What Is Consciousness?
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
What is consciousness?
Consciousness is its content; its content makes up consciousness. This is not complex, it’s very simple. Your consciousness is made up of its content. The content is your education, your attachment to furniture, to the family, to your name, to the tradition, to your particular experience, identification with a country or your house, the gods you have invented. When you are attached to your furniture, your furniture is part of your consciousness. When you are frightened, when you are ambitious, greedy, envious, all that makes up your consciousness. That consciousness is the “me”, the self, the higher self, the lower self. Divide the self as much as you like, it is still within the field of that consciousness. That consciousness is the known. You may not be aware of the total known, you may only be aware of the partial known. When you look at consciousness not as an observer looking at the observed, but without the observer, when you look totally at this consciousness, you will see all its content, not little by little but the totality of consciousness. To understand the totality of consciousness, to look at it, analysis has no place. The content of my consciousness is consciousness; they are indivisible. Remove the content and there is no consciousness as we know it.
Your consciousness is the consciousness of your neighbour.
We live long years full of travail, sorrow, pain, pleasure and fear. The body, the organism wears out through misuse, through disease, through constant conflict and battle inwardly: the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, I am a Hindu, you are a Muslim, I am a Christian, you are a Buddhist, division, the “me”, the “we” and “they” – conflict and division. Psychologically, inwardly this conflict wears down the body. And living in a polluted world as we, there is disease, pollution, strife inwardly and outwardly, which weighs down the body, along with bad diet, overwork, overindulgence and all the rest of it, the organism must inevitably come to an end. We know that. That doesn’t cause us so much fear. What causes fear is losing consciousness as the known. I know what I have achieved, what I have not achieved, I know my friends, my wife or husband, my children, my desires, my pleasures, my anxieties – I know myself, and that is the totality of my consciousness. Expand it, contract it, it is still within the field of the known. All movement of thought is in the field of the known. The mind which has sought security in the known faces death, that is, it has to enter into something it doesn’t know, therefore it’s frightened; not of the unknown but losing the known. Losing the “me”, losing my consciousness with all its content, my gods, my knowledge, my wife or husband, my children, my experience, everything in that content of consciousness, so the mind is scared, frightened and is ready to believe that it will continue hereafter.
Can the mind die to the known, to its content, to the furniture, to ambition, to its gods, to its gurus – can my mind die to all that from day to day? You will see, if you so die to the known, that fear comes to an end totally. Are you going to die to the content of your consciousness, to your gurus, to your ambitions, to your secret desires? You won’t. So what happens if you do not die to the content of your consciousness? What is your consciousness? Is it like everybody else’s consciousness? Is it the consciousness of your neighbour who has also his gods, his thoughts, his desires, his attachment to his house? Your consciousness is the consciousness of another. You may not like it; you may think you are an extraordinary consciousness but you are just like your neighbour, though you have a different name, different face, different bank account. You are just like everybody else but with little temperamental changes. You may be most proficient at your profession, but below that profession you are frightened, you are greedy, you are ambitious, you have sexual appetite, you are attached like everybody else. Your consciousness is the consciousness of your neighbour. So you are the world and the world is you.
Tags: Higher Consciousness Inner Space Life Itself Own Experience
