* Our existence is a miracle * Does the body have consciousness or consciousness have a body? * "Nothing" or matter? * The oddities of selective attention * Is it the cat's head that causes its tail? * What are you paying attention to * The mysteries of consciousness *
We know that some time between 13 and 14 billion years ago, energy condensed into a tiny dot exploded in a huge explosion, and here we are, sentient thinking beings, wondering how it is that I am writing these lines on a high-tech gadget and you understand what I wrote. Isn't it amazing that such a mysterious awareness has sprung out of nowhere? But there are those who do not wonder at this, but sit in the hell of their suffering and think: I have a perishable body, in it a kind of consciousness, a multitude of emotions and thoughts; my body will pass away, die, and this consciousness will also dissolve into nothingness. And it may be that it is not our body that has consciousness, but consciousness that has taken on a body.
If you look around, you see all sorts of things. If you're in a room, you see furniture, lots of utensils, ornaments; if you're sitting outside, you see plants, animals, people, buildings, all kinds of things. But there is something you don't notice: the space between them. And this has strange consequences.
Over the last few hundred years in particular, humanity has fallen in love with a particular form of attention: selective, choosy attention. Much is consciously noticed, but far more escapes our attention. We narrow our conscious attention, restrict it to noticing things that meet our expectations, our interests; or those that are important to our survival, our growth, our interests. It is as if we were wandering in the dark in the endless open spaces, and illuminating the few metres ahead of us with a faint, weak torch: what we thus dimly, fragmentarily recognise exists for us; what we lose in the mists of beneficial obscurity we declare non-existent.
We are flooded with information, but we only know a very small fraction of it. Every second, we receive about 400 billion bits of information, but we are aware of 2,000 of them - the rest ends up in the unconscious. We see a very narrow part of the whole reality, and we unconsciously colour it, transform it according to our own expectations and desires.
Look at the drawing on the left! Wonder what I drew here? Most people answer: a circle. A dark circle. But I drew a white wall with a black hole. In fact, both answers are true, and at the same time. The answer is correct: a dark circle inside a white board, or a white square with a dark hole in the middle. The outline is what seems to break this single image in two: the inner outline of the white wall is the same as the outer outline of the dark hole (circle). I can therefore see as a wall with a hole, or a dark hole. We tend to see only the circle, while completely forgetting the sheet of paper on which we drew the circle. So the space of form is very important.
It is inside space that material forms are created. No one has ever found an object without space, nor space without an object. Similarly, there are no sounds without the space of silence in which they are created and on whose surface they dance. As you can see, object/space and sound/silence are not opposites, not separate, but two manifestations of the same thing - inseparable.
Our conscious attention is focused solely on the objects and we do not notice the space between them. We think space is nothing, empty, uninteresting, of no use to us. Objects are important for our survival, for our material gain, so we only and exclusively pay attention to objects. Because if space is nothing, then it is not worthwhile to deal with it, so we ignore it. We pay a very high price for this.
When we focus solely on objects, our attention is easily distracted by the space between them. Our consciousness then scans its surroundings and perceives something, like a piece of furniture. Our memory categorizes this object as “furniture,” and the concept of “furniture” emerges. Subsequently, we scan our attention further and identify every object that can be associated with each concept. Of course, this process occurs so rapidly that we remain unaware of it. If we come across something we have no concept, symbol for, or are not interested in, it escapes our attention completely.
We break the world into pieces to make sense of it with concepts and fail to realize that in fact everything is one, intertwined, inseparable from its surroundings. This is how we get the idea that we are us and that there is an external world outside us, and that the world is made up of separate objects. And because it takes us a while to scan and identify our environment with our attention, we believe that some things affect other things, that there is a causal relationship between them, even though everything happens simultaneously within the existing reality.
To use the example of Alan Watts: suppose you are standing next to a wall and you want to study the unknown world behind the wall. On the other side of the wall, a cat is walking up and down, and there is a tiny little gap in the wall through which we peer and take a look. What do we see? A cat's head appears, followed by a longer body, then a thin tail, then the body again, then the head, and so on. Because we are looking at it for a long time, we conclude that the cat head always causes a cat body, the cat body causes a cat tail, and the cat tail causes a cat head again. But in fact there is no causal link, there is only one cat, which is only alive when it is in one piece. If you break it down into separate parts - head, body, tail - you're looking at a dead cat.
Everything we know about we only know through our senses. We see the world through our senses, these little gaps in the wall of reality. There are no objects in reality, only a constantly swirling, intermingling set of energy patterns that our senses transform into lights, colours, shapes, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations. Our mind identifies the image of a pattern as an object, assembles the many, many tiny images into a unified whole and projects it into the space of our consciousness - this is the image of ourselves and the world. And the consciousness within us knows this image - that's how we know about ourselves (which is also an image in the field of our consciousness) and the world around us. We pay attention to the little pictures, to the images of objects, and we get caught up in the dance of many, many colourful images, while we completely forget that they are only images on the screen of consciousness. We forget that our real self is nothing but a mysterious, elusive consciousness.
If we focus our attention only on the objects in the space of our awareness, we will only be aware of the material things. That's what we identify with. This is exactly what happens in our everyday life. We are convinced with absolute certainty that we are a living body with intelligence, with emotions and thoughts, and that at some point this body will grow old, become useless, die and cease to exist - that's it! We experience ourselves as a mortal, suffering body enclosed in a heavy, solid, material world - and this is our 'normal' state of consciousness.
Something strange happens all over if we broaden the focus of our attention. In our ordinary, everyday state of our attention is only scanning the objects, sorting between them, and our attention is completely bypassed by the space between them. This space (like silence) connects us to the consciousness within us. If we manage to capture with our conscious attention not only the objects but also the space between the objects, a strange shift of consciousness takes place within us.
Try this exercise, which will strengthen your peripheral vision and lead you to the realisation of your inner awareness:
Look for a natural place (e.g. an open field) where you can see far away without protruding objects disturbing your wide field of view. Get comfortable and relax! Softly scan your eyes over your surroundings while focusing some of your attention on what you are looking at. Relax and slowly - very slowly - sway your head from right to left, then left to right and scan your surroundings. Don't just focus your attention on individual objects, but let your eyes wander. And when you feel yourself in a calm, peaceful state of contemplation, keep your head still and try to capture the space in front of you. Simply look ahead of you, don't move your eyeballs, and take in your field of vision to the left as well as to the right. Although we mostly specialise in seeing a small area, the peripheral field of view can cover an angle of up to 180°. Pay attention to your entire field of view! Practise peripheral vision as much as possible!
Writer Carlos Castaneda collected the Yakish Indian wisdom of Don Juan into books, and among these wisdoms was the teaching of scattered or peripheral vision. This is useful not only because from focused "peripheral vision" we see far more, we perceive far more, but also because we then see not only objects, but the space that contains the objects. And as our attention takes in the space, we are astonished to find that the space and the attention within us are one and the same. We see that it is not really the objects that are important, but the space of awareness within us in which the objects appear, emerge. It is this awareness which is aware of itself and of the contents present within it – You are That.
Ultimately, you will realize that you are not a body with a consciousness, but the Consciousness is your real Self that has taken on a body.
Excerpt from the book "The Mysteries of Consciousness” by Ervin Kery