Enduring Consciousness

 

ENDURING CONSCIOUSNESS

Prelude:  ‘Tasha curls up in my lap.  Perfect spring moment.  Bodhi sits at my feet.  ‘Tasha looks around, the turns of her head barely perceptible on my lap.  The morning sun quickly warms the back of my neck while a chickadee emits its mechanical sound.  Surely there are any number of more important things to do than savor this moment.  Surely there could be nothing more important to do than savoring this moment.  

The moment extends, eternity intrudes, and I am wrapped in an instant of timelessness, the relentless flow of time momentarily escaped, my soul bathing in a backwater temporal eddy.

There is an inarguable and profound fact we trenchantly deny.  All physical forms and existence disappear.  The only thing that has endured throughout our entire lives is our individual consciousness.  If we are to rely on anything, if we are to plan on anything, if we are to invest in anything, shouldn’t it be this one thing we know that actually endures?  

We invest in our homes and bodies and structures and careers, all the while watching them inexorably disappear. Even our intellect is destined to fade and fail, but even that does not release us from the continuity of consciousness. Our greatest fear is of death, and for the explicit reason that it seems to entail the end of the continuity of our consciousness.

Yet for the most part we invest nothing in our consciousness. We exercise the body that provides a localized sensory home for our consciousness, we build homes and jobs that shelter and feed the body that carries our conscious experience, but consciousness itself we do not exercise or build.

It is our personal conscious experience that will watch our homes and bodies fall and fail, yet even then we will often as not pay no heed to that enduring consciousness, letting it wander untethered and undernourished.

All the physical trappings of body and belongings are not us and are not enduring, yet our consciousness focuses on those vaporous forms.  Self-awareness, inner peace, chosen intention, these are the investments that directly benefit that single essence that is guaranteed to stay with you as long as you live.  Upon exploring and exercising the potential of consciousness you may discover that it is not even temporally bounded by the body and brain that are revealed to be merely a passing chrysalis form and rudimentary tool for interface in this transient physical world.