The Contents of Consciousness

Ever been sitting by a river & everything just seems so clear. Life seems so simple & why can we just stay like this? Or you are meditating & in a blissful state then you come out of this & before long are really annoyed about something else only to feel despair that you have failed to maintain that state. As I have said in the Immersion & Videotape blogs we get consumed by feelings we need to manage these yet they are a fact of existence.

The negative states/feelings are contents of consciousness. All contents don’t have to be negative, we can be calculating our tax, listening to another person or creating a new idea, where the mind is quite useful & these are still contents of consciousness. The state by the river I’m terming the flow of ground consciousness. The positive states can flow from ground consciousness but the negative will be ego immersion. We will not normally be trying to control positive feelings either! 

The tricky bit is that trying to revert to ground consciousness deliberately will invoke the ego/conscious mind. So to insist that you stay in the ground consciousness will be at behest of your conscious mind, yet the ground consciousness is just a pure flow of consciousness, from Free-self, free of the conscious mind. (Think meditation.) Furthermore as Emerson said: Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. Also see the triangulation of (Coming home, Meeting life & Transcendence.)

This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.  Alan Watts

So something in life might need addressing & this might involve an addressing of issues that seem quite negative. Or in other words we ‘just lost it’. We re-emerge apologize & may have learnt something as Emerson said, even if it was just to avoid getting so heated over this issue again. Or maybe something has been resolved. The state of grief is surely where the contents of mind will be appropriately occupied by things we need to deal with, grieve for & come to terms with. Here is a heuristic to put this together.

1. Accept the negative happens. Like a ripple in a pond, observe it & it goes away. Such feelings are just part of conditioning & will be there (some issues might need to be worked through)
2. Accept that in the major part positive motivation & feelings will come from ground consciousness or the Livingness our spiritual nature 
3.  Both are contents of consciousness but allow the positive to develop & be expressed in life. If they are Ego driven this will surface eventually
4.  This acceptance will quieten you where it counts & lead to a greater transcendence in your life as you observe yourself coming home & returning to meet life

In the poem below Kipling beautifully nails it. To the conscious mind one feels overwhelmed ‘like who can do that’. However a deeper being in us says, yes. The poem says that we hold to the anchor of the deep soul self &:  All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. (Julian of Norwich) Julian was a Saint in Christian language, such that I will never be, however there is something that says if we can hold ultimately, in all turmoils (or even some?) then we are anchored to that with is ultimately the source of our being. Try not to overemphasize the contents of consciousness!