Archive for July 8th, 2010
A Thin Strip of Consciousness
Seriously, this is all there is to see of the prairie village in which my house is to be found. Sometimes it almost overwhelms thinking when one stands back and sees how minute the presence of consciousness is in contrast to the unconscious. When I speak of the unconscious, I don’t limit it to the personal unconscious or even the collective unconscious of a culture. I include the whole of nature. If one goes back to the beginning, before everything there was only darkness. And somehow out of the darkness, “presence” began to take shape, a presence that was unaware, unconscious of its SELF. It was only with the creation out of the nothingness of light that there began to be differentiation of SELF from the mass of otherness.
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“In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” (Genesis Chapter One)
As I look at the thin layer of space that the village takes up in comparison with the fertile soil and all of the minerals that lay beneath the soil, I am made a bit humble. As I wander through the village and see how little space within that village that humans actually physically occupy, I am almost overwhelmed with a sense of our puny presence. Yet, I know that for all of our presence in body, even that amount of space is vast in contrast to the level of consciousness enjoyed by the collective. How can anyone ever become so inflated that they see themselves as superordinate to the planet that they dwell upon. How one can be anything but humble when faced with all of the universe is something that is hard to wrap my mind around.
Even within my own head, I sense that consciousness is but a sliver of the possibilities. Yet, that doesn’t dissuade me from continuing on with my personal journey in search of more awareness, hoping to find my rightful place in the larger universe. I know that my microscopic contribution to the making the darkness light is as valuable as the greatest and the least among all humans. It is enough that I “am” and continue to “be.”
