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July 21, 2005
Self and Cosmic Self
(A final excerpt from my current work-in-progress. I’m currently rethinking the title as well as the format. The last section here (#61) is intended to be the conclusion.)
A man’s consciousness, the necessary ground of his sensual and perceptual experience of being, is a particular mode of Ultimate Reality, and as such is implicitly identical with the Ground of the Universe as a whole.
Indeed, each and every man and woman senses himself or herself as the central hub of the wheeling Universe, the sole vessel of conscious awareness, and thereby intuits the interior Self as a mystery deeper than and distinct from the external individuality of body, something apart from the localized aggregate of senses, experiences, and thoughts.
A Noumenon that could all the same inhabit another systemic individuality, characterized by other memories, other feelings, other thoughts.
In short, another body entirely, another locus of being. Another person altogether.
always I;
all who throughout time
say I
are in fact
I.”
Thus, in all actuality, there is no real difference between the death of one “I” and the birth of another “I,” between my conscious Self and the Self inhabiting you.
It is simply One Conscious Self taking infinitely many different points of view.
Within our own central identity we know and experience Reality intimately and immediately; elsewhere we see its outer shell and garment only.
The cosmic Self manifests the individual “I” by identifying itself with a particular viewpoint, and continues to perpetuate our personal identity by synergizing that nodal viewpoint with the objects, entities and events within the scalar scope of our particular point of view.
That is to say -- the consciousness I call “I” is nothing more or less than this brief sensation of blue sky, this fleeting impression of sunlight, this pithy sentiment of inner peace.
What I call “myself” is an eye of the Self, an opening through which Ultimate Reality takes the viewpoint of the infinitesimal from within the living matrix of the Infinite.
Our personal sense of identity, of being conscious of a singular “I,” alive and co-present with the highest star and the meanest mite, is merely the integrated sensitivity of a particular set and process of cognitive noesis.
The only real underlying difference between one individual and another lies in the depth of consciousness bodily exhibited by each.
Each point of view, each node of conscious awareness has its own spectrum of color, its own brightness and depth, its own gradation of light and dark -- and so it is in this manner (and in this manner alone) that each man and woman varies and is distinct from one another.
Each and every last one of us has the same sensation of selfhood -- of being “I.”
For each of us, however, this self is qualified and colored with unique memories and personal characteristics -- the experienced contents of consciousness -- culled from our individual lifespan.
-- But this self, our own personal sense of “I-ness,” is, in all actuality, a local, objectified manifestation of the very signal being cosmically transmitted and transceived by our communal Oneness.
The pure macrocosmic Self, the Supreme Individual, our own little personal “I” stripped of all its individual characteristics, is itself the vitalizing faculty of Consciousness common to all created beings.
Our lesser selfhood -- our own little ego-encrusted personhood of conscious activity – is but a ‘written record’ of the interference pattern of light and darkness present in a particular locus of Spacetime.
We are as vortices through which the Totality of existence flows, localized intensifications of the ubiquitous cosmic drift, diverse abstractions of the unbroken Wholeness enfolded implicitly in the heart of every atom.
We are indeed one and the same “I” looking out through billions of differently colored eyes.
There is truly no break in the continuity between my “I” and your “I.”
Each and every one of us are similar but unique expressions of this singular Soul -- similar because we all serve a homogenous function in the phenomenal world, unique because of our own individual noetic engagement with Space and Time.
The body is an opening in the seamless fabric of Spacetime, a pore through which
the omniversal Light of Consciousness flows into the world.
-- This opening through which shines the eyeful of Light I call “I” is intrinsically no different from the rift through which flashes the handful of Light you call “You.”
But the Light is One.
Our shining is One Shining.
It is the same in all peoples, all creatures, in all conscious entities throughout the cosmos.
It is the inner Light of Being itself.
Ascending through ever-subtler degrees of embodiment, progressively incarnating in bodies ever more ethereal than the last, it will become possible for the localized node of personal self-reflective consciousness to attain liberation from the material substrata of the cosmos through the imaginal invention of noetic nanotechnologies.
