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Here's one way to think about consciousness: We all are focusing agents of the inconceivable infinite. As any organism needs some degree of perception and mind, and that perception "chooses" and/or is attuned to certain potentials for perception, so to the cosmos evolves over billions of years organisms that can perceive and focus experience. As minds in animals evolve over hundreds of millions of years, so too do our abilities as focusing agents, to perceive and "think"---i.e., reflect on those perceptions---this latter ability only in the last hundred thousand years or less---also has evolved. I have no idea how many times this process may have happened elsewhere in the cosmos. But it is my myth-poetry that the Inconceivable Infinite (another intriguing name for what mystics dimly perceive as God) may be evolving. (This myth is not totally idiosyncratic; many such as Teilhard de Chardin have shared this general idea.) have discovered my identity and solved the apparent riddle of life: We humans are focusing agents of the inconceivable infinite.
This inspired bit of channeling (also known as a doodle) I did during a recent workshop on new developments in psychiatry. So, on reflection, if we are focusing agents, then this is a nudge that indeed, “It takes all kinds.” The universe needs many kinds of endeavors to keep going, just as our own personal body needs all its very varied types of organs. The brilliant brain needs a functioning colo-rectal area, and all the other parts, too. It’s not hierarchical! We need to engage and enjoy many non-culturally-elevated challenges in just being human, sustaining ourselves collectively in our variety. Part of me is tempted to elevate my own activities and imagine I’m “better,” but another part of me cautions, “cool it. Just do your think and stop comparing yourself.” Not easy but I know this wisdom is more true than the temptation or tendency to become egocentric and prideful. Gotta watch that.
Being a focusing agent involves many sub-phenomena. One must gather together one’s various potentialities, re-synthesize them, be creative in channeling our interpretation of that which can barely be expressed, the ineffable. This focusing agent role has many components and corresponding pitfalls. The illusion of the sense of self as being more than a focusing agent, the tendency to magnify this potential into a “self”—an object that must be shored up as valued and important (i.e., pride), an object the death of which—or even decline—is nearly impossible to conceive. Yet conceive it we must.
My mission on this planet is multiple, as is hinted at in the drawing above. I play many roles that take me in many domains, from romantic to social, recreational to mundane, professional to playful. Indeed, one of my roles is to synthesize my roles, articulate how humans do play many roles. We are not to be identified by one.
I'll go further and suggest that the self is a collective illusion that we work, more or less, as a constructed scaffold for sustaining some continuity. This helps us stay focused---something we tend not to do for long in the dream world. We hold onto a task, we remember more distinctly. (We can do this for a short while in our dreams, enough to feel there's a story line, which offers a sense of coherence. Alas, it falls well short of any analysis regarding its congruence with larger goals or other rationalist coordination. But most folks don't bother doing that much even when they're not dreaming---i.e., they seem to themselves to be fully awake. Point: As Gurdjieff suggests, there may be many levels of so-called consciousness.)
Part of my mission is to comment on this gradual awakening, the better to foster God's gradual awakening in this cosmos. This is a profoundly aesthetic process. Even people feel compellingly moved when they "realize" something. Imagine what it's like to "realize" a thousand things a second---fairly big things---and maybe a zillion things a zillionth of a second of fairly small things.
Becoming
As elsewhere demonstrated, the Shree Yantra is a fair diagram---if humans can dare to attempt to imagine such a diagram---of how the cosmos evolves. It is highly diagrammatic, or to be more blunt, "dumbed down" to how we can begin to grasp it. I don't claim to understand it all, let me be clear. But then again, Ben Franklin didn't understand electricity. He just had a hunch that lightning was sort of a type of electricity---that's about as far as it went. So too, I intuit certain interlacing, evolving patterns.
So, starting with an emergence, it is like the following:
beginning with a gesture---that's the closest word we can think of for this unfolding, the cosmos begins and progresses to more complex forms:
Then, below, the forms begin to interpenetrated, signifying the creation of dimensional overlappings.
Then,
the pattern expands, becomes more like the Shree Yantra, taking on a broader sector of not only three-dimensional fullness (manifestation) but also manifestation in the psychical realms, with many other dimensions:
... so that's what it's all about...
...from one perspective.
