The Ego, the Consciousness and Spiritual Evolution: Lent 2021, Day 11

I wrote yesterday about the baggage of shame, embarrassment and guilt that one carries. Yes, it is a part of who we are, but it is associated with the ego, not with the consciousness. What is the consciousness, then, and why is it disconnected from the ego?

The purest expression of our consciousness are our subjective experiences, qualia. 

Unlike those embarrassing memories, qualia flashbacks are always pleasant as they are of pure experiences, unfiltered through the baseness of the ego. Two I had today - I wrote a few days ago about my memories of February 1976, the time I was going to university interviews and my father's installation of a new central heating system. The smell of the enamel paint on the new boiler was imparted into the fibres of the towels in the adjacent airing cupboard; unbidden that precise sensation - of holding up a towel to my face and smelling it, freshly laundered and with that faint aroma of enamel. The other - late spring, early spring, 1977, Coventry; I'm exploring the south-eastern suburbs on foot, Far Gosford Street, Binley Road, Brictorian streets, terraced houses, a fresh wind, and a feeling in the air that soon it will be spring.

Both of these moments, uniquely mine, devoid of any negative emotions, reflect the existence of my conscious being. They are as equally as mine as those embarrassing memories, yet I feel they will persist.

Why do I feel that? Because, as I have written on this blog many times before, the qualia flashbacks than I can attribute to such moments experienced in this life are matched by anomalous flashbacks that I can't attribute to this life. That are neither of this time, nor this place, and yet feel just as familiar as the ones that are firmly placed in this life. I call this phenomenon xenomnesia - 'foreign memory'.

These anomalous experiences have a consistent 'feel' to them, the northern United States from the 1920s to the 1950s, and have been with me since childhood. They are an integral part of what it is to be me, and, along with my belief (shared with my father) in luck, form the experiential backbone of my beliefs.

Zen Buddhism has a notion called kōan, "a story, dialogue, question, or statement, used in Zen practice to provoke the 'great doubt' or to test a student's progress". Probably the most famous kōan known in the Western world is the one about the sound of one hand clapping. But this is the one that grabs me: "What did your face look like before your parents were born?"

On the second day of Lent, I asked "had your parents never met - would you still be? Not the physical you, but the conscious you - the awareness that defines how you experience life?"

In other words - was your consciousness predestined to be - to exist, to feel, to be aware? Was the choice of your parents, your biological body and its ego something random? Or was it somehow shaped by undefined factors? We are who we are - but by chance? I don't know; I can't even guess.

But what I do feel is that this is all a journey of growth, a spiritual progression, towards God, towards enlightenment, towards a unity, towards a continuous whole, to be experienced with joy and observed with curiosity. The journey is too long for one lifetime, which is but a bead along a thread, passing through a myriad living bodies, latching on to an ego, letting go of that ego, living and learning - that thread continues into Eternity.

How it does this - again, I don't know. but I instinctively feel that it somehow does. I will elaborate further during the course of Lent, but tomorrow I want to touch on the question of luck and predestination. 

This time last year:
The Physical, the Metaphysical, the Natural and the Supernatural

This time two years ago:
Heathrow Airport now and then

This time five years ago:
Radom line modernisation will change the face of Jeziorki

This time six years ago:
How do we perceive good and evil?

This time seven years ago:
Civilisation and a civil society

This time nine years ago:
Strong, late-winter sunshine

This time ten years ago:
Jeziorki's wetlands freeze over

This time 11 years ago
Kensington, a London village

This time 12 years ago:
Lenten recipes

This time 13 years ago:
A walk through Sadyba