What is Consciousness?

No matter how you look at the world, it’s clear there’s life here. Life seems to be rare in the universe, but it’s abundant here. It’s hard for us to imagine a world without life because imagination requires consciousness and consciousness seems to require life. Can a star be conscious? Well, maybe. I suppose I don’t know whether consciousness requires life but I can say that life is, in some way, a conduit for consciousness.

You are conscious. So am I. So are trees, fungi, beetles, and dogs, but in different ways than us. Plenty of people don’t think that’s true, but just ask any indigenous culture. There’s reverence for creation because creation is what we are–we are part of the world, not separate from it. Everything in us, from our bones to our brains, comes from the earth. Where consciousness or the soul comes from is unknown, but we came from the living things of earth, and living things have consciousness. Monkeys are conscious of how their behaviors affect their place in the social hierarchy. Plants bends towards sunlight instead of shade. Scientific materialism can’t explain how indigenous elders communicate with trees, so they say it isn’t possible. Do you believe them?

We come from the earth. We are the sum total of all our ancestors put together, including the ones who weren’t conscious (like, our single-celled relatives of 4 billion years ago). Does life beget consciousness? What about complex life? Is there a certain anatomical feature that generates consciousness, like the hind part of our brainstem, or our occipital lobe, or is consciousness merely electrical impulses interacting with organic life forms?

I have only a lifetime to ask and reflect on these questions, no answers. The known is overrated. The world is far bigger than our minds can imagine–but why not at least try?

The Catholic Shadow

If the Catholic Church doesn’t start to reflect, recognize, accept, and begin to integrate its shadow, the faith will be irrelevant in 50 years. Enough Augustine and Aquinas–we need Jung.

Write, then Think

Today I told my students the truth about writing and thinking:

When you write, you think. Neurons in your brain start firing in a familiar pattern until there’s no more neural connections in that area. That’s when some students stop writing–when they run out of ideas. They believe they can only write about what they think about first.

This is exactly when you must keep writing.

When you keep writing in the face of a dead-end neural pathway, you have no choice but to write about something else. You go to another section of neural connections, then transcribe that though process on the page. Then another, and another. You keep writing about what you do know about, what you can uncover within your own mind, or about some questions you have about that which you don’t know.

Every now and then, that process of writing, then writing more, allows you to draw connections neural connections between the ideas you wrote down, pathways you didn’t previously have. And you have just learned something new, without turning to an outside source. It was within your own mind. A self-revelation, a connection, a link that might shift your perception from here on out.

So write, and keep writing. Do not think first, just write. Let your thoughts flow then let them snag, trip, scrape their knees, and flow again. In this way writing is an act of courage–it’s going where your mind hasn’t gone before, into the unknown. Into yourself.

More than Meets the Eye

Order is only possible if there is also entropy. Entropy seems to win.

Entropy, as thermodynamic holds, is always increasing. All aspects of the universe tend toward chaos, towards falling apart. Organization is seldom witnessed, let alone maintained.

If God created everything, why did God create entropy? Why do things have to fall apart?

Perhaps the only way things can ever organize is if the raw materials somehow came together in the first place. The only way for things to come together, it seems, is if there are plenty of things that fall apart, first. The Big Bang did not create the perfect conditions for Earth; it created the conditions for stars to burn and explode, then Earth took shape after enough rock floating was floating around our sun that gravity pulled it all together. Order, but first there was chaos.

We tend to justify order as a good, benevolent force and chaos as a bad, malevolent one. Perhaps that’s the way it is. Or maybe order is an evolutionary mechanism, intrinsic to the survivability of complex social species such as ours. Maybe we equate order with goodness because that’s what’s best for our survival.

Either way, whether order, chaos, organization, or entropy takes over, all are aspects of God, Who is all things. There can be no light without darkness, no order without entropy, no good without evil. Life is duality, but here we are thinking God is only the good. It’s all God, is it not?

Being a Professional

Show up, do your work, go home.

Show up on time, do your best work, go home feeling accomplished.

Show up on time so you can focus without early distractions (like email, or the mess from yesterday), do your best work because the world needs it and your company enables it, go home feeling accomplished because you did something that moved you towards the change you seek to make.

Amateurs do the work because they have to. Professionals do the work because it’s important and the world would suffer if they didn’t.

Memory

We don’t remember much from when we were babies. That part of our brain wasn’t online.

What was online, though, was the rest of our itty-bitty bodies. Babies are sensory machines. It’s only through their experiences of the world–touching, tasting, smelling, grabbing, moving, crying–that they learn, grow, and develop. But what is “learning?” How does a baby learn?