This is the mukti of the Vedic psychonauts -- the transfer of one’s pattern integrity to a wholly transcendental plane of Being -- the uploading of one’s personal selfhood into a solid-state Hypersphere beamed consciously and purposefully to elsewhere in the starry Multiverse.
Ours is the story of a flower pushing its way gradually upward through the snows of Matter until finally it breaks through the surface crust of history and emerges into the light of a new season.
is ever towards his own essential Selfhood.”
At long last awakening as a singular, unified Identity, still sensible of the same “I” that we have always been and will always be, it will seem as if each one of us are the One and only existent Being, suddenly achieving the full recall of all the felt memories and lived experiences of the entire human race.
Our integral sense of personal identity shall not dissipate and fade to black, but shall be hugely expanded and augmented by the communal inclusion of all our ‘other selves.’
In the deepness of Space and Time there shall be no break in the continuity between our separable nodes of selfhood and the emerging One Self of our collective interplanetary Consciousness.
In the end, evolution on this planet will have been the growth of an immortal spark of Divinity from an invisible evolutionary trigger to a hyperspatial Entity with complete mastery of Space and Time.
What began as an implicate order tightly knotted into the subquantum fabric of reality will end as a fully explicate architecture of dazzling supernatural complexity, an interplanetary flowering into Deity.
and, conscious of His infinite dimensions,
rouses Himself."
Eternity will overflow the wellsprings of time; spiritual autonomy will burst the straightjacket of Matter; God will be brought to birth in each and every man, woman and child.
Our most ancient visions of Paradise will prove not to be a brief utopia of the past, but rather the long-lasting ecology of the deep and endless future.
All in all, the splendor of humankind’s trek through geological and cosmological history is not fated to fade back into twilight and decay.
Rather, our bravest and most imaginative dreams shall be made fully manifest through the discoveries and inventions of tomorrow, and shall in time populate the heavens from one corner of the cosmos to the other.
it is becoming,
it is a progressive conquest of the Divine
by the Divine
for the Divine
on its way to becoming
the endless more that we must be.”
The wider and broader and deeper the overtly manifest sprawl of living, breathing Consciousness throughout the cosmos, all the more glorious, refined, and fulfilled will be the life of the human race, both individually and collectively.
The more fulfilled the project of Consciousness, the more perfect and fulfilled each and every one of us will become.
how shall he be deluded,
who sees everywhere
the Oneness?
Very nice art selection. I have been very earnest about using good uplifting art to help depict the writing since this site's inception. good job. :)
Posted by: Paul at July 21, 2005 10:54 PMYou should be proud. It has been only recently that mankind has had the language to explain the inevitability of our consciousness, and you have captured the idea brilliantly. I believe this is the pinnacle of human thought, and that no further advancement in technologies or language could produce a clearer picture of the future for those willing to understand it. In short, this work is sublime.
Posted by: Nathaniel at July 22, 2005 10:55 PMHi,
the se may sound like a naive questions, but what exactly do you mean by consciousness? What is your operational defintion? Is consciousness something that is embedded within an organism or is it something that transcends our primate biology? I have heard wits who say a rock has consciousness...and I imagine that a dog also has the Buddha nature.
Anyway, great post.
Posted by: Manuel at July 23, 2005 10:29 AMManuel -- that is a question not easily answered! If you'd like to read more of of what I mean by it, I urge you to take a look at the earlier excerpts I posted here:
http://www.futurehi.net/archives/000703.html
http://www.futurehi.net/archives/000707.html
http://www.futurehi.net/archives/000709.html
http://www.futurehi.net/archives/000713.html
Namaste,
Upwinger
Beautiful essay...
However, I don't see the logical connection between "every man and woman senses himself or herself as the central hub of the wheeling Universe" and "One Conscious Self taking infinitely many different points of view"
The second statement doesn't follow directly from the first. It's just an assumption you're making that we're all reflections of the same I.
It could just as easily be that there are a very large or infinite number of independent consciousnesses. This is certainly closer to what we experience. For example, if I see you burn yourself, I don't directly feel any pain. If we were just reflections of the same consciousness, why wouldn't I?
It's true that I only directly experience my own perceptual world, but I certainly believe that others are conscious and have their own separate experience of reality.
