The Breaking and Making of Consciousness

Hello-hello! Welcome to Rethinking E v e r y t h i n g.

This piece is a first-person account of an altered state of consciousness. Moving through sensory immersion, conceptual collapse, and uncertain return, this piece explores what happens when familiar structures of self and perception temporarily dissolve. It does not argue for meaning or insight and it stays with the experience, its beauty, disorientation, and lingering ambiguity, leaving open questions about the fragility and provisional nature of consciousness.

Happy journey for you travels through thoughts and perceptions you will find here.

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Before language slips

I laid the bedsheets under the pine trees not so distant from the waves and placed the Magical Bedsheet on the shores of my tongue. I am not writing this to explain what followed, but only to stay close to how it felt as familiar structures, perceptions and reality began to loosen.

Image by author

My head dissolved in the bedsheet under my body and the magical bedsheet dissolved into all the metaphysical elements of my consciousness. Giving my spine a cold shiver under the scorching sun, I knew my metamorphosis was on the horizon.

In pine trees shading me from the sun, I saw ocean waves crash on the peak of the tree above me and a flock of birds dive into the ocean like olympic divers. There was no applause for their dive, only the sound of waves crashing onto the clouds. I was filled with joy for the birds as I watched them take a victory lap around the sun.

The branches of this pine tree looked like they had perfectly grown to rest at a uniform distance from each other. The winds choreographed a dance for these branches where they swayed in perfect sync and never touched another branch or even a leaf. The perfect geometry of the gaps between these branches presented a leafy maze in the sky that my eyes entered.

But I wasn’t the only one in there as a swift squirrel climbing up the tree had taken a leap into this maze. A little help from the nut-feeding friend guided me out of the leafy maze and upon the trunk of this tree. I rested with my little friend on the outer bark of the trunk and felt the heartwood, the deepest part of the tree trunk, beat inside my chest.

Hands on my chest,

I was breathing the tree.

Eyes on my little friend,

at rest with a new found friend.

Short of another breath,

closer to where life began and will end.

Unravelling

I gasped in awe of the beauty of mortality. I felt witness to all of my mortality in a single breath, and I sat up right.

The vision of the leafy maze gave way to sand, the endless ocean, and the glaring sun. My eyes adjusted to this panorama as if it were being recorded on a vintage Fujifilm Superia 400 film.I gazed at the sun with my bare eyes, but what pierced me was the realisation to look inwards and reach beyond the mind’s horizon.

I returned to the school of psychedelic thought and asked the mystical teachers if there was something more to be found beyond the awareness and consciousness I felt I had graduated with. I walked to every floor of this building, through every corridor, and entered every classroom to find the book that could reveal more knowledge of the Oneness, more awareness of all the possible principles of Oneness, and more of the unknown unknowns.

Becoming restless, I found myself pacing in the auditorium’s balcony, overlooking the chatter seated in rows downstairs, and witnessing an empty stage that I was desperately trying to fill with the One performer. Alas, the curtains came down, the lights went out and darkness took attention behind my eyelids.

But this was momentary.

From the darkness, an image similar to M.C. Escher’s 'Drawing Hands' began to sketch itself.

On my visit to the 'Escher in Het Paleis' museum in the Netherlands (2019), this is the photograph I had taken of the 'Drawing Hands' among several other mesmerising artworks. I do not own any copyrights to the 'Drawing Hands' art by M.C. Escher. This photograph is not for commercial use.

I am already what I am looking for.

A higher state of consciousness is not an answer to find, it is the state of no questions.

My hand that was reaching to unlock the doors of higher perception was the hand that was opening it from the other side.

The Upanishads texts alluded that if you think you know The Answer, then you do not understand it and need to be further instructed. In that moment, I had come to understand that reaching illuminations beyond the ones possessed from ego-transcendence states are not a mystery to be found conceptually, rather they come into existence non-conceptually after the ego-transcendence and liberation from all Games*.

I was filled with an unconventional liberation. In this state I was devoid of mental-conceptual activity, but I felt I was the recipient of messages as though I was tuned to an inter-dimensional radio frequency. In other words, think of a Flow State**, except the only activity I was engaged in was non-activity.

This was my temporary death. The Void beyond nothingness. The Final Reality. The quiet bliss beyond all transformations.

My consciousness was not formed into form, colour, or concept. It was at the awareness of my formless beginning.

