Dream

I am terrified. I know they know. They are coming. I can hear them. Where can I hide? They are here to punish me. My heart is racing. My skin is sweaty. My vision is blurry. I am trapped.

The bathroom. In the bathtub. The shower curtain pulled closed. Lay down. Don't breathe. Don't move. Lie still. They are coming. I hear them. They are here to punish me.

I'll change. I'll be what they want. It will be easy. Just pretend. That's all. Bury yourself. Close yourself off. Put you aside. Lock you away.

There's someone else here. A child. Where did this child come from? I must protect this child. Push the child behind me. Don't move. Don't breath. Lie still child. Pretend you're not here. They will find you. They are coming. I hear them. They are here to punish you.

I will distract them. You will run. Run as fast as you can. Don't look back. Run away.

I jump out. I spread my arms. I scream. I make the funniest face. I see myself in a mirror. It is not me. I stand, arms spread, face contorted. Where is the child? The child is gone.

I run out of the bathroom. They are there. They look surprised. I run past them. They step aside. I run out of the house. I turn back. There is no one. I am not there. I was never there. The child was never there.

I wake up.

What it’s like to be you…

It’s impossible to know “how it is to be something else”. You can only ever know what it is to be like yourself. We can imagine what it may be like to be something else, someone else. We call it empathy. I can empathize with you because you’re a human being. I can assume that your human experience is similar to mine. But I can never really know for sure that you and I experience the world in the same or in even a similar way.

What must it be like to be a cat? Or an insect crawling up the wall of my bedroom. Does an insect have an experience of being itself? It must experience something, it senses light, air pressure, temperature. Does it think that “I am an insect”. Probably not. It may not think at all in the way us, as humans, conceive of thinking.

What about a cat? A cat seems to have some knowledge of itself. Cats seem to make decisions for themselves. Why does my cat come up to my bed in the middle of the night and seem to ask to go under the blankets and then settle down to sleep. Does she think to herself “I’m cold and it’s nighttime and I know I can go get under the covers upstairs in that big cats’ bed?” I would guess not exactly like that, maybe something more akin to a feeling, a habit, or instinct. I don’t know for sure and that’s the key point. I can never know for sure.

Why would any of this matter at all? Why would we care if we can know what it’s like to be something else? It matters in that it is a great mystery of life. The “hard problem” of consciousness. As opposed to the “easy problem”. The “easy problem” is focused on answering the mechanism of how the physical nature of a brain/body organism functions. Neurons, nervous systems, blood vessels, cardiovascular systems, etc. We can study those systems and we can learn how a neuron functions, how the heart pumps blood, how oxygen enters the bloodstream. None of the answers to these system questions provide any insight into the how and why of consciousness though.

It is one of, if not the, ultimate question.

And we can never truly know or find out the answer. How can we possible put ourselves into the mind/body of another being. How would that even make sense. How can you separate the consciousness of one mind/body and transfer it to another mind/body. You can’t. It’s pure science fiction. The idea that we could transfer our consciousness to a machine and that somehow that transferred “data” would be “us” is utterly ridiculous. The consciousness is intertwined and interwoven with the mind/body system. It arises around the focal point of the mind/body system.

Or is it? Again, there’s no way to know. We don’t have a framework, a methodology, or the tools to answer this question.

Some people have tried to provide such frameworks and tools, they start with the idea that consciousness if “fundamental” to the working of the Universe. They assume that consciousness arises as a function of the Universe. It’s a bit like saying that reality is governed by the speed of causality (speed of light) and that our observations of the material nature of spacetime arise from this fundamental assumption that nothing can happen faster than the speed of light. That the speed of light is constant in all reference frames and this is explained by the warping of spacetime to ensure that this fact remains true under all circumstances. Only we can experimentally prove that spacetime warps to maintain the constancy of the speed of light.

How do we experimentally prove that consciousness is as fundamental to reality as the speed of light is to reality?

Time

There is no past.

Past is just memories.

There is no future.

Future is just dreams.

There is no now.

For now is the illusion

Of the divide between

Memory and dreams.

There is simply this.

This happening.

This arising.

This dissolving.

Time is a construct

Of the me

Sleeping in the dreams

And reveling in the memories.

Me

Finding the Pathless Path

I’m not worthy. I’m worthy.

I’m not special. I’m special.

I’m anxious. I’m at ease.

I’m exhausted. I’m energized.

I’m a failure. I’m a success.

I’m divided.

I’m at war with myself.

I’m separate.

I’m me.

Me is an illusion.

There is no me.

There is no one worthy or not worthy.

There is no one special or not special.

There is no one at ease or anxious.

There is no one energized or exhausted.

There is no one succeeding or failing.

There is only oneness.

There is only wholeness.

There is only emptiness.

Thoughts arise and fade.

Feelings come and go.

No one is observing the thoughts.

No one is feeling the feelings.

There is only this.

Life happening.

Full on.

Non stop.

This Is It

I remember reading a story about young men and women joining a monastic order. These young people had high aspirations of becoming monks with great spiritual enlightenment. The older monks set these young aspiring monks to working long hours clearing the many steps on the path leading up to the monastery. The monastery was high in the hills nestled in a wooded area. The path up the hill was paved. In the fall, the raking of leaves seemed endless. In the winter the shoveling of the snow never ending. When the young acolytes were not sweeping or raking, the monks had them cleaning toilets or dishes or floors in the monastery. After a few weeks of this some of them left, protesting that they didn’t join the monastic order to just do chores and clean all day long. Others, the ones that stayed, would also complain but had a higher tolerance for the hard work. This continued for many more months, with a few more leaving each week. The monks wished them well and bared no ill feelings toward them.

Eventually the few that stayed began to notice that it didn’t really matter that they were sweeping, or shoveling, or scrubbing, or cleaning toilets, or sitting quietly in meditation, all of these activities took on a feeling of sameness. They noticed that thoughts arose and then dissolved like drops create ripples in a bucket of water and then disappear leaving the water still once again. Feelings flooded the body and then fell away as leaves bud in the spring and then drop from a tree branch in the fall. They noticed that there was no need to grasp or to seek or to cling to those negative thoughts and feelings they had experienced.

After some period of time the acolytes were encouraged by the older monks to leave the monastery and visit the nearby village during a harvest festival. Several of them met family during the festival. Others met past friends. Still others made new friends. And still others took lovers for the brief time during the festival. Many felt great joy and relief to be away from what seemed to them now in the bustle and energy of the festival activities, to be endless drudgery of monastic life. Some mourned the loss of loved ones or the loss of time wasted sweeping, shoveling and cleaning. They dreamed of futures filled with marriage, having a home, raising children, going on travels and having adventures. They turned away from the monastery and went out to seek these things in the wider world.

A few of them felt those same feelings and had those same thoughts and responded not with dreaming or seeking but with a simple intuitive feeling of “this too.” They returned to the monastery with a lighter step and a freer heart.

The older monks were waiting to greet the younger monks upon their return. The young monks smiled with a half smile and a twinkle in their eyes. The older monks returned the gesture in kind and said “welcome home, for you had never left and there was never any place to go.” And the younger monks said “yes, this is it. This has always been it. There is only wholeness. There is only emptiness.”

And they returned to their chores and their meditations only now there was no one doing the chores, no one doing the meditations. There was simply this and this was all there ever was and all that ever could or would be.