Ch.3 - Life is Consciousness, Consciousness is Life
What Do We Think Life Really Is?
Life is Consciousness
The Main Interfering Factor Producing Interference in our Life is Our Idea of Self
Letting Go is Surrendering our Need to Control Life
[This chapter discusses the nature of life, how consciousness is the ground of life, not a bi-product of material processes]
What Do We Think Life Really Is?
If, as the Buddha said, suffering is caused by not paying attention, then we should start by looking at what we are not paying attention to. And for that let us start right at the beginning, or if you like, let us start with the biggest question of all.
What do we think life really is? It is going on around us everywhere, we are an expression of it ourselves, it is the basic and fundamental principle that governs our entire experience of being, and yet for all of man's ingenuity it still remains, to a large extent, the most unfathomable mystery.
Now I would say that instead of trying to reduce it down into its constituent parts and rob it of its exquisite mystery, we should allow it to be the very mystery that it is and start to acknowledge that perhaps there might be more to it than meets the eye. That perhaps there might be more intelligence behind it than we have assumed.
In many ways, in our failed attempts to understand it scientifically, we may well have robbed it of its very sacredness, which if we can reconnect to it might prompt us to respect it and honour it more than we currently do.
We have spent a long, long time trying to figure this world out through scientific observation. The problem scientists have faced since they tried to unravel life’s great mystery is that all they had to observe was the apparent physically expressed form of it. We can only quantify that which we can discretely perceive to be there.
The problem with this is that there is one great big elephant in the room the moment we even start down this route. And that is that life itself is consciousness. Consciousness is life. It is consciousness that is the intelligent organising principle that galvanises life and brings it into expression. Any attempt to understand life in the absence of consciousness is going to fall short. We have continued to adopt the 18th Century Western Enlightenment view that the universe is a material occurrence that under certain circumstances brings forth life. But what if, in truth, it was a conscious universe that under certain circumstances brings forth matter and expresses itself as life when this consciousness and matter interact?
Taking a materialist approach to understand life is a bit like trying to understand your computer simply by looking at the hardware. When you take the actual physical thing apart and look inside, trying to fathom how on earth it does all the myriad things it does, there is no way that by looking at the constituent parts you are going to figure it out. That is because the real functionality of the computer is governed not by its hardware, but by its software. It is the flow and current of information that brings it to life. We, the human being, indeed any form of life, are exactly the same.
Consciousness is the software package that brings this mass of flesh and bones to life. And it is the absence of it that marks it as dead. It is as simple as that. The appearance of consciousness within a living organism produces a subtle electromagnetic current or field. In fact all things that are alive are alive because of this subtle current that is produced by consciousness. It is this current that flows life through us, and the absence of it is death. It isn’t produced by the food we eat or the air we breathe. It is produced by the consciousness that arises within us.
If you ever watch a plant with your naked eye it is extremely hard to recognise the point at which it goes from being alive to the point at which it is completely dead. In a human being it is much more obvious. There is a moment that marks the point of death. Although the body does not look very different with the naked eye, because there is the same body, it has profoundly changed at an unseen level. It has changed so profoundly, in fact, that it is now no longer capable of performing any functions whatsoever. In just the same way a computer is not capable of performing any functions in the absence of its software.
The mark, the sign of life in all things is the appearance of this subtle field: this very, very delicate charge, or electromagnetic field and electrical charge. Its presence within the organism marks it as alive. The absence of it marks it as dead. With the withdrawal of consciousness from the body during the dying process, that subtle electrical field fades. There is a point at which it is no longer able to support the heart and it stops beating, and thereafter a point where all activity, even that of the brain and nerves, likewise ceases.
Life is Consciousness
That field of life is produced by one thing, and only by one thing. It is produced by the arising of consciousness within the organism, by awareness itself. I am not talking about the kind of active intelligence that is produced by our brain, I am talking about the basic ground of our very being, which is consciousness or awareness itself.
Nature expresses itself absolutely perfectly. It is a pure response to the conditions around it. The degree to which it is interfered with will always be shown in the way in which it expresses itself. Since we as humans are governed by the same principles as all life and all of nature, we would likewise express ourselves absolutely perfectly for as long as we are allowed to. There is nothing in nature that becomes dysfunctional or sick in anything like the way a human being does. That is because we are capable of interfering with the natural order of things that we live so disconnected from.
The Main Interfering Factor Producing Interference in our Life is Our Idea of Self
The main interfering factor producing incoherence in this human life, sadly, is our idea of ourselves, our active mind, our personal will, and our ability to impose that personal will upon the things around us. The mind, and the idea of ourselves that it expresses, seeks constantly to add or take something away from the experience we are having, and in so doing interferes with the experience.
But not only that, the mind interferes with the current of awareness within us that is actually having the experience. Now that is not to say that we should not be completely engaged in the life. But understand that it is consciousness that produced the life within you. The quality of it will determine the integrity with which that life is allowed to flow through us, or the degree to which it is impeded. That impedance itself is what we call ignorance, or lack of awareness. It is the lack of awareness that blocks the flow of life and energy through us.
