Fused Consciousness and Letting Go

Wednesday 08 Nov 2017

At the outset, it needs to be said that from a Buddhist perspective, the human condition is a deluded condition. This is so because we do not generally self-reflect deep enough to understand the Absolute truth that can be discovered in the depths of the present moment. Understanding the fact that we are grasping and believing in the way we are conditioned, without investigating what it is we are holding onto brings about this delusion. We confabulate the stories of our lives, thinking that they are absolute without ever knowing that we do not have the full picture. We see only relatively and we build up confabulated ideas and opinions that are at best only true to the localised relative circumstances that we are involved with. (A bit like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic)

Physics takes us beyond our world to try and understand the Universe we live in. It does a good job in gathering data and using it to investigate the birth and death of our lives as they relate to comings and goings of our world and the beginning and endings of the universe at large, but then misses the point of the Present Moment.  I am talking about “right now” where reality really is! Consciousness is there, right in the heart of the present moment where it too begins and ends countless times in the wink of an eye as the Buddha has said. The discoveries of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in Physics, point to the present moment --- past what can be measured as the heart of our truth.  What has happened in the past and what is going to happen in the future can only ever be a confabulation!  Right now is what needs to be understood and known. This is where consciousness begins and ends its conditioning process; it builds up bit by bit, with a nested aggregation of conditioning into the world that we know. The whole experience begins and ends in sync with our consciousness in the present moment and that allows us to have familiarity with all the different scales of duality. Countless lives and Aeons of time and space have fused our consciousness, into seeing and believing the conditioning we have become.  We are in “jail” --- but we do have the key to release ourselves.

The best way to understand the process of fusion, where conscious conditions have fused into the physical, is to practice with Buddhist Meditation in order make the mind still enough to see and understand the deconstruction process that can be experienced as we go deeper into the moment. I call it calcination! This is where you can observe the structure of this ageless fusion process as it deconstructs. We do this by making our mind progressively more still over time. Dedicated and consistent practice allows the mind to clarify and gradually incline toward an understanding of what is being observed. The scales and nested aggregation of consciousness become clear. I have borrowed the term “calcination” from an industrial process that roasts compounded material while at the same time rumbling or spinning the material to separate the constituents. (E.g. making cement from limestone) Energetic phase transition points that fuse in creation can be observed in the mind as they deconstruct. The phase transitions points are observed in the increasing stillness, analogous to the separations in the calcination process. For example we can start to notice how our energetic consciousness flows and feeds back, shaping our physical being. As the body relaxes, this pleasurable effervescent tingling defines the shape of our body. One can also see a similar definition working on our internal physical makeup and then externally wherever our attention is placed. Going deeper into our mind we can experience the separation of the mental and physical as the body falls away when we relax into deep meditation. The mind can be seen collapsing into a mental state alone, mimicking the death of the body. Incidentally both this simulated experience and the actual death of the body are events that happen all together, when seen from the reality of the present moment.  At a deeper level again consciousness that supports both the mental and the physical can be seen to finish in a phase transition as the external Universe collapses. This is the pathway to enlightenment!

The space of the Universe forms its matrix! The same can be said for any systems nested within it. Any large or small scaled condition, including our bodies has the same matrix. We know that every condition contains mostly space and when we look closely at the particles that we think of as solid, we see that they are mostly space as well. And so it goes as we look deeper and deeper into what appears to be solid. A snapshot of this space in meditation terms can be seen as emptiness or stillness, and we can be aware that this is so when we consciously observe this stillness. We can experience it feeding back in our mind as we observe from a cultivated place of still knowing. We can observe this still consciousness and the way it begins and ends. Further we see that the ending conditions the beginning again and again. This is something that can be observed in our mind when we practice Buddhist meditation. We are observing it continuously feeding itself back very fast and this gives it an identity. The practice of Buddhist meditation focusses the energy of the mind to allow it to concentrate and penetrate deep to bring about what is called Samadhi, a Pali word that means “one pointed”. This is combined with what in Pali is called Sati or “mindfulness” which sustains this one pointed penetrating energy over time. A third factor called Viraya in Pali, means energy, but more to the point, means a balanced energy that will then help the mind clear and allow deep insight. This is the practice that will allow us to observe calcination back to still consciousness with mindfulness that will eventually know that it has finished --- finished with feedback.

The Buddha’s wisdom that underlies this process is described in his second and third noble truth. The second noble truth speaks to beginnings (birth) and the third noble truth speaks to the endings (death). These Noble truths encourage us to look at our ignorance as we grasp the continual round of birth death and rebirth. We see that it is our grasping that is causing the feedback. Our ignorance of the Absolute Truth, present in the moment becomes clear. Our fear of letting go and our desire to grasp the conditions causes us to continue round and round on the so called wheel of Samsara.  Eventually though, with practice and insight, the wisdom of letting go is then integrated into our personal mind stream and this inclines our practice towards truth and insight. Eventually our grasping becomes less and consciousness can eventually be allowed to finish. Then the external Universe will collapse and integrate into us, making it impossible for any rebirth after our death if this state is maintained.  We can be free and this insight is the key to our release.  Because the Universe is no longer feeding back from an external memory, there is no cause for a rebirth, the karmic energy is stopped and the body and mind can finish in Absolute peace.