Buddhism 101: The Nature of Consciousness and Reality
The things we fret over - our desires and aversions of the past, present and future - in our minds are not real. This is the simplest and most profound truth. But it is the depth to which they are not real that resonates with me the most. In all of the mind-numbingly vastness of space and reality, through everything we understand of the fabric of space-time and everything material and theoretical that exists within it, where physically is the future? If we could draw a map of the entire universe, could you point to a place on that map to locate the past? No. Why not? Because it doesn't exist. Time is nothing more than the measure of change in reality, and "when" is reality? Now. And now, and now. It is never "then". Nothing in the observable universe - no galaxies, no stars, no black holes, no physical entity that we have ever discovered - ever reflects anything more than what it is at the time of observation. Even the oddity of the double-slit experiment which demonstrates that light and matter can be defined as both waves and particles, which seems to violate the laws of reality as we understand on scales larger than particle physics, says nothing about the past or the future and describes only the state of right now. When we use science to make predictions, we don't predict the future, we describe the present, and when reality is it exists now passes through the arrow of time that it takes to perform the experiment, what truth is revealed (or disproved) describes the same present reality that existed when we started the experiment, when we made the hypothesis and prior.
The past and the future physically exist in only one place in the entire known universe: in the collections of molecules that we call brains which reside within organisms on one small speck of dust orbiting an nondescript star in a nondescript galaxy, and in only a handful of said organisms at that - organisms which exist at all, essentially, because some particular set of amino acids floating in a huge pool of H2O facilitated the universal tendency to increase entropy, transforming photons from the sun into infrared (heat) energy. The past and the future exist as concepts at all because the brains of that handful of organisms evolved in such a way as to record present events in a way that could be referenced in the present and to use the combination of those records and present events to project events which had not yet occurred. In a very real sense, the past and the future are mere concepts of evolution and not even human evolution at that; in a material universe, they do not exist.
So when we fret over the past and the future, when we desire or avert any occurance from the past or any projection of the future or any state of the present which is anything other than how the present actually is, in the most real sense we are dealing in non-reality, in sheer fantasy that exists only in the firings of neurons in our brains. But you know what is real? The present, the now, and what exists in the now is the organism in whose brain those neurons are firing. I think, therefore I am;my brain is processing thoughts, and the processing of thoughts occurs in the present (changes in the physical state of chemicals which can be measured) which defines my existence. This is the very reason why meditation starts with focusing on the breath, because that organism is sustained by O2, and O2 is found in our planet's atmosphere (approximately 21% of it), and that organism evolved to draw the atmosphere inside of itself and to perform a chemical exchange that withdraws O2 from the atmosphere and deposits CO2 into it which is returned to the atmosphere by pressing out the air previously drawn in.
In this sense, for me, meditation is simply and literally being real. A choice to select, among all the thoughts that bubble up in the toil and trouble of the cauldron of consciousness, observations of the present and not to connect with recollections of records of the past and speculations or projections about the present or future, again none of which exist. Those nonexistent parts have generated some of the most amazing and wondrous parts of human existence - states of love and awe, manipulations of sound and form like music and art, inventions ranging from the wheel to the Internet - but they are only useful, as Joseph Goldstein puts it, as long as they are useful. Imagining everything required to getting to the airport on time is useful, but imagining all the ways those plans could get derailed such that we fret over the derailings occurring is not.
Finally, though the imaginings and fantasies of consciousness are not real, our physical reactions to those fantasies are real: muscle tensions, increased heart rate, spiked cortisol levels. Meditation, for me, includes times of invoking those difficult memories and fantasies and then observing the body's response to them. Give time to the memories and fantasies only as long as they are useful: allow them to generate the physical responses they generate, then change focus to the reactions themselves to observe the delta from baseline. If this, then that: if I focus on this memory or projection, then my body reacts that way. Then stay with the reactions - focus on reality, the now - until they dissipate. Lather, rinse, repeat. Over time, the lack of (or at least deflated) physical response allows me to deal with the thoughts themselves, unwrap them, address why I react the way I do, why they generate the physical responses, and then stop allowing the cause to be the cause. Because, by nature of the thoughts not being real, the cause is bullshit. By removing the bullshit, I get to what's real, and what is real is my true nature, my true values, the core of the layers. There am I. So again, I deal with reality.
The past and the future physically exist in only one place in the entire known universe: in the collections of molecules that we call brains which reside within organisms on one small speck of dust orbiting an nondescript star in a nondescript galaxy, and in only a handful of said organisms at that - organisms which exist at all, essentially, because some particular set of amino acids floating in a huge pool of H2O facilitated the universal tendency to increase entropy, transforming photons from the sun into infrared (heat) energy. The past and the future exist as concepts at all because the brains of that handful of organisms evolved in such a way as to record present events in a way that could be referenced in the present and to use the combination of those records and present events to project events which had not yet occurred. In a very real sense, the past and the future are mere concepts of evolution and not even human evolution at that; in a material universe, they do not exist.
So when we fret over the past and the future, when we desire or avert any occurance from the past or any projection of the future or any state of the present which is anything other than how the present actually is, in the most real sense we are dealing in non-reality, in sheer fantasy that exists only in the firings of neurons in our brains. But you know what is real? The present, the now, and what exists in the now is the organism in whose brain those neurons are firing. I think, therefore I am;my brain is processing thoughts, and the processing of thoughts occurs in the present (changes in the physical state of chemicals which can be measured) which defines my existence. This is the very reason why meditation starts with focusing on the breath, because that organism is sustained by O2, and O2 is found in our planet's atmosphere (approximately 21% of it), and that organism evolved to draw the atmosphere inside of itself and to perform a chemical exchange that withdraws O2 from the atmosphere and deposits CO2 into it which is returned to the atmosphere by pressing out the air previously drawn in.
In this sense, for me, meditation is simply and literally being real. A choice to select, among all the thoughts that bubble up in the toil and trouble of the cauldron of consciousness, observations of the present and not to connect with recollections of records of the past and speculations or projections about the present or future, again none of which exist. Those nonexistent parts have generated some of the most amazing and wondrous parts of human existence - states of love and awe, manipulations of sound and form like music and art, inventions ranging from the wheel to the Internet - but they are only useful, as Joseph Goldstein puts it, as long as they are useful. Imagining everything required to getting to the airport on time is useful, but imagining all the ways those plans could get derailed such that we fret over the derailings occurring is not.
Finally, though the imaginings and fantasies of consciousness are not real, our physical reactions to those fantasies are real: muscle tensions, increased heart rate, spiked cortisol levels. Meditation, for me, includes times of invoking those difficult memories and fantasies and then observing the body's response to them. Give time to the memories and fantasies only as long as they are useful: allow them to generate the physical responses they generate, then change focus to the reactions themselves to observe the delta from baseline. If this, then that: if I focus on this memory or projection, then my body reacts that way. Then stay with the reactions - focus on reality, the now - until they dissipate. Lather, rinse, repeat. Over time, the lack of (or at least deflated) physical response allows me to deal with the thoughts themselves, unwrap them, address why I react the way I do, why they generate the physical responses, and then stop allowing the cause to be the cause. Because, by nature of the thoughts not being real, the cause is bullshit. By removing the bullshit, I get to what's real, and what is real is my true nature, my true values, the core of the layers. There am I. So again, I deal with reality.
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