Through neuronal pathways. Every time a baby tries to crawl, its nervous system attempts the complicated physiological process known as locomotion. In the beginning it doesn’t work. But after trying and trying, the neurons attached to the muscles in the arms and legs get enough practice. Like ski tracks down a fresh bank of snow, the baby’s brain now has the deep grooves of the neuromuscular pathways necessary to crawl. And that’s basically how learning works.

A baby doesn’t make memories because its brain is busy learning how to be alive, and a baby must be entirely present, in all its senses, in order to learn. Meanwhile, its body has to pay very careful attention to its environment so it can figure out how to act against gravity, understand, communicate, move, fight, flight, think, and, eventually, grow up. The visual memories we typically think of as our imagination don’t come until later. First, our body has to learn–then remember–how to live and survive.

As we grow up in our modern, westernized society, we are less in our bodies and more in our minds. As we are less aware and sensing of our bodies, we become less present and more past and future oriented (attention moves away from the brain stem and spinal cord and to the far reaches of the prefrontal cortex, unique in size and intellectual capacity to humans). We lose ourselves in our imagination. While our imagination is real to us, it often pulls us out of the present, the now.

The way a baby comes into the world is almost the same as how the universe came into existence through the Big Bang. In the beginning, everything was one, whole, unified, present, now. Then it expanded and reality was created in less than a second. Ever since then we’ve been moving away from the oneness, the center, the origin. We’ve been soaring away, in the far stretches of the universe, a reality so unbelievable it only seems possible through a rich, divine imagination. Still we long for connection, relationships, presence, and eternity. We desire things as they were in the beginning and always have been, a world without end. A world with unlimited potential. A world where we can become whatever we want.

A world like that of a baby who is loved.

For a baby, memories are embodied so we can learn to live. For us, memories control our bodies so much that we forget to live.

I’m Nobody? Who are you?

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Emily Dickinson

If you have spent your whole life becoming somebody and having something, the beginning of awakening requires you to turn around and start the journey in the other direction, towards becoming nothing, becoming nobody, and having nothing. ⁣

Ram Das

Within us is the potential to be a somebody. The game of life asks us to be a somebody. Once we are somebody and choose to wake up, there are two potentials within you: the potential to become a new somebody, or the potential to become a nobody.

What does it mean to be a nobody? Nobody knows.

Can you be a somebody and a nobody? To that I would ask: Does the sun rise and set every day? The universe is composed of dual forces, yin and yang. Empty darkness and fiery matter. Nothing and something, all at the same time.

Aren’t we the same?

Then and There

Father McNally used to say, “You were not made for the here and now; you were made for the then and there.” This tripped me up for a bit. I think I’m starting to get it.

At first I thought it was obvious: we are made for heaven, not earth. This is a classic Manicheist dictum–essentially the material world is bad and the spiritual world is good. But that doesn’t sound like Father McNally. He was excited about being a human being, about being able to taste and touch and paint and see and imagine. We, at least as we manifest on this earth, are quite well made “for earth.” We can taste, smell, touch, etc. How are we not made for here?

I don’t think he was necessarily talking about the “me” that includes the body but the “I,” our soul, which is more than a body, which transcends this physical world. We were not made for here; rather, our soul–the true Self–is a part of God that longs for communion with God again. But even if this were the case, this is quite a step. It still sidesteps our reality–that we are Homo sapiens living on planet earth, that we need to eat, sleep, breathe, and live in order to, well, have experiences that can allow us to learn about God. So I’m not ready to give up the first part of this saying yet.

“You were not made for the here and now.” Here and now is a common phrase among spiritual people. In Island, the birds on the utopian island are chanting, “Attention!” and “Here and Now!” as reminders to live in the present. All throughout the spiritual/awakened/enlightened world are texts that talk about being present, being in the now. From Eckhart Tolle to Ram Das, it’s pervasive. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and Be Here Now by Ram Das, taught the western world exactly that: reality is what’s happening now, not what happened in the past or what might happen in the future. Right now. Here and now.

“You were made for the then and there.” This assumes that there’s an existence beyond physical death. Let’s give merit to this assumption by crediting, well, nearly every religion, spiritual person, and psychedelic adventurer who ever lived and assume this is true. It’s a commonly held belief that this life on earth is preparation for the next life, or our next series of lives on this earth (i.e. reincarnation). Regardless of form or fortune, what we do here counts, in some regard, in what happens after we physically die.

One of the primary teachings of Jesus was about the Kingdom of God. Supposedly, this is where we want to go when we die. It’s the “then and there.” But then Jesus said something that most people don’t like to talk about: “The Kingdom of God is in your midst.” Father McNally referenced this a lot. What’s that about? Allow me to bring this all together.

