Connector.

James George on awareness ...

What I’m coming to lately is an end-of-life conviction that there is more to consciousness than what is produced in my little head, or yours. Both of us have the capacity, at times, mysteriously, to get beyond whatever this small consciousness is doing and telling us. When we are able, when we are sufficiently still and relaxed—letting it happen, not doing it—we can receive a resonance from a greater consciousness.

Many spiritual masters I’ve known, and also eminent scientists like Carl Jung, echo this belief. Just before Jung died, the BBC managed to interview him. And he was free enough at that stage of his life to say things without looking over his shoulder and worrying about his scientific reputation. He said: “Man cannot stand a meaningless life. Something in us sees around corners, knows beyond time and space, so may continue in that state after our physical death. Those who fear death as the End, die soon. Those who think they will go on, die old.”

Fear is constricting. In fact, so are all those self-concerns for one’s reputation, for one’s ideas, even for what the next association is telling me. For example, am I just thinking of what I should say to you now? Or am I open to something that could be quite new, that is not really coming so much from me as from this source consciousness that many traditions have called “I”? I’m referring to the consciousness that manages to see what things are, what I am, and to not get caught in the next reaction or judgment or association—because all of these are functions; and consciousness is not a function.

In the environmental movement that I’ve been part of for thirty years, I’ve been saying that the problem is not just in our technology or in our corporate system, but inside ourselves. What has to change more radically is my whole attitude to nature, from one of domination to an attitude of stewardship. It’s a hard sell these days, though the need for such a radical change has been laid out in all of the great traditions.

When we talk about the need for a less self-centered attitude or for waking up, it’s a change of consciousness, a change of mind from an identified mind that is just presenting its next automatic association—and assuming it can control our entire life that way—to a mind that is still and open and able to receive something from this greater mind that Carl Jung was invoking earlier. Like you, I am searching for who I am, and by now I know that I am not going to find an answer in my functional machinery, ticking away automatically, but in my essential mind, just aware attention, watching.

As the Dalai Lama has been pointing out in recent years, the Tibetan language has two words for these two very different kinds of “mind”: The ordinary automatic mind that they call Sem; and this other receptive stillness, which has no judgments, no associations, that they call Rigpa and translate as awareness. It’s a beautiful statement in a few sentences of what has previously been a very secret Tibetan practice called dzogchen, closely allied to what Gurdjieff and others have taught as the wordless way of being totally present now, in this moment.

We’re all designed with this possibility. But what is obstructing the realization of that human potential ... it’s me. This narcissistic preoccupation with my story, my difficulty, which always has a kind of negative touch to it because I am complaining about what is wrong with me either physically or mentally. And the quiet, impartial, impersonal mind, consciousness, with which I could be connected, is blocked by that.

It is so important to understand awareness as a connector to something greater than me, to my source, really. My presence is the doorway to that, even at the moment that I acknowledge that I don’t know who I am and I see my lack of presence. But that is the beginning of a real wish for it, a wish to be.

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