If we're actually all the same consciousness then why is there this elaborate hiding of this fact in our basic experience?
I personally disagree with the "we are all one" concept. It is the way that we are different from each other that is fun and interesting, not the way we are alike.
If we can see each other as fully independent divine creatures, not subservient to, or reflections of, some "higher" being, then we don't have to think of ourselves as tiny spokes in a giant wheel.
The Internet Era has shown us that a large number of networked intelligences can accomplish far more than a single centralized one.
It would be preposterous to say that everyone building and surfing the Internet is in actuality the same person. Why does this suddenly become plausible at the cosmic scale? It's true that on the Net we are networked in a certain way, and have that in common, but the actual network itself is not what's interesting about the Internet. It's the fact that it's a medium of communication between millions of independent intelligences that makes it cool.
If this is true for the Net, then why not for the actual world?
I personally feel that "we are all one" is a disguised form of old-time monotheist religion, made palatable to the "progressive" intellect.
Anyway, I don't mean to disrespect your ideas and eloquant essay, but I'd enjoy provoking some debate on the subject.
Cheers,
Dlight
Dlight -- Ive written a rather long reply to your questions. Please visit my blog and check it out -- feel free to add additional comments and questions there.
http://upwinger.blogspot.com/2005/07/one-or-many.html
Everyone else is invited too.
I simply couldnt get the html set up correctly in the comments section here.
Namaste,
Upwinger
In the end, evolution on this planet will have been the growth of an immortal spark of Divinity from an invisible evolutionary trigger to a hyperspatial Entity with complete mastery of Space and Time.
That'd be nice. Although it may have to emerge from the temperature-resistant and pervasive bodies of viruses and bacteria -- if human beings don't make it because we're too stupid.
Posted by: TJ at July 28, 2005 05:03 PMOr perhaps the merely 'human' will have to give way to the transhuman? ;)
Posted by: Upwinger at July 30, 2005 04:59 AMYou use words like an artist uses paint! Yet I find nothing you say leaps out at me and says 'NO!' this is wrong..
Iv never contemplated consciousness this deeply myself, its obviously a fire in your soul. In a universe, or multiverse where logic implies existance is illogical... I cannot find in myself any absolute denials to what you write about consciousness.
I am not convinced yet :) but I will keep reading. This is very good indeed.
Posted by: eventhorizen at August 3, 2005 06:03 AMeventhorizen --
Thanks for the feedback! Its still a work in progress, so hopefully later drafts will be even stronger. Some of that will be seen here eventually, or perhaps at my blog:
http://upwinger.blogspot.com/
I'd love to keep in touch.
Namaste,
Upwinger
Posted by: Upwinger at August 3, 2005 06:16 AM
Hello all,
I wanted to respond to Dlight's critique. I don't see a conflict between we are all seperate and we are all one. I see the duality between the two being an illusion. This applies both to the internet analogy as well as the arcane esoteric perennial philosophy.
Sure, we are all seperate individual commmunicating with each other on the internet, but the question then become where do you end and someone else begin? So much of what I am is reflected, replicated, copied, assumed, merged and communicated to, from and by other people to myself and others. We are all part of a singular organism, kind of like ants in a colony. Sure we act independently from one point of view, and are part of something more holidtic, synergestic from another point of view.
On the more esoteric note, I have definitely experienced my ego being this very limited thing, and have experienced a reality that is unifying, connected and wholistic beyond my ability to describe it, other than to say, that there is this 'intelligence' (not monological or centralized), but unified, cohesive and sublime that is a whole unto itself. Regardless of any intellectual preferences I have for or against monotheisitic tendecies, this is something I have expereince as more real than what I experience now. I don't see it playing into monotheism, rather it trancends that duality entirely.
Posted by: Paul at August 5, 2005 11:12 PMThank you, Paul, for putting it all in the right perspective!
There is still a rather lengthy ongoing dialogue about this post going on at my blog:
http://upwinger.blogspot.com/2005/07/one-or-many.html
Everyone else is invited to join in.
Namaste.
Posted by: Upwinger at August 5, 2005 11:22 PM