Consciousness

Most people I know think of consciousness as something within,
specific and enclosed in our bodies. Many of them think that it’s
always manifested in words. But we are conscious even in the absence
of inner narration. If our toe hurts we’re conscious of it whether we
think, “My toe hurts.” Or not. Watching something, observing
carefully, we can be intensely aware. We have what neurologist,
Antonio Damasio calls a “core consciousness” that we share with
animals, all beings conscious of moving around in space that’s moving
around us and knowing where we are in relation to the external world.
Thinking of consciousness as localized in our individual being is also
an assumption worth questioning, more of a mental habit than a proven
fact. There’s no more evidence of a personal consciousness than for an
overall consciousness that flows through everyone. Scientists have
never found a pilot in the mind. Why is it so hard to consider that
what we experience as awareness might be something that looks through
us as a resource for gathering knowledge? Just as the wave juts up
into the air but remains part of the ocean, consciousness uses our
senses and experience in the world to grow in knowledge that becomes
part of the larger consciousness. Our being is a specific location in
the whole, a portal to that region of spacetime, but never was it
separate. Our life experience and personality are like individual
qualities in the lens through which material reality is experienced.
Awareness is immortal because it was never of the body but using the
body. Things come to us when we need them. We connect to others that
matter to us because the field of consciousness is entire and
simultaneous, just as our body knows where the immune responders need
to be. Quantum physicists, most prominently David Bohm and Erwin
Schrödinger suggest the evidence is much stronger for a single unitary
consciousness. They see the unbroken continuum at the quantum level
and realize that boundaries creating separate things don’t exist at a
certain point. We are part of a continuous field. The anomalies of
science, like electrons once correlated remaining so no matter what
the distance, suggests there is no distance within an overall
consciousness. Messages don’t travel from one part to another since
they’re within a consciousness that includes all parts at once. All is
known and individual experience is knowledge contributed to a larger
whole.
Allen Watts spoke of incarnating the spirit as full attention to the
present moment. Let go of the idea of a separate ego-self and step out
of the drama of the personal life story and into the world as it is,
alive and available to attentive consciousness. Consciousness
recognizes and acknowledges its presence in others. Love is the
natural result. On this wonderful video of a cat and dolphin getting
to know each other there is such pleasure in witnessing the
universality of loving connection.
(http://www.slothster.com/2352-Cat-On-Boat-Plays-With-Dolphins.html
)Three species enjoy endorphins as a result of the connection, the
cat, the dolphin and the human that watches. The more different on the
surface the deeper and more profound seems the connection. The
possibilities are all around us.