Father McNally was right–we are made for the then and there, for the Kingdom of God. But the Kingdom of God is in our midst, in the here and now on earth. We have access to the Kingdom if we want to enter; we can see the Kingdom if we want to see it; we can experience the Kingdom if we want to experience it. But what is the Kingdom? What is the Then and There? It is Here and Now. Anthony de Mello says that eternal life is the eternal now, the now that never began and never ends. It’s a place beyond time, another dimension that we cannot know or understand or comprehend but can experience. And how can we experience it? By being present to it; by ministering to it. By merely being, here and now. By stepping into this moment. Not meditating or analyzing, not mindfulness or intellect or yoga or philosophy, but by being. By not being preoccupied by the past or future or everything that isn’t happening and existing right here and right now. The Kingdom of God, the Then and There, is the eternal now, the eternal Here and Now. The Here and Now is the Then and There.

Guess what? We are conditioned animals, and we are not conditioned for stepping into the here and now. That makes it less convenient. It’s almost impossible to escape this inconvenience. Possible, sure, but it requires a disciplined and aware mind and being. That’s what Father McNally meant–we are not made for the here and now. That’s not how we got here as animals, as human beings. We got here by learning how to survive, by struggling for existence, and by fighting to pass on our genetics. Survival of the fittest. That’s how the here and now works, right? Maybe. But plants and animals and other living things don’t care about the past or the future, they just care about the here and now. But we aren’t just animals–we’re ensouled beings. Animals with souls that long to reconnect with the source of all creation, an existence that is only possible by entering the Kingdom of God, the eternal now, the Then and There with very little baggage, so little that we can pass through the eye of a needle. This reconnection seems to be the direction of creation–conscious, ensouled beings, capable of having a relationship with God, longing to reconnecting with God. And the way to prepare for that reconnection is to simply be here and now, to merely be present to what is unfolding before us. Nothing more. Because that is an experience of what is, and God is all that is. So experiencing the here and now is experiencing God, which may just be the then and there.

What does this mean for us?

Be present. In your experience of now is the experience of the eternal now, God Godself. The way to experience this moment is fully, with all your senses. Taste, touch, smell, see, and hear creation and your place in it, seemingly distant but all-too-connected to the source which created and is it all. This earth is a spiritual training ground. It may have required human beings to destroy the planet in order to realize it and embrace our role as conscious beings, but it’s not too late for each and every one of us to step into this moment and experience God for ourselves. It’s what we’re made for.

Highlights from Awareness by Anthony de Mello, SJ (Part 2/2)

Here are some more quotes I highlighted while reading:

“Sometimes the best thing that can happen to us is to be awakened to reality, for calamity to strike, for then we come to faith, as C.S. Lewis did.”

“All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.” – Thomas Aquinas

“Don’t carry over experiences from the past. In fact, don’t carry over good experiences from the past either. Learn what it means to experience something fully, then drop it and move on to the next moment, uninfluenced by the previous one. You’d be traveling with such little baggage that you could pass through the eye of a needle. You’d know what eternal life is, because eternal life is now, the timeless now.”

“No great merit in it if it’s mechanical. The beauty of an action comes not from its having become a habit but from its sensitivity, consciousness, clarity of perception, and accuracy of response.”

“An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy.”

“Exhortations are of no great help.”

“There’s only one way out and that is to get deprogrammed! How do you do that? You become aware of the programming.”

“The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived.” – Japanese adage

“You always empower the demons you fight.”

“You don’t chase darkness out of the room with a broom, you turn on a light.”

“There is no salvation till they have seen their basic prejudice.”

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished.”

“Life only makes sense when you perceive it as a mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”

“A terrorist to you is a martyr to the other side.”

“It’s only when you’re afraid of life that you fear death.”

“If you would die to the past, if you would die to every minute, you would be the person who is fully alive, because a fully alive person is one who is full of death.”

“First, cope with your negative feelings so that when you move out to change others, you’re not coming from hate or negativity but from love.”

It’s not a question of imitating Christ, it’s a question of becoming what Jesus was. It’s a question of becoming Christ, becoming aware, understanding what’s going on within you.”

“There is nothing so cruel as nature. In the whole of the universe there is no escape from it, and yet it is not nature that does the injury, but the person’s own heart.”

