consciousness… so far

one giant question mark

I don’t know why we’re here.
And I’d go as far as to say no one does.

Nevertheless, we follow religion, dogma, and doctrine
to convince us it will be alright.

It is impossible to predict when we will run out of time,
so we busy ourselves with work, hobbies, and family.

We erect walls, enact policy, and create social contracts
to cope with the inevitability of our passing.

We desperately want to feel like we have a place on this earth,
so we find names, labels, and ideologies to place our organisms into.

One of mine is being deeply interested in the human experience
and what consciousness feels like.

And this calling card has made me lifelong friends.
It helps me feel like I belong.

We have barely scratched the surface of what it means to be alive,
and I’m here to figure it out.

And I know I’ll be lucky if I can peel even one layer of the onion backwards, but this is the game I’ve chosen to play.

And though I know it’s foolish,
every attempt to map the immensity
of the technicolor I feel
is the most magical of them all.

What I’ve learned is that my brain is a special thing,
using schemas and past experience to build
the most coherent imaging of reality there is.

It minimizes tension and collects objects that would otherwise feel foreign into shapes, colors, and feelings.

It builds me a beautiful body of work to bring myself through and beyond.

It affords me the joy of deep, unstructured loving,
the pain of harsh, cold truth, and pride in the last sentence’s alliteration.

It provides me with the luxury of understanding math, physics, and literature, and at the same time, the absurdity of it all.

And more than anything else, it reminds me
how little I know about where it all comes from.

The neural correlates of consciousness maintain, quite explicitly,
that consciousness has its root in the dense neural networks of our brains.

We’ve barely touched the gut-brain connection, or the vast proportions of what Feynman calls cargo-cult science.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last twenty years,
if it works, it’s worth considering.

Even if it’s not scientifically bulletproof,
what we call “woo-woo” in the west deserves a little more inspection.

‘Oh goodness,’ you must be thinking, ‘how fallible he is’.

And you aren’t far off.

In fact, add some salt on the grain you’re munching on,
because I know nothing.

I wear my heart on my sleeve
and know the consequences of trusting too early.
I give my all to too many things at once
and am a living jack of all trades.
I follow the magic of serendipity to a fault and have
no clue how I’m going to fund my living dream upon graduating college.

I listen to music more than
I listen to myself,
I build bridges out of promises and know
I can’t keep them all, and for god sakes,
I’m vegan – and those cats are crazy!

You have no idea just how much I’ve gotten wrong.

And when you look in the mirror, I wonder,
do you know how much you have too?

We are all works in progress,
and there isn’t a perfect way to patch up our broken walls.

So we must provide ourselves with grace and permission
to try on different textures of being.

Because without an open heart and curious soul
we forget we are whole by default.

We matter from the very beginning.

We are complete at birth.

And whatever definition of consciousness
helps you feel closest to this truth,
the only one I can offer you,
I say live it.

We haven’t got a huge amount of time here,
and if you find aliveness in a certain feeling or phrase,
then it is the answer.

Call it life, god, or nothing at all,
nothing is true,
except for what centers
your point of view.

So trust it.

There isn’t a better explanation than yours.