Are you self aware? Yes? good. That’s the life test passed. You’re alive, yeah! You always experience some degree of awareness but it’s very easy to be lulled to sleep and most of us spend most of our lives mostly asleep. Awaken! What do I mean awaken? You’re already awake? Are you sure?
“Yes of course I’m awake, look, I’m very successful, I’ve a lovely family, I’ve a two cars and two houses, and a very respectable bank balance I’ll have you know, you don’t get that by sleeping at the wheel.“
Good, well done. Are you awake though?
When’s the last time just sat for a moment, stopped paying attention to all of your thoughts, stopped paying attention to the sounds, the sights, the smells, the pain in your foot, the chair under you and just be totally present in that moment. Not for any purpose or reason. Just all stop, be here now.
Were you even aware that such a state existed? A complete freeing of your mind. The state or place described is the present and you experience it by being awake and aware.
Dip your toe in, if you dare.
Here a thought experiment / exercise you can try. You don’t have to do anything special to try. You’ll have to read through first because it works best when you close your eyes.
Now visualise the room you’re in. Make it disappear, see the area around your building, make that disappear, make everything as far as the horizon disappear, so you’re just on the plains of the earth, now let the earth drop away, let it drop into space beneath you, now it’s just you on your chair and the moon in space. Let your chair and the moon float off. All the faint stars and anything else you can see, including the sun, push all those off into the distance so far that the light is no longer reaching you. You’re just occupying empty space. Where are you now? Have you moved?
Same place? Yes, of course you’re in the same place, you have not moved, right?
Welcome to the present. Now open your eyes. Bing! all the distractions are back.
The world is a very noisy place so it’s very easy to lose ourselves in that soup of colour and sounds and smells and touch and thoughts and everything in a huge ocean of information washing over us like a tsunami. Awareness is about wakening up to see the that all that noise is part of reality but it’s not all of reality.
Oh no here comes the woo…
Just so I don’t lose you, in case you might be thinking there’s some magical mystical tour thing going on here. Let me save you the worry. You think the sun is real right? Right, we’re in agreement there, but have you ever been there? at the Sun? or anywhere in space? The moon perhaps? No? Ok, but they are real right? They are very real to you but you’ve never been there. All you need to do is apply that kind of thinking to all reality. Just because you have not experienced something (like the earth dropping from under you in the thought experiment) doesn’t mean it can’t happen or that it’s not there. It doesn’t mean it is there either, but you can at least admit you can’t be sure, all you need to do is open your mind to possibility. There is more to reality than we know about. If you want the current state of science.
Of the universe’s total mass-energy content; 5% is ordinary matter – that’s every visible thing in the universe, every piece of matter and energy that makes up everything from the stars to your eyeball – 5% is everything we know.
The rest is 27% dark matter – the “stuff” we can’t see, and dark energy 68% we can’t see that either.
So that’s 5% on the “We’re fairly sure of this stuff” side and 95% is on the “Not a dickie bird what this stuff is” side.
So if reality to you is everything known, detectable, visible, tangible, measurable. Then you’re scientifically speaking, experiencing 5% of reality. The truth is stranger than fiction. The only truth about all of this is nobody knows, so have some fun!
When you awaken from the noise. You’ll be able to experience a much larger part of reality. The great thing about the percentages is that the unknown 95% is not necessarily a few billion light years away stored away in a long term storage locker. It’s everywhere. It’s in you. You are not in the universe you are the universe. I’ve heard the same said about traffic. 95% of what makes up ‘You’ is unknown.
Free your mind
When you awaken and become aware of the fact that there’s more to reality that you believe then you can start to open yourself to it. In the way that a raindrop falling into a river instantly becomes the river you can do the same. With an awakened mind, aware of it’s place in the universe you can really begin to experience everything.
Carl Sagan
We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself…
As far as we know you are quite unique with this ability. You, being made of the same stuff as the universe, is the universe becoming aware of itself. The dust has literally formed such a complex structure we call life, that it can look at and examine itself and the rest of the universe. If that doesn’t cook your noodle then you’re probably reading the wrong book.
I won’t try to wake you, as Anthony DeMello says in his lovely book ‘Awareness’ It’s not that you have an obligation to wake up from the noise of the world, you can remain asleep if you want. I’m just telling you about the party.
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