“If the eye is unobstructed, it results in sight; if the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing; if the nose is unobstructed, the result is a sense of smell; if the mouth is unobstructed, the result is a sense of taste; if the mind is unobstructed, the result is wisdom.” – Oriental sage

“If the heart is unobstructed, the result is love.” – Anthony de Mello

“Wisdom occurs when you drop barriers you have erected through your concepts and conditioning… Wisdom is to be sensitive to this situation, to this person, uninfluenced by any carryover from the past, without residue from the experience of the past.”

“Freedom lies not in external circumstances; freedom resides in the heart.”

“Seeing is the most arduous thing that a human being can undertake, for it calls for a disciplined, alert mind.”

“A nice definition of an awakened person: a person who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within.”

“Now, you need awareness and you need nourishment. You need good, healthy nourishment. Learn to enjoy the solid food of life. Good food, good wine, good water. Taste them. Lose your mind and come to your senses.”

“And if I can’t get you to peep out of your little narrow beliefs and convictions and look at another world, you’re dead, you’re completely dead; life has passed you by.”

“So love the thought of death, love it.”

“It will also help if you take on activities that you can do with your whole being, activities that you love to do so that while you’re engaged in them success, recognition, and approval simply do not mean a thing to you.”

“I’ve told you what a spiritual exercise it is to gaze at things, to be aware of things around you.”

“It is not from lack of religion in the ordinary sense of the word that the world is suffering, it is from lack of love, lack of awareness.”

“Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something that you have; love is something that has you.”

“‘It’s the ‘Aha’ experience that counts.'”

“Living is to have dropped all the impediments and to live in the present moment with freshness.”

“Anything you’re aware of keeps changing; clouds keep moving.”

“Every child has a god in him. Our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil. Children come to my school, little devils, hating the world, destructive, unmannerly, lying, thieving, bad-tempered. In six months they are happy, healthy children who do no evil.” – from Summerhill by A. S. Neill

“There’s no violence in those children, because no one is practicing violence on them, that’s why.”

“No fear, so no violence.”

“Do you know where wars come from? They come from projecting outside of us the conflict that is inside.”

“The religion that makes people good makes people bad, but the religion known as freedom makes all people good, for it destroys the inner conflict [I’ve added the word “inner”] that makes people devils.” – from Summerhill by A. S. Neill

“I have run into individuals, here and there, who suddenly stumble upon this truth: The root of evil is within you. As you begin to understand this, you stop making demands on yourself, you stop having expectations of yourself, you stop pushing yourself and you understand. Nourish yourself on wholesome food, good wholesome food. I’m not talking about actual food, I’m talking about sunsets, about nature, about s good movie, about a good book, about enjoyable work, about good company, and hopefully you will break your addictions to those other feelings.”

Highlights from Awareness by Anthony de Mello, SJ (Part 1/2)

Here are some quotes I highlighted while reading:

“The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.”

“What you really fear is loss of the known.”

“[Jesus] ran into trouble with people who were really convinced they were good.”:

“The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were.”

“All suffering is caused by misidentifying myself with something, whether than something is within me or outside me.”

“Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion.”

“We never feel grief when we lose something that we have allowed to be free, that we have never attempted to possess. Grief is a sign that I made my happiness depend on this thing or person, at least to some extent.”

“Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency.”

“Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.”

“Someone once said, ‘The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded, third, admitting that you are wrong.'”

“You know there are times like that when the Blessed Sacrament becomes more important than Jesus Christ. When worship becomes more important than love, when the Church becomes more important than life. When God becomes more important than the neighbor.”

“What you are aware of you are in control of. What you are not aware of is in control of you.”

“You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.”

“You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said it very beautifully, ‘God is not attainted by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.’ You don’t need to do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free.”

“It’s not your actions, it’s your being that counts.”

“We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.”

“Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit. And understand: That is not selfish. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else life their life as YOU see fit. That’s selfish.“

“Awakening should be a surprise.”

“It’s only when you become love–in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments–that you will “know” [that compassion can be very rude, can jolt you can roll up its sleeves and operate on you, can be soft, is all kinds of things].”

“That fanaticism of one sincere believer who thinks he knows causes more evil than the united efforts of two hundred rogues.”

“The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable.”

“Happiness releases you from self. It is suffering and pain and misery and depression that tie you to the self.”

“Suffering points up an area in you where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change. If you knew how to use that suffering, oh, how you would grow.”

“Negative feelings, every negative feeling, is useful for awareness, for understanding.”

“We always hate what we fear.”

“The moment you put things in a concept, they become static, dead.”

“Words are pointers, they’re not descriptions.”

“How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child.”

“When we start off in life, we look at reality with wonder, but it isn’t the intelligent wonder of the mystics; it’s the formless wonder of a child.”