Returning

The Drawing Hands picture reappeared behind my eyelids, but this time the hands were moving out of the canvas leaving an extremely bright white hue behind my eyelids. I opened my eyes to the Sun sitting on the horizon and a child dipping its feet in the waves that came flowing. I was hesitant to wake up from this temporary death and my mind was like that child trying to catch the wave that was retreating from its feet. At that sight, I declared that this was my re-birth, that the the child was me entering back into the Game world but still trying to hold the revelations as if it were mine to take away.

"There are things know and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception." - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

As my revival back to the Game-self unfolded, a Vantablack night sky unfolded upon me.

The surface of the sand looked like the surface of the Moon as the moonlight shined on it.

My head turned upwards to find this moonlight from the only colour - White - to exist in the night sky, but what I witnessed was rhapsodic to my eyes.

Numerous small, bright, Starlink-like satellite internet constellations were advancing into the distance. Little freight trains that were transporting the energy of stars to an intergalactic cargo port, to be then dispatched to a universe whose Sun is dying faster than ours.

The twilight sky was a roof made of multiple megalithic-sized frames of the starry sky, holding each other. A rhythmic disco light filled the spaces between many of these connected frames like there was an 80s club night happening on the other side of the sky. I pondered the possibility of Interstellar 5555 playing behind where this sky ends.

In another part of this sky, the luminescent stars formed an outline of two human bodies embracing each other and their lips clasped to each other like someone had connected the dots, that the stars were, in a drawing book.

This preternatural dark sky filled the remaining half of my pupil like Yang beside the Yin.

As I retired from this place and until I reached my physical form, the tranquility that had embraced my lips slowly began to let loose like an infant finding its first words.

After the experience, questions remain

For hundreds of millions of years, biology flowed across the surface, species advanced and retreated, sensory organs were refined and redefined, but our consciousness keeps on breaking loose as we move forward as a species. As babies we possess Lantern consciousness, the vivid, panoramic, illumination of the everyday. As we become adults our brain filters every thing it encounters and shifts to a more Spotlight consciousness*** to perceive and experience most of our life. This step is evolutionary to us humans, in the sense that our brains have certainly become more intelligent and resourceful than they once were. But consciousness still remains to be an epic existential mystery. The rate and depth at which we have discerned the brain is not remotely the same as the rate and depth at which we have understood consciousness.

Perhaps consciousness is not the property of the brain alone as per the prevailing consensus.

It is not trivial to consider the possibility that consciousness may also exist outside the brain and that the brain is a device that filters, perceives and interprets rather complex states of consciousness. The eyes and ears filter and interpret electromagnetic energy and sonic frequencies respectively. But we know that electromagnetic energies and sonic frequencies exist on a vast spectrum, a lot of which is imperceptible to human eyes and ears. As such, embarking on altered states of consciousness could expose the brain to filter and interpret intricate forms of illumination. Perhaps the next break in consciousness for the species to move forward is to unlock the DNA code of the self, the world and beyond.

Is it the breaking into the ego-transcendental psychedelic states of consciousness?

Or putting together all our consciousness into a generative artificial intelligence?

Or is it anything in between?

Even now, I am unsure what exactly was broken and what was made. Some parts of the experience feel nearer than memory and other already abstracted by language. What remains unresolved is not the intensity of what happened, but how easily consciousness, which I once assumed to be stable, can loosen its grip, and how little certainty returns with its reassembly. I am left no with answers, but with a quieter suspicion about how provisional our perceptions and the self itself, really are.

Cover artwork by Kshitija Gurav

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*As described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, "Games" are behavioural sequences defined by roles, rules, rituals, goals, strategies, values, language, characteristic space-time locations and characteristic patterns of movement. Any behaviour not having these nine features is non-game: this includes physiological reflexes, spontaneous play, and transcendent awareness.

**The term ‘Flow State’ as popularised by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura, is where a person is deeply focused on moment-to-moment activity, which is completely devoid of mental disturbances, interruptions, boredom and fatigue, and under all the right conditions time feels like it has slowed down and there is effortless momentum on your activity.

***Spotlight Consciousness refers to a mode that adults usually operate from, where we narrowly focus attention on one thing, idea or a goal. The brain directs the spotlight onto the idea or the goal, which becomes the centre of our focus and eliminates the rest of the data or perceptions by its own predictive ability of how much will it be all useful for us to deal with that idea of goal at hand.