I believe that I have made some additional progress in understanding and engaging (my) consciousness beyond what I formulated previously, so I want to reflect a bit on where I have gotten to now.
My Granddaughter
Let’s take my granddaughter as an example of how one’s Self emerges. I am privileged to be able to spend time with my three-year-old granddaughter, Ronan. I have seen/heard her move from being able to say words and know what they mean to being able to string words together into more whole thoughts and successions of thoughts. This amounts to witnessing her move into a more and more expanded participation in time. Her (short) sentences now make sense. She can ask for something, describe something, react to something.
On a visit to our house one day, Ronan saw a big red Yoga ball. She called out: “Big ball!” and then “Up!” clearly meaning to throw the big ball up. Jane, my wife, didn’t think that was a such good idea so she said, “Take the ball outside.” Ronan understood and we walked outside together. She knew we were going to go outside, so she put one foot in front of the other as we walked through the house and out the door with the ball. Once we were outside, she said, “Throw the Big Ball! Up!” I did and she laughed, went after it, and rolled it back to me, and said, “Up!” and threw her hands up, and I threw the Big Ball again, and the process repeated, and we had a game that guided our behavior through time.
Ronan, her Mom, and I Facetime most every week. The next time we Facetimed, as soon as Ronan saw me she asked, “Where’s the Big Ball?” “Get the Big Ball!” So I went upstairs and got the Big Ball and showed it to her, and she said, “Throw the Big Ball!” which I dutifully did for a bit until we moved on to the Big Drum in my study which I played for her.
My daughter, Sirona, used to refer to me as “Crazy Hat Grampa” to Ronan, because I wear my hat and play with it and with her when we Facetime. On an earlier visit to our house, I came to the door without my hat and Ronan sort of cringed back and grabbed her Mom’s leg. Sirona whispered, “Get your hat.” So I ran and put my hat on and came back to the door. Ronan looked up at me, threw her arms wide, called out “Grampa!” and ran up and grabbed my leg.
However, now my daughter calls me “Big Ball Grampa,” and Ronan laughs.
In the interactions with Ronan, I can see her evolving a little Self that exists beyond her moment-by-moment temporal reality to bind some of her moments within bundles of meaning structured by her language and her patterns of interaction (little games).
Connecting With Our Selves
As we grow up, our personalities come to solidify, and we develop habits of thought/language as well as patterns of experience, action, and interaction. However, they tend to fall in different buckets.
One of Carl Jung’s many useful insights was that people differ in the predominant psychological function that takes the lead in our solidified personalities. He found four types of people: sensate people, for whom kinesthetic awareness predominated; feeling people, for whom emotional awareness led the way; thinking people, who interacted with the world predominantly through their intellects and language; and intuitive people, who engaged with the world based on their intuitions.
Of course, everyone has kinesthetic awareness, emotions, intellects, and intuitions and, for Jung, psychological health required developing a Self that could take in, process, decide about, and take action on information processed by an integrated balance of all four functions.
But, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Not only are most of us primarily stuck in one function, but our engagement with that function is largely an automatic unconscious habit guided process.
The Phenomenologists in the West have, by and large, focused on the intellectual function and language as they have built their philosophical systems. The Phenomenologists were right to look within at their experiences and attempt to identify the principles that governed their experiences. However, they tended to be thinking types, using Yung’s typology, and so they have tended to overemphasize the role of thinking and language in understanding the nature of experience.
Eastern thought emerged over centuries, not just the decades of the Phenomenologists, and evolved a more robust account of the nature of experience and a variety of sets of practices to guide the evolution of consciousness. I have followed various of those practices for many decades, myself, and have arrived at a place from which to produce my own formulation.
Temporal Consciousness
So, from this new, for me, location that I have arrived at, what do I find? Consciousness is temporal – a stream in which the present continually emerges leaving a past trail behind and reaching into an immediate future. The moving moment of time that constitutes our present consciousness is our unit of experience, reflection, and action.
Each moment doesn’t last very long, so we don’t have a very long time to experience, reflect, and act in any given moment. However, we can string our moments together and we can accomplish much more in a succession of moments linked by some form of overarching guidance.
OK, so far so good. But here’s the rub (to sort of quote Hamlet), what form does the overarching guidance take. We can talk either outload – or internally, as I’m doing now to drive typing – on a moment-by-moment basis, but our awareness has to extend beyond our moment-by-moment consciousness in a way that we can string our words together in a way that makes sense.
For a lot of us (me certainly when I got started on this journey) the time binding process becomes governed by language. We acquire a repertoire of words, and the ways words can interact (language). We assess a situation and want to engage with it – make sense of it, or take some action in it, or communicate something about it to someone else – so we reach into our repertoire of language and produce some language to guide us as we move through time within the situation in question. Within this context, the Phenomenologists have been largely correct.
