What is this we call awareness or consciousness? Perhaps a rock is conscious, just not in a way we understand. It is surely our arrogance, and our narrow vision, which causes us to dismiss such an idea as a rock being a conscious, living thing. But Aristotle saw the possibility, the Buddha saw the possibility that everything is alive. It is actually more like a probability, as we even have physics to show us that at bottom, everything is alive, is moving.
So what is human consciousness, what is human awareness? That is the question. I cannot know a rock’s awareness because I am not a rock. But at a very basic place, maybe I and the rock are one. In that way, I think to achieve enlightenment is to experience, to be, that oneness with everything. That is the collective unconscious many people allude to, it is the underlying substance—the God—of Spinoza.
As Hinduism and Buddhadharma teach us, the path to enlightenment is through the self, and so the only way get to that place where we can be one with everything is to go through the self.
We must examine the human condition, the human experience and consciousness if we are to get there, for the simple fact is that, as humans, our path is right here with us, is, in fact, with us as long as we are with us, which means all the time.
We are the door, we are the portal to enlightenment, there is no other path because this is what we are. This is the path we have. We are the path. And again, there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
How do we walk the path that is us? The only way is to examine, to deconstruct the house of illusion that ego built. It takes us back to the process that is enlightenment. And again, it brings us to where we see that each of us has a different karma, each of us has a different path. It is a different path, but it is the same path, in that the answer, the key, the door or portal is the same for us all—it is ourselves—but each one is different. And so we can see that the answer is both the same and different for everyone. The opposite, the paradox, is no longer an opposite, but one and the same. This is truth. When the opposites are no longer opposites, then truth is accomplished.
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From my personal notes, 12/22/99
