Get Out of Your Own Way. Chapter 6 – Part 2

You Are Consciousness

The most common mistake human beings make is forgetting who they really are. This forgetting is precipitated, encouraged, and reinforced by cultural attachment to the materialist paradigm.

We get in our own way by forgetting that our true nature, our essence – that aspect of us which doesn’t change – which doesn’t come or go – is awareness, or consciousness.

It isn’t something physical or material. The physical, the material, is known by awareness. It is secondary. It changes with time. It comes and it goes.

Most people believe themselves to be a body inhabited by a mind. They believe that consciousness somehow emanates from this body. But the moment you start to examine this assumption more closely, the absence of evidence for this belief becomes apparent .

Do you say ‘I have a body’, or ‘I am a body?’
‘I have a mind’ or ‘I am a mind?’

Your body has changed significantly throughout your life. Cells are constantly dying and being replaced. The body you experience now is not the body you experienced five years ago. Yet your deepest intuition about who you are is the same as it was when you were small. You still refer to yourself as ‘me’ or ‘I’, despite the fact the components of your biological structures have regenerated many times over.

If you were to lose part of your body, you would still refer to yourself as ‘I’ or ‘me’. You don’t feel any less ‘you’ if you go on a diet or have a haircut. Your body is more akin to the vehicle you drive or the house you inhabit than it is your essential being.

Likewise, your mind. Your thoughts, feelings, preferences, likes, dislikes, beliefs, behaviours and relationships are all different now from when you were a child. Yet you still feel your ‘self’ as the same entity and refer to it as such. You have referred to yourself as I from the moment you could speak.

To what then, do the mind and body belong if not to the ‘you’ referred to in both these common sentences? What is that?

It is the awareness of the body and of the mind.
The ‘me’ or ‘I’ referred to in our thoughts and actions from moment to moment is awareness, or consciousness.
That is who you really are.

So, to proceed with the train of reasoning started in the previous chapter; most people when they ask, ‘What does this mean for me?’ have innocently made an incorrect assumption about who or what the ‘me’ they are referring to really is.

If you believe that ‘you’ are the central character in the story of your life – a limited, finite body / mind – it’s natural for you to care deeply about the destiny of that body / mind. To be concerned and to worry whether or not the story has a happy ending. What an event or an occurrence might mean.

But who or what knows your story? To whom does the story belong? From whose perspective is the story being told?

Golf is probably a big part of your life. If you have invested considerable time, effort, and money into ‘becoming’ someone or achieving something through golf and the story seems to be taking a turn in an unwanted direction, your feelings will certainly give you a warning that something or someone is being threatened.

This is the stress and pressure experienced by golfers. But it is based on a case of mistaken identity.

There Is Only One Reality

In Chapter 4, we questioned the common belief that there are two, separate realities. The reality of our inner lives -thoughts, feelings perceptions and sensations known via awareness, and the ‘reality’ of the physical world.

Mind and matter as they are commonly described.

But our only experience of the matter from which we are told the universe is created is our knowing of it. This knowing happens in awareness. This would give credence to the deeply held intuition that there is only one reality.

And it is mental, not physical or material.

In the language of philosophical idealism (in contrast to materialism) awareness or consciousness is the ontological primitive.

Every theory about the nature of reality needs to have something at the bottom of the reduction base. This is the ground level of reality. The element from which everything else is derived and can be explained, but it cannot be explained in terms of something else. It just is.

In the materialist model, the bottom of the reduction base is the field of sub-atomic particles described in the Standard Model mentioned in Chapter Four.

Yet this model and the objects and structures within it cannot account for or explain subjective experience. We know beyond any doubt that this reality perceives. All objects and structures are known by awareness.

How can the bottom of the reduction base, the primary element by which everything else can be explained, have something that stands outside it? It doesn’t make sense. Not only does our intuition tell us that there is only one reality, and that is non-material in nature, but logic and reason are telling us the same thing!

So, what other evidence can we gather from our direct experience to further back up our intuition about the unitary nature of reality?

Well, no matter how hard I try, I cannot find an edge, or an outer limit to my awareness. I can’t find a start or beginning to it. And I can’t find a point where it ends. It seems not to be limited by either time or space. As with matter, time and space seem to be conceptual frameworks that appear within awareness.

I have discussed this matter with dozens of other curious people over the previous few years. And guess what? Their experience is telling them the same thing. Their awareness has the same limitless, infinite qualities as my awareness.

Test it for yourself. See if you can find the boundary of your awareness? The point where it starts or where it ends. Does it have edges, a bottom or a top?

Now if my awareness has no limits, and neither does the awareness of other people, what does that suggest? The obvious logical inference we can make from the evidence is that rather than being 7 billion separate, individual awarenesses, there is one awareness, experiencing the world from 7 billion individual perspectives or viewpoints.
‘The one eye of the world which looks out from all knowing creatures’,
as described by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer over 200 years ago.

Consciousness is the reality that perceives. Consciousness is not dependent on the mind. It is not dependent on anything limited. This has profound implications.

Realising your true nature takes care of fear. Because you realise that consciousness is eternal, immortal. The fear of death, the fear of absolute disappearance begins to release its grip.

Consciousness has a reality of its own. The awareness that is perceiving these words right now is real. You aren’t making them up.

The words themselves could be made up. You could be having a dream that you are reading this book. But the awareness by which you are aware of the dream is the same regardless. It cannot be denied. This is the foundation of our deep intuition that consciousness is real.

We have another deeply held intuition, that there is only one reality.
The reality that perceives.

And what you call ‘I’ or ‘me’ is it.