But thinking is only one channel along which we interact with the world. If I take an inventory now, I find that my moments can include:
- The kinesthetic awareness of my body, the world inside me.
- The sensory awareness of the world outside me as I have experiences and act on them.
- The feelings that my experiences of the world inside me and outside me evoke and that my actions evoke.
- My thinking in words about my immediate experiences.
- My visualizations, which present themselves as voluntarily self-generated inner sensory experiences not tied to immediate input from the outside world.
- The visions that come to me in meditation and that I receive, without willing their content.
- My half a dozen or so out-of-body experiences.
- My memories and my anticipations along all of these dimensions.
I weave all of these dimensions together in the stories I tell myself to provide meaning for my life. All that I have just said is, largely, a recapitulation of where I have gotten to over the years in paying attention to and thinking about my consciousness. However, a few weeks ago, I came to a new realization, which has given me a new point of departure. Here is what I came to recognize.
A New (To Me) Insight
I recently took Nassim Haramein’s seminar on his new paper on Resonant Physics. In this seminar, he reiterated that protons and electrons are made up of submicroscopic Plank Spherical Units (PSUs). These PSUs are many thousands of times smaller than the protons and electrons for which they are the building blocks. Haramein asserted that the PSUs have mini-mini black holes at their cores.
A black hole is a location where gravity is so strong that light cannot escape. Each black hole is a singularity. A singularity occurs when some quantity goes to infinity, indicating a change in dimension. The Big Bang is the singularity that marks the beginning of the universe. It is a point where the laws of physics as we currently understand them break down. In information technology, a singularity refers to a hypothetical point in the future when AI can govern its own development, leading to exponential and irreversible growth.
Haramein asserts that each proton has a black hole/singularity at its core. Each star has a black hole/singularity at its core and thus each solar system has a black hole/singularity at its core. Each galaxy has a black hole/singularity at its core. Likewise for each super cluster. Likewise for the Universe as a whole, which functions as a black hole/singularity in a surrounding Multiverse. Haramein was the first physicist to assert that each galaxy has a black hole at its center, a proposition that is now widely accepted.
Instead of the famous “turtles all the way down” – a myth where a giant turtle supports the Earth on its back and another turtle supports the first turtle and so on – it’s singularities all the way down – and up.
This means that the world we see and hear and taste and touch is within one dimension that interfaces with another dimension (other dimensions) at every point. So, when I got this realization from the seminar, I asked myself, “Is there a singularity at the core of every human being?” And I immediately realized that the answer is yes.
Before I say what that is, I have to take a little detour. When I took Nassim Haramein’s seminar, I had just finished reading The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening by Paul Brunton. Paul Brunton was a significant follower of Ramana Maharshi, who taught the Path of Self-Inquiry (atma-vichara) sometimes also referred to as the Path of Who Am I?
Following some of the exercises in that book, along with other practices I have been pursuing, I have come to a couple of realizations. It is my Self that is aware of all my experiences and that initiates all my actions, but, since my Self is what is aware of all aspects of me, my Self cannot be directly aware of my Self because it is the vehicle of my awareness.
We just have to rest easy in the process of awareness, and the process of awareness implies a certain kind of Self that receives experience, initiates action, and manifests awareness. However the awareness that the Self manifests doesn’t extend backward to allow the Self to be aware of itself directly.
According to Ramana Maharshi, and a lot of Eastern thought, my Self is a manifestation of the one Self of the Universe. And my Self links with all the other Selves, the way the interior of all Black Holes link up through a network of worm holes.
OK, I have been trying my best to, in fact, rest easy in the process of awareness for the last few weeks, which set me up for the revelation I had after I asked myself the question in Nassim’s seminar.
The Singularity at the Core of Every Person
Of course, a singularity is at the core of every person. A singularity is the point of change of dimension. What is that for people? Well, of course, we change dimensions every time we go to sleep and wake up.
It appears that my Soul resides in the dimension that I enter when I go to sleep and cross the dimensional boundary. The Yogis say that there are four realms of consciousness: dreamless sleep, dreaming, waking, and being full awake.
Bang, all of a sudden everything turned around and I realized that dreamless sleep is my Soul’s primary state and I reach out from that through dreaming into the waking state for a period of time before I have to go back to my primary state by going to sleep. Going to sleep means crossing the boundary into another higher, faster dimension.
Every time I wake up, I enter a new mini-incarnation that is the life that I lead from the moment I wake up to the moment I go back to sleep. During each mini-incarnation I get the opportunity to live out a whole little life. Each of these lives can be pretty similar to the previous ones, but, each time, I get to make improvements from the previous mini-incarnations. (The movie Groundhog Day is the metaphor here, where Phil, the weather reporter, woke up into the same day and lived it over and over again until he got it right.)
