‘Looks like a comfy chair’.
That was the first thing my partner said when I showed her this photo. Her eyes – and perhaps even her heart – had found that which is illuminated by the sun, even though it’s surrounded by wreckage and ruin.
The wreckage by the way, of an abandoned and trashed store front. One of several in a small arcade, that’s long sat empty.
Ah, I thought: one more illustration of a metaphor I’ve been hearing a lot lately in my studies about consciousness.
Allow me, please, to adopt our teacher’s metaphor which, for me, really clarifies this concept of consciousness, or Atma as it’s called in Sanskrit.
Is the brilliant light streaming into this room and onto this chair affected in any way whatsoever because the chair is sitting amidst all that wreckage?
Is the sun shining any less brightly on the chair than it would if the chair was sitting in a luxuriously decorated space instead?
Of course the answer to both questions is no. The sun, and its brilliance remains undimmed, and completely unaffected, untouched, regardless of what it shines on.
The ‘I’ that photographed this scene, and my partner’s ‘I’ whose eyes were drawn to the chair in the scene, are both consciousness. Not ‘my’ consciousness; not ‘her’ consciousness. Consciousness is all; all there is. Boundaryless, infinite, all pervading. We can’t even say there is one consciousness, because there is only consciousness.
Ah, I hear you say: there is one sun shining on our world; and the sun isn’t ‘all there is’. Well, as our teacher likes to remind us, all metaphors are flawed: you can only take them so far.
Metaphors, are only meant to illustrate, to show us the way, point us in the right direction as it were. In our little example here, the metaphor is meant to help us gain some knowledge.
The knowledge that we are not what we see, hear, taste, touch, think or feel. We are that light – consciousness – that allows us to know what we experience with our senses.
One more thing: The light of the sun, flooding the chair with its brilliance, enabled my partner to see that it was comfy, even though it was sitting in that wrecked, abandoned and lonely place.
Just as in our lives, when everything seems to be crashing down around us and we feel we are the ones stranded in that wreckage, we can remember that the light of our own consciousness, is the way in which we may shine our attention on the truth of our unchanging eternal, and true nature, that is who we really are: perfect, eternal, absolutely unaffected by anything at all.
Peace and love
Notes from the Hermit's Cave 