(Almost) Achieving Consciousness(?)

Note: I highly suggest that you go out and get The Inner Journey Home by A. H. Almas and read it for yourself. These understandings are based on my own understandings and those of my professor and classmates. Don't take what I say as gospel.

Today in Consciousness and Spirituality, we talked about chapters three and nine in The Inner Journey Home by A. H. Almas. These chapters were basically about how the soul in addition to being a field of sensitivity, it is a field of consciousness. It is consciousness. It is an organism of consciousness. This consciousness is also presence. Almas uses consciousness and presence interchangeably because that is his findings and the findings of others through personal examination. When a person remembers himself, he is conscious of being conscious, as the soul is at its basic level. Almas says that all thinking, doing, feeling, and other cognitions or actions are separate from this basic ground of the soul. In order to get to a point of self-remembrance (which is the higher state of consciousness that is just above what we usually experience), we must release all these other things and get to the ground, the consciousness, and presence of the soul.

For our exercise, we meditated. The aim of this meditation is to remember yourself, or as Dr. Dinardo put it, "Being acutely aware of yourself being present to yourself." So, with the information that I read and learned, I sought to get to the ground of my soul. I first thought to myself that I was going to experience the soul, that is, the pure consciousness, presence, and "beingness." A few times I had a sense that I was getting very close to something, and each I experienced things in my body. I gasped for air, breathed deeper, my chest felt as if it were clenching (nothing painful, but I was aware of it). It was like coming up for air. I didn't get all the way "there," wherever "there" was in this case. It could have been the higher state of consciousness, but I won't know it for sure until I get there.

It was like the story of a Sufi mystic who, when asked how he achieved enlightenment, said that he learned from watching a dog. He said that the dog kept creeping up to a pool of water in the desert, but frightened by his reflection, he jumped away. After a while, he needed the water so much that he finally just plunged in. We don't want really know ourselves. When we get hints of it, we really don't like what we see. This is at least my own interpretation of it.