Amor Conscientia – the love of pure consciousness. The Roman stoic philosopher Seneca used the word Conscientia in his writings to describe the idea of shared knowledge, collective consciousness, being in the know or privy to, joint knowledge and knowledge found within oneself; which is simply spiritually going inwards to seek the truth. In contemplative practice this love of higher, deeper and broader consciousness is what people seek to experience. The more we are able to love pure reality and everything else just as it is, the more we love the Light, Truth, Courage, Justice and our other innate virtues that can be found deep within each of us. To Fall in love with Consciousness is to fall in love with Reality. Without the need for the masks, delusions or cognitive biases that keep us separate, angry and foolish.
Human beings can and must rise beyond dualistic thinking to experience this higher state of conscious knowledge – being who we truly are. We know this to be scientifically and empirically true as this is how life is unfolding for everyone. When we rise in this way we will fall deeply in love with Reality (truth). Amor Conscientia!
Life is all about how we fall in love with Consciousness a little everyday. What does this really mean in terms of taking action with such a love affair with life? It means that we need to learn how to surrender. Surrender our obsessive thoughts that we try and use to control outcomes, and other people, places and things. It means allowing broader questions to flow rather than sticking to the same old answers we think we have about life. It means learning how to see people as they truly are, without our own judgements and biases blinding us to who they are – divine human beings as we all are.
There are 3 levels of consciousness which spiral us upwards from Contracted, then Expanded to then Pure Consciousness. If we have a contracted view of the world it is like thinking you have completed life’s 500 piece puzzle and you have that image in your mind. However, if life is a million piece puzzle you probably have the wrong image. An incomplete picture of yourself and reality. This is how we can become stuck in life. Stuck or depressed or anxious and fearful of life itself.
Contemplate Consciousness with a Contemplative Practice
Picture for a moment the planet you are on. Imagine where you are standing on it right now. Then zoom out in your mind. Zoom out and see the blue marble you live on surrounded by stars, and darkness and zooming asteroids. See the colours and then zoom out beyond this galaxy. By this point the mind, without having practiced this before, will tend to want to come back to earth. What the mind can’t understand it won’t like! We are here among millions of galaxies, never-mind planets. No life has been found anywhere else yet even though we see millions of light years out into the void of space, and I like to think of this as a lesson in humility.
Secondly, close your eyes and go within. Inside you is a match of the Universe and all the space and colour and whizzing by of things. It is endless and boundless, much like your imagination. Understand that what is out there is inside also. It’s the same thing. When people tell me they don’t believe in God it is almost as if they refuse to believe in any consciousness that they cannot see with their eye, or hear with their ear. That kind of Universe is too small for me. No, love has no bounds and God is this boundless love. Call it consciousness or anything else you want and you will be right. This is a second lesson in humility. When we are humble we step beyond the veil of the ego, even if just for a moment, and gain conscious insight into the unknown.
“Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness.”
Eckhart Tolle
The Hard problem of consciousness
The hard problem of consciousness is a well known issue people have today. People tend to go beyond what they think is their consciousness with our CQ Meditations. Perhaps that is why so many healings are being reported through the work of these Meditations. The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining the relationship between physical phenomena, such as brain processes, and experience. Why are physical processes ever accompanied by experience? And why does a given physical process generate the specific experience it does—why an experience of red rather than green, for example?
To simplify the matter. You can sit with a profound problem in silence and contemplate it. You can initially find no answers whatsoever to your conundrum and you don’t google or read any new books to find the answers you simply sit and stew. You contemplate the problem without doing anything and then one day the answer appears. The solution comes out of the darkness and the silence and oftentimes its the most profound and wonderful solution there is. It is at that moment that you realize that what is out there is also in here. Consciousness is abundantly everywhere, all the time without exclusion. The body, heart and brain are not the container of our awareness but rather they are an experience of it. In other words we are internally experiencing consciousness that is out there through our senses. Just like a butterfly who hears through their wings, all things experience the same consciousness differently.
Just like anything else to Fall in love with Consciousness is to embark on a journey and a quest. Love is found beyond fear which implies that you must go on a journey to get to love. Likewise you need to become a sojourner to find and then experience expanded and then pure consciousness. All that we seem to know about pure consciousness is that it never changes and yet is always moving and shifting. If there is a God, this is what God is doing? We know it is loving, abundant, limitless and boundless. We know it is giving and friendly by nature which means eventually if we reciprocate in our own way we will develop a growing relationship with it. It is then that we will Fall in love (intense feeling of deep affection) with Consciousness and become aware of it.
All that is ever, ever happening to us is that we are always becoming more and more conscious. The last book of the bible is the book of revelation. It does not end. Only more and more is revealed to us as we are able to recognise and then contain it. The funny thing is that most of us like learning. We enjoy adventure and mystery and love experiencing a sense of adventure. Yet, when we try and contemplate issues such as time, space, creation and the Creator we close our minds. Some of the best minds, scientists, philosophers and thinkers we have ever had believed and then affirmed that there is nothing more than matter and stuck to it like glue. As if the existence of spirit, collective consciousness, God and anything mystical or celestial was a product of fictional imagination. These believers perhaps stopped too soon on their journey to purer consciousness. A lesson we can do well to learn from well with that humility we spoke of earlier as our teacher.
Perfect love casts out fear. If fear exists, then there is not perfect love. But:
Only perfect love exists. If there is fear. It produces a state that does not exist.
A Course In Miracles
Fear not, only believe is apparently written down in the bible 365 times. One time for each day of the year. Perhaps then, if perfect love casts out fear (things that don’t exist), then we can Fall in love with Consciousness after all. Fall in love with new ideas and with the mystical and wondrous. Notice things. Be open and push your comfort zones and boundaries. Let go of certainty and develop your awareness. Contemplate an apple again, when last did you do that? If we don’t act in this way, by re-looking at things we may end up as stuck as the philosophers who snuffed the ideas they did not see or understand at the time. When you do you will Fall in love with Consciousness which essentially is the falling in love with everything and everyone! This is the universal song Uni-verse, one song that we all can one day sing together, that represents the human experience beyond dualistic thinking. One consciousness. One universe and one you amongst trillions of you’s. All three of which are so deeply and intimately the same without and within.
Wishing you Amor Conscientia – the love of pure consciousness. Gassho.
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