Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
Astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington
Several years ago I had a lucid dream that my consciousness was simultaneously a tiny speckle in the moving ocean of energy and a higher awareness behind the unified universal consciousness. There was an observer eye that projected my consciousness into a malleable holographic form, which was a part of billions of sparkling dots that formed a glowing sphere. I was able to zoom into my physical reality, see myself and my family and zoom out to higher awareness behind the creation. This awareness was represented by a symbolic looking eye, which was floating by itself in dazzling darkness. I was my physical body, a floating eye, and space in between. A simple question: “What is behind this awareness?” zoomed me out further, and I became awareness behind the awareness in the form of another eye. It was a blissful, non-ordinary, and non-dual state of consciousness, where I had complete freedom to move any directions, create anything, become an entire universe, or a tiny particle. It was a state of pure potentiality and infinite possibilities.
It was difficult to come back to regular life after this shift of consciousness, to sink back in the routine and monotony of physical form. Trying to make sense of it, knowing that I am missing the essential, fundamental part of my existence.
This dream started my quest into an empirical and conceptual exploration of consciousness. Just a simple question of what is consciousness led me into a shocking discovery that our mainstream reductionist materialistic science does not want to ask “C” question and deal with “hard problem of Consciousness” the way David Chalmer described it. Consciousness is a fascinating and elusive phenomenon and one of the biggest mystery in our world.
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
– Max Plank, Quantum Physicist
Ancient wisdom traditions such as Vedanta, Tantrik Kashmir Shaivism, and Dzogchen considered a single universal field of consciousness to be a fundamental nature of reality. We are just different ripples on a single ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness at the basis of everything.
All things are part of one vast field of energy, called the Light of Creation or the Light of Consciousness (prakāśa). This field of energy, vibrating at an incalculable number of different frequencies, is all that really exists. It is also called the Ocean of Awareness.”
Wallis, Christopher
Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition
Though we are experiencing it all the time, we do not realize that we are. We are like the fish asking skeptically, “What is this thing called water?” The last thing a fish would contemplate is the very medium of its existence. So, we pay little attention to the nature of the one thing present in every single experience: Consciousness. We exist in a state of contracted awareness, our powers limited and our perception narrowed to a tiny bandwidth. To put it briefly, our brains synthesize an experience of reality through our limited senses, each of which functions as a different type of frequency analyzer directed at this fluxing field of energy all around us (and which we are not separate from).