TEN: Consciousness

In a “good” psychedelic experience, or after more years of meditation than I’ve been able to sit still for (yet), one experiences the death of some aspect of one’s self. Let’s put it this way: it feels like you are dying, or how you imagine what death would feel like. Once you let go, you realize that it, the ego, or whatever you want to call it, is not the true self. It is more like the self that has been conditioned in each of us by focusing on how different we are from each other, how we are better, how we are worse.

In co-counseling, another frame of reference I’ll talk more about later, we refer to it, to this false self, as a set of distress patterns that we developed as young people when we were hurt and unable to release (“discharge”) the emotions engendered by these hurts (by crying, laughing, shaking, raging, tantruming, etc.).

This false self seems to be that self which arises out of our sense of dis-connection with others. This false self is based not in the present, but in the past. It exists as a challenge for our true self to overcome. Presumably it has the same evolutionary advantage – which we no longer need – as the fight or flight instincts that kept us alive in the wild. For example, the hurt of hearing about the family friend who drowned skindiving haunted me sufficiently to make me afraid of swimming. Despite having grown up on a lake where in the summer we went swimming every day, I never became a good swimmer. Our lives are replete with such examples of generalizing from a single incident and thereby creating a false self living in a false reality. False isn’t quite right either, given that everything has a shred of truth in it. Limited. A narrow view of self or of reality.

In the sixties we used to talk about “expanding our consciousness,” and that became the excuse for imbibing a lot of substances, which seemed to give us the experience of our consciousness expanding. While I would no longer advocate imbibing the substances, expanding our consciousness still seems like a worthy idea, a good description of the “Path” that I would like to be on, perhaps even a moral compass of sorts: those things which expand our consciousness are good, those things which narrow it (denial, self-absorption, alcohol, repetitive behavior, pettiness, caving into fear – we each have our own list), not good.

Then the question becomes, can some kind of consciousness survive the death of the body? The psychedelic experience implies that the universe itself is conscious, that consciousness is an attribute of all matter and energy, that there is a universal consciousness that is so powerful one is tempted to call it Divine. In this metaphor, our miniscule consciousness as human beings will merge into the universal consciousness as we die. This makes some sense. Our own human consciousness spends a lot of time drawing distinctions between things, between “me” and “not me,” between living and not living, between energy and matter. The universe, by definition, recognizes no such distinctions. There’s no “universe” and “not universe.” The universe is one thing: everything. Can one thing be conscious of itself?

This view favors the final moment of ecstasy metaphor, as one’s individual consciousness merges with the universal consciousness. It doesn’t seem to support the notion of past lives, or of individual consciousness somehow surviving, being reincarnated, or whatever.
One possibility takes into account the fluid nature of time. Another common LSD insight is about how extremely relative our concept of time is. “Trips” lasting for hours seem to last at least weeks if not longer. Suppose as one approaches death asymptotically (the way a mathematical curve on a graph approaches a line without ever reaching it), time slows down. Suppose we experience the last few nanoseconds of life as every bit as long as the rest of our life, or longer. If this were the case, one could even see how some sense of “heaven” and “hell” might apply. If you acted really badly – Hitler, say – those last few nanoseconds could be pretty horrific. But if you did your best to be kind to animals and all that, those last few nanoseconds reviewing your life could be, well, heavenly. And there could be many purgatorial scenarios in between where you might have to go back and clean some things up, apologize to some people, at least in your mind’s eye.