Prologue: Consciousness
Floating … dismembered … fragments of thoughts … just Being … just Consciousness. There is no sensation of a discrete self … there is only Consciousness. There is no discrete body … there is only Consciousness. There is no ego in this infinite space … there is only Consciousness. Words such as peace, tranquility, and love, cannot approximate the experience of being in Pure Consciousness. You cannot find peace, because in Consciousness, you are peace. You cannot find tranquility, because in Consciousness, you are tranquility. You cannot find love, because in Consciousness, you are love. No thing can be found looking outside of yourself, because there is no self.
Just floating … dismembered … fragments of thoughts contained in no thing … just Being … just Consciousness. Floating in an infinite ocean of love, without any concept of an “I”—a body, a mind, a structure—that separates the object and subject. Just “Isness,” Being.
In Consciousness, you are the infinite. It is the very act of a “you” that results in a contraction from the infinity of Consciousness to the illusion of you from the infinity of “Isness to the limited you that is constructing a local experience. There is only Consciousness.
It was not always like this. Eternities ago, although still an illusion, there were thoughtsdesires and all the peripheral emotions related to that other state—fear, desire, jealousy, pain, things to do and accomplish. Illusions. All illusions.
What a journey! What an adventure! The memories of that former existence are like wisps floating in the wind. These memories arise like a movie you’ve seen many times. You can recite the lines simultaneously, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show audiences that showed up every Friday night at the New Yorker Cinema Street and Broadway in New York City. They dressed up as the film characters and played out the roles as they were occurring on screen to the accompaniment of an old upright piano. Memories … illusions.
So many illusions of past lives to arrive here, or rather, to realize that one has never left or could ever leave. Even with this knowledge, even if off by light years in its magnitude and scope, why was it so difficult to grasp its ultimate simplicity? Why the repetitive structure of sunglasses upon sunglasses, ad infinitum, preventing one from seeing the simplest truth?
A perfect metaphor is human existence in the earth-realm, where the vast majority of not even aware that they have a consciousness, much less that they are, in actuality, Consciousness. They simply exist and live out their illusory metro, boulot, dodo lives until their illusory deaths. At this level, there is a thought, which leads to another thought, which leads to another, creating an endless pattern that is called “a life.”
In the state of Consciousness, there are thoughts, but they are recognized for what they are passing distractions, a radio playing in the distance. They don’t have substance and therefore, one who has achieved this state makes no attempt to grasp them. Occasionally, however, a particular thought catches attention. Such a thought, too trivial even be memorable enough to recite, serves as a catalyst. Once engaged, the catalyst is the hand that toggles the lever of the toilet of Consciousness, instantaneously flushing one from the realm of Being, out into the earth-realm, with barely the faintest memory of whence came. It is here that our story begins.
