The Houseboat Philosopher

So how do we live in the Now without being neglectful of the future? Watts would answer that it's the wrong question. There is nothing we can know of the future until it arrives and it arrives a nano-second from now. And now. And now. But that is not what we mean by 'the future'. We mean next week or next month or when we 'retire'. The future we are concerned with is a potential state of being that we may or may not live to see (at least in physical form). We are finite and to us the future seems infinite because we cannot see an end to it, an end to time itself. This is the great paradox: we are aware enough to ask questions but not aware enough to answer them, except by acknowledging that although we are aware of a 'self' we cannot see that 'self' at all. It is not visible to us. All that we can see is the physical vehicle through which the 'self' operates. We are an idea in our own heads for that is where the 'self' seems to reside, isn't it? We "hear" ourselves think. In fact, we hear that inaudible voice of the 'self' incessantly.  But that voice is not us because if we stop for a moment and listen to it ,we must ask 'who is it that listens'?  This is the pivotal point in both psychology and philosophy, the apparently separate Observer that is behind everything that we identify as ourselves. There is another "I" behind "me".  The "I" behind what I call 'me' is the silent witness, that aspect of us that is aware of being aware of being. That "I" is consciousness, what Arthur Koestler called "the ghost in the machine".  But what is Consciousness? What is it made of?

The Ghost In The Machine

What we understand scientifically of the nature of reality at this juncture is that everything that we experience in the universe is vibration, energy, the invisible background that generates what we experience as the universe. That energy generated us. But this energy is not visible to us except when it becomes dense enough to for us or for our instruments to detect. But how does it become dense? What is the motive force that causes energy to form into visible matter? That is the Higgs Boson question, the search for 'the God particle' or more properly the wavicle since before it becomes a particle it is both wave and particle, a potential without form. That fact that we can contemplate such a concept is itself amazing! We owe the ability to imagine such realities to several generations of 'natural philosophers' (now called physicists, but I prefer the older term) and mathematicians working at the theoretical edge of the possible. Impressive stuff. But, the essential insights into the 'nature of reality' that science now claims as its exclusive turf had its beginnings long, long ago in the work of the Rishi of ancient India. 

Ghost Hunting In Ancient India

The original atomic theorists were the authors of the Rig Veda, the repository of the collective wisdom of the Vedic tradition of deep contemplation of the nature of 'reality'. Many thousands of years before Newton proclaimed that energy could neither be created nor destroyed but only changes form, the Rishis posited the notion that everything is made mostly of nothing! That all there is arose from what they called the 'Void', the home of the Higgs Boson for which scientists are presently seeking. The Void is the source of all. We are part of the 'all' and therefore part of the 'Void'. Nothing can exist outside of the Void or Source; imaging that we are separate from it is an illusion. Stars are born and die. Planets form and are swallowed by 'Black Holes'. But everything is 're-cycled'! Nothing is permanently destroyed - the theory of entropy notwithstanding. (We may yet find that what tiny amount of energy that we think is 'lost' to 'entropy' in atomic fission and other forms of energy release might be some other form of dark matter we have to identify. It may even be the case that the 'lost energy' is subsumed into another dimension…)  The significance of the Void for us is that our essential being is invisible. Consciousness cannot be observed directly; it can only be inferred on the basis of observable actions in which we and the universe engage. We cannot observe 'energy' directly; we can only infer its existence from its actions. Consciousness and energy seem to be synonymous, the same 'stuff'. We are - more or less - Conscious. We are Energy. Even our bodies of matter can only change form from the way we see them now to complete reabsorption into nature, untimely the atoms of the body including the bones will be reduced to nothingness. Obviously, of the two - body and consciousness - it is the latter that is really US. Or as Alan Watts would put it "You are It", an expression of pure consciousness that is temporarily having a physical experience.


Hide and Seek Is Not Just For Kids

The irony is how un-necessarily difficult we make that experience! 99% of the suffering in the world is human inflicted, ultimately self-inflicted because we can only act on the basis of our awareness of our existence. The problem is that, as conscious beings, we can play games with ourselves! We can 'shut down' consciousness through denial, through rejection of life, through addictions that distract us from reality, through any number of dead-end practices to avoid the inevitable knowledge that we don't know who we are! But we don't know who we are because we don't take time to find out! We take 'consciousness' for granted. We don't see what a miracle it is! We invent religions to punish ourselves with in the hope of eradicating the uncomfortable fact that being conscious is all there is and all there needs to be! We under-use consciousness all the time. It has so many ways of interacting with the universe that we cannot hope to exhaust them. However, most humans use only a minuscule fraction of their consciousness. They limit their awareness to the concrete world and a pointless game of one-up-man-ship with each other. The anxiety we feel is the anxiety we generate by creating elaborate systems for the exchange of things that make us dependent on other elaborate systems for the exchange of more things, ad infinitum.  Why?  To feel 'secure'!

Security is the opposite of life. Life by definition changes - constantly! Nothing is the same as it was a nano-second ago. That is now history and we are here NOW. We cannot create 'security'. We can create a social and economic structure which would make 'security' un-necessary. How? By using the Consciousness we have and putting what we can see to be true into practice: We are part of interdependent organism that is the universe and possible multi-verses. We are not separate from 'reality' or 'existence', we are IT. We only feel anxious and insecure when we exert ourselves in the direction of separation from WHAT IS. Most of our suffering comes from some form of resisting WHAT IS. WE ARE WHAT IS!  

Think how different our lives would be if we saw ourselves not as bodies competing with other bodies for space and sustenance, but as points of consciousness in an infinite ocean of consciousness. The Infinite is Eternal and the paradox is that it is always changing and never destroyed. We understand almost nothing of our own universe and how enormous it is, how incalculably timeless it is.  But given that we are experiencing our universe through both our bodies and our minds and are aware of both through Consciousness, is it not obvious that we are meant to use all of ourselves to explore this universe? We cannot hope to do so in our current human form but we may be able to do so by extending our awareness, our consciousness outward into that universe. Whilst we cling to the physical side of life to the exclusion of greater awareness, we increase our levels of anxiety and insecurity. That is, we choose to live in fear. We can choose not to do so by adopting a different way of thinking and being in the world. That is The Wisdom of Insecurity.

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