of this peculiar run of larger consciousness this morning rolling through my life in the above short period of time in one specific place.
Our own personal consciousness, which is very much self-containing and seemingly self-generated, fills our mind every day in whatever specific, limited form. Most of us view ourselves as “self-encapsulated egos” or individual selves whose limited views are generally most of our inner daily reality. Seen a certain way–no one else exists– sometimes/often even significant others, family members, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, strangers, et al. That includes all those people we experience on tv, online, or in books. The basic illusion of ‘separation’/”I am an island”.
Periodically, inevitably, we meet, see, or hear from all these ‘others’. It is then that we become most aware of others’ consciousnesses, how they, in turn, process all the physical reality of their lives. We expand our consciousness through these contacts with others, which, in turn, expands our own awareness and consciousness to varying degrees. “The Information” as I called it in earlier blog entries, but when you come down to it, that which we seek, desire, need, and want every day. People and places where you can get this nutritional consciousness each day.
“Feed your head” pronounced the Jefferson Airplane in their sixties anthem “White Rabbit” as it mused about one of the great works of awakening consciousness of all time: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
It is important, though, to recognize, though, as happened this morning for me, that you do not have to deliberately and actively ‘go after’/search for consciousness each day as I regularly do. Sometimes, as in the three things I reported above first, it just simply happens to you and, more to the point, consciousness and its possibilities and implications for your own awareness, are simply ‘happening’ every day as long as you have eyes, ears, and the rest of your senses. They are there potentially to be processed, felt, empathized with, and reflected on. They are the readily available ‘fodder’ for any consciousness mind, not just your own, but the myriad others in infinite spaces and times (past, present, future) here on Earth.
ps/ And I am very much Buddhisticly aware of consciousness in what Frost called “considerable speck[s]” or larger entities be they animal, vegetable, mineral (who knows?), or alien. But potentially in most of the denizens and ‘things’ of Earth: a large infinite field of potential connection, awareness and consciousness.
the lingering questions/ In the words of the Caterpillar “Who are you?” and What limits to consciousness have you set in your own life?