And it is our active mind that is the interfering principle, which is why we have to be unconscious for a third of our life in order to function nicely for the two thirds that we are awake. Quite simply we go to sleep to get our conscious mind out of the way for long enough for our higher intelligence to put us back together again. Now that is quite an extraordinary thing.
What this means is that the very faculty that gives us the capacity to identify our sense of ourselves as a living organism, to register discretely, to be aware of our own life expressing itself through us, with a separate sense of ourselves - which is our human mind - is the very thing that causes the expression of life within us to become compromised or impeded. It is the same mind that marks the human being as the most complex, intelligent and evolved form of life at one level and that makes it the messiest form of life at another.
Because there is not anywhere else in nature that you will see this life principle interfered with anything like as much as it is within a human being. The untold number of ways in which the human organism degenerates in the course of its life, the ways in which atrophy occurs within its life, and the sickness and disease that appear – there is nothing else in nature that suffers anything like as much as we humans suffer. Be it as a result of physical degeneration and physical pain, or mental degeneration and mental pain. Apart from infectious diseases like viruses and bacteria or parasites, there are so few sicknesses, there are just a handful of ways that life decays elsewhere in the natural world.
These days very few humans simply die of old age or reach the end of life and just die of natural causes because the organism is simply worn out. The life principle in the human being is the most interfered-with expression of life there is. So our challenge as humans is to rise to the extraordinary opportunity that we have, something that most other forms of life do not have to the same extent, which is to turn up consciously within our experience, becoming fully aware of what is going on within us and around us, and to do this without making a mess of it. And therein lies the rub.
How can we completely and deeply engage in life and its extraordinary display that we are a part of without making a mess of it? The key to this lies in our perceived need to interfere, to impinge upon it at one level or another, in order to make it feel personally meaningful to us. Our inability to allow it to be what it is marks the point at which impedance appears within the nerve system, that subtle flow of electromagnetism that keeps us alive becomes disrupted, and the expression of life becomes at some level subtly impaired.
When that interference in the experience comes to an end and life is utterly unimpaired, it flows frictionlessly through us. Without the interference of our mind, our nerve system should be effectively a superconductor; it simply flows the current of life through us.
But there it is, the predicament we are all faced with. We have this intelligence that has the capacity to recognise what we are a part of. Our recognition of this is what makes it all seem worthwhile and extraordinary. Yet that same intelligence has this inordinate capacity to think it knows best and impinge upon the experience, grasping or rejecting it or thinking it should be something other than it is when in fact it is never anything other than what it is.
Of course on hearing this there arises in our mind the objection, ‘But does that mean we’re supposed to live in some abject state of indolence and indifference?'
No, it does not mean that. It means that what prompts you to act and engage in life should not be a rejection of, nor a grasping of, what is in front of you, but a complete willingness to accept it as it is.
I'm not suggesting that we do not completely jump right into the heart of life and fully engage with life. But thinking that it is mine and that it should be like this and should not be like that is the root justification for the myriad ways in which we interfere with it. This not only makes it messy but causes it to become dysfunctional.
It might be a very long time before the mind is subtle and concentrated enough to see behind the appearance of things to the process by which they arise. That need to understand is only our idea of ourself seeking justification, and as such we will always land upon the conclusions that suit us, or uphold our idea of ourselves, and reject the ones that undermine it.
Our journey out of suffering to the point where our sense of separation from what we are experiencing ends is the journey to that place where we are able to completely accept what is, as it is, and stop fighting with it. It may well take us on a rather roundabout route before we’re able to let go and accept things as they are. We may need to seek some kind of personal resolution in order to feel able to let go, but what we are engaged in here is not a personal process. It is not personal. The universe does not behave differently for you than it does for anyone else.
Taking life personally is the root of all our misery. However unique an experience of it we personally may be having, the process of life itself is not personal. That intelligence, that deeper intelligence that is at work in all life, allowing it to express itself perfectly wherever it is allowed to, is not working one way on you and a different way on me and a different way elsewhere on something else.
It is a single process and it does not vary in the way in which it functions, however it may vary in the way it manifests or expresses itself. It only ever expresses itself as a pure expression of conditions. What we are experiencing is not personal, but it is a personal opportunity to witness the extraordinary thing, the miracle if you like, that life is.
It is our taking it personally that is our undoing. And the point at which we stop taking it personally is the point at which we can start to enter truly into life and allow life to move through us unimpeded. And it is only at that point that we might get to glimpse it, see it undistorted and come to know it for what it actually is.
So the first stage on the path of untangling this tangled knot, whether it is suffering or sickness or confusion or despair, the first stage to get to that place of peace, happiness and contentment, is the process of reorganising ourselves energetically enough so that some sense of coherence can be experienced within us individually.