I used to experience my waking life as my primary reality, and sleep was the strange other reality I had to enter each night to get refreshed, but sleep was a kind of aberration from waking reality. Now I recognize that dreamless sleep is my primary reality. However, I don’t consciously remember that reality because I have not attained full enlightenment. One way to understand full enlightenment is that fully enlightened people have evolved to the point that they can remember dreamless sleep, at which point they have become fully awake in the Yogi’s sense of that term.
Anyway, just today, I fully perceive the reversal of my Soul coming from the other side of my personal singularity, across the sleep boundary, and inhabiting first my body and then my immediate personal environment and then my extended environment (my neighborhood on out to my larger neighborhood, the Earth/Solar System etc.).
My first job, each time I wake up, is for my Soul to manifest as my awakened Self. (My Self is what my Soul manifests as in my waking world.) Then my Soul/Self has the job of forming the right relationships with my body, my emotions, my intellect, my spiritual awareness, and my environments by embracing the right persona and, from that perspective, planning out my mini-incarnation and then implementing my plans for the current mini-incarnation that is the day ahead.
Given that we can remember back to previous mini-incarnations (periods of wakefulness) and anticipate future mini-incarnations, we can string them together to accomplish larger objectives that require longer term plans and multiple mini-incarnations for their accomplishment.
Anyway, I now recognize that my ego (my not fully conscious waking awareness, mediated and guided by my talking to myself silently and aloud) has, indeed, pretty much died. My primary reality, my Soul, rests in the bosom of dreamless sleep, but I am connected with that reality at all times, because it is that reality, that Soul become Self, which reaches across the sleep/waking boundary and experiences everything I experience and initiates all my actions.
That is my true “I”. It is the experience of that “I” that Ramana Maharshi helps us to find. Experiencing and acting from that I is what the “Short Path” helps us get to. That is the ultimate goal of Mindfulness Meditation.
Vision Meditation uses our spiritual senses to take us across the speed-of-light boundary and experience some aspect of the Spiritual Realm. My Soul has a similar relationship with my spiritual senses that it does with my physical senses. It is that which experiences my spiritual experiences and initiates my spiritual actions analogous to the way it experiences my physical senses and initiates my physical actions.
All of the many physical and emotional and intellectual and visualization and meditation practices that I have followed and continue to follow as aspects of the “Long Path” are crucially important in that they provide the vehicle(s) through which my Self, my Soul, my I – accessed through the “Short Path” – can experience and act.
Our number 1 job is to act in the most loving and just way possible, put out the most powerful loving/just vibration we can through our own physical and spiritual bodies and then take that further into our immediate environments and our extended environments, mini-incarnation after mini-incarnation.
I keep feeling like everything is settling into a new, much more coherent perspective. Before, my philosophy left out how I spend approximately 1/3 of every 24 hours and left out the amazing reality that is falling asleep, i.e., crossing the boundary into what is clearly a different dimension.
On the sleep side of the sleep boundary, my consciousness usually takes on a kind of binocular awareness, in that I am aware of the whole environment of a dream as well as being aware of being a body within the dream and the environment of the dream from the perspective of that body. But, unless I am having a Lucid Dream, I am not aware of my physical body on the waking side of the sleep boundary.
Anyway, as I talk to myself to drive my fingers typing, I am doing it within the process of awareness, with my Self/Soul – the Soul aspect of which is most at home in Dreamless Sleep – reaching across the sleep/waking boundary and driving the typing and receiving the experiences of hearing the words in my mind and feeling my fingers on the keys and seeing the words appear on the page, i.e. the screen. I feel connected – dare I say it – coherent.
I guess one of my new goals, new practices, that flows from this perspective, is to try to go through a whole period of wakefulness, a whole mini-incarnation of a day, continually resting in the process of consciousness whereby I am in touch with my Self/Soul, that I cannot directly experience, but that does the experiencing and generates the actions through which I interact with my small, medium, and large environments. I wonder what other new practices will emerge from this new reality.
With my consciousness, as I have developed it through years of practicing the Long Path, I can now bring some level of coherence to my some 37 trillion cells. If I can do that with my individual consciousness, it is not too bizarre to think that humanity, in association with the rest of life on Earth, could form a Planetary Consciousness that could bring coherence to the 8 billion people and the somewhere around 10 million other species with their many trillions of individuals.
And, as I am growing into Planetary Consciousness, a binocular awareness is beginning to emerge, analogous to the binocular awareness of dreaming. Just as I can be aware of my body within my dream as well as the whole environment of the dream at the same time, it is beginning to be possible for my Self/Soul to be aware of my personal reality (kinesthetically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually) and also aware of the Planet as a conscious being and the Planetary Consciousness of that Planetary Being as well.
I guess what I am saying is that accessing my Self/Soul is beginning to enable me to acquire a coherent Personal Consciousness and Planetary Consciousness at the same time.