In that way we can start to connect, find something that we feel we can lean upon, trust a little bit. Only as we come into coherence with what is around us does a sense that there might be an intelligence behind this life, that is underpinning it and holding it together, start to emerge. For as long as we remain in conflict with the way of things, seeking to bend it to our personal will, that higher intelligence remains cut off, choked and unable to express itself through us.
Up until that point, we have assumed that it is this personal will of ours that is the galvanising and driving force behind life. For as long as that is the case we cannot begin to contemplate relinquishing our perceived need to feel in control, which is one of the greatest causes of interference with a process that we are not in control of. The more we insist on feeling or being or creating the sense or perception of being in control, the more we are going to atrophy that expression of life within us.
The only moment that you will be in control is when you utterly, utterly allow it to be what it is without rejecting it or seeking to grasp it. No matter how hard you try in every other moment, no matter how much control you exert over it, when you choose to relax you will not be able to relax completely, because you will not be in control, because you will always know that if you have bent your world to your will, the moment you relax it will start to fall apart.
Letting Go is Surrendering our Need to Control Life
Surrendering our control is a huge part of letting go. And in order to surrender we have to feel that we can trust it. The reason we feel we cannot trust the intelligence behind our lives is because it is so poorly expressed within us. It is so poorly expressed on account of the degree to which we are entangled and to which we interfere with it. Again it is a Catch 22. ‘I won’t let go until I know it will be OK to let go.’ But you will not know that it is OK until you let go.
The gradual, step by step process of yielding our need to be in control and coming to a place of trust in this intelligence is a very personal journey. That sense that we can trust it comes upon us gradually. Reaching that place is what we call grace.
That is the point at which your sense of separation from what you are experiencing and what you feel a part of comes to an end. It is the point at which the sense of yourself that you put at the forefront of your experience fades in stages, revealing in its wake the simple suchness of what you have actually always been experiencing without realising it. It is to meet this point where our sense of separation ends, to feel connected to that, this is the greatest longing that we have inside us.
And the only reason we have tangled ourselves up in knots and interfered with it so incessantly is because we have not learned to pay enough attention to it to see what is actually going on. The personal meaning that we seek in the end reveals itself to be only a kind of vanity, a need to be personally seen or met, and in the final analysis it reveals itself to be a compensation for not seeing the bigger picture. But life itself is inherently meaningful – turning up for it completely is the meaningful experience, not the story you tell yourself.
So when we start to sit and meditate, agitation, restlessness, frustration, discomfort, whatever it is that we experience that is not a state of serenity and peace or connectedness, this is the charge that we have accumulated throughout the life, that we are holding in the subtle electrical field at a software level and in our nerve system at a hardware level. This is our net stock of interference with that intelligence that I have just been explaining.
What we are actually talking about here is the feeling of not being able to be with ourselves. And that is actually our deepest suffering. Not being able to be with this moment and the next and the next, which is all there ever is. That is what suffering really is.
And the cessation of suffering is being completely willing and able to be with it; to delight in being with it when the special things in life come our way, eventually to find a delight even in the ordinary in every moment, being able to be with it with a sense of wonder and joy, and when it is truly challenging, to accept that it is that way and find the kind of humility, patience and grace that means we can even be with that.
It is to work patiently towards that point – this is the invitation that meditation presents to us, this is the invitation that we accept when we sit on the cushion and decide to stay patiently and start to really pay attention. It is an invitation to learn to be with ourselves. It could not be more pure. There is nothing added externally that is going to make it an extraordinary event. It is just you, in the most ordinary moment of all, which one day will become the most extraordinary moment of all.
So when you find that you are not resting effortlessly within yourself and you cannot leave things alone to settle naturally, when you insist on playing with it, or messing about with it, or in the daily life when you find yourself interfering with others and not allowing them to be, just stop. Pay attention to how it feels. Any unwillingness to be with your experience, try to overcome it.
And in that way that which does feel like friction will in stages come to pass, until there comes a point where there is not a sense of friction, where there is no conflict. And in that moment there will be no needing to be anywhere else but where you are right now. And that is the cessation of suffering.
There is no stone you have to look under so that one day you might find that mysterious key that unlocks the door to the solution to all your problems. It is not on the other side of the world in some exotic location, or at the foot of some great sage. It is in an ordinary moment in an ordinary place with ordinary you, just as it is. And when that simple moment is enough, more than enough, when you see that it is already complete, then the rest of life is a dance and an extraordinary opportunity to dance, fearlessly but lovingly and unobtrusively in this world.
I am not suggesting that it is easy. Real meditation is not easy. It is probably the hardest thing we will ever do, but it is so worth putting that much effort into, so that we can reach the point when we really can just be with ourselves, our lives and everything in it.
So that we can start to feel that life within us, moving through us, around us. So that we can connect with it in a way that we did as children, when we trusted enough to be fully open to it. So that we can start to recognise what we have always been a part of. Something perhaps far more wonderful and extraordinary than all the things we have thus far tried to dream it up to be.
