Riding the consciousness wave?
“The wave does not care if you are riding it, but you care about the wave,” waves emerge from the water, they crest, peak, fall and toughs in a single oscillation. They transfer energy, completely real in effect and cause, a rock that drops into a still pond will take gravitational energy and turn it in to the kinetic energy of a wave that will spread out to the edge of the pond after the rock has sunk, we make sense of that event through our knowledge of time, the edge of the wave hitting the shore and the fall of the rock are two events linked by time. It is an understanding that every child can reach, and yet we are the only creature that experience time with that knowledge, and are able to express that understanding, that is an everyday miracle, but there is so much that we are capable of understanding through the direct experience of life, it is available to everyone who is willing to follow those who have already traveled down the rabbit hole of consciousness no matter how late you might be.
Consciousness is not just being aware of something or anything, it is not just tracking the movement of a finger in front of your eyes, or remembering your mother's birthday before it happens. It is not just a matter of making sense of inputs and outputs, such as eating salad makes me feel good and the doughnut makes me feel tired (as nice as that can be). It is all useful information but life is not just monitoring data and making the correct decision based upon it, clever forecasting and prediction of our mind gives you an advantage. It is a great starting point, being aware that you have choices that are under your control and letting go of the things that you do not, letting your emotions, thoughts, feeling, be rather than picking at them like itchy scab, it is a wonderful idea, letting things be is the action of letting thing go, and it is worth practising, experiencing and improving that control is a worthwhile investment of your time, even if you never take it further.
However once you have the bug for taking control of your life, what is happening in it, what you want and how you wish to achieve your aims and desires, there is more to explore and when you do, the best assistance you can have, as any adventure can tell you is a map. Some of the best maps ever laid out for this terrain comes from the Buddhists, they have spent over two and a half thousands years in this land after all, they are aware of the pitfalls and dangers, this is not a land for the weak, damaged and vulnerable, the mind is a dangerous place, you may need some real world help, in the form of teachers, friends and for some professional medical assistance (especially if you have suicidal thoughts that is an immediate red flag, get help, no excuses).
With the danger warnings done, it is a way of experiencing life that is truly joyful, despite their reputation Buddhist recognise suffering so that they can miminise it and are positively in favour of joy, that is what mindfulness is all about, finding joy in the moment. That is why I use the wave of consciousness concept, by seeing your consciousness as it is rather than how you are use to thinking about it, you are able to observe that it is not an object, a fixed point of view, it changes in just the same dynamic way that a wave does. In everyday life, our energy changes during the day, and we always have a reason for it, I just woke up, I ate a heavy lunch, I exercised, however even when you do nothing except breathe that energies changes constantly, far more than external reasons could ever account for, not enough could happen for our energy to constantly shift if it was not for internal reasons.
The fundamental nature of consciousness is that it is a wave, it changes, peaks and troughs, falls and rise, our concentrate focuses, intensifies and then dissipates and subsides, and it does so at a frequency of seconds in the untrained mind, as anyone who has ever meditated will testify the mind is not disciplined, it needs to be practised if you want to extend that concentration. The strange thing is that most people can access that concentration for a specific task, and access flow in a single skill, you can read for twenty minutes and completely lose track of time (that is flow) when you lose your sense of time and self. Mindfulness promotes this flow state in every day tasks, but it can be present in so many things, playing a game you love, dancing, singing, painting, carpentry, any skill you can think of, and it feels so good we can spend ten thousand hours immersed in practise and become a master in a single skill. And yet, so few of us spend the time to acquire the explicit base skill of concentration, but once you have it, it can speed up the learning of every other skill (putting your thumb and finger together and concentrating on the point of contact is the simplest practise for this meta skill).
So why think of riding the consciousness wave, because that is the stance that you want to take when using the skill of riding a wave, you do not try and hold water in your hands by squeezing it tightly, loose, relaxed hands does the job so much better. When you stop trying to be rigid, stop trying to be static and relax into the wave, follow that wave, let your self feel it rather fighting it, you are going to have a better journey. For one you stop doing really stupid things like trying go in the opposite direction to where the wave really wants to go, and you do not try to do big tricks when the waves are calm, you follow the wave rather than trying to control it.
When you stop trying make your own weather, you can enjoy exactly what the universe has given you today, it stops being a fight and the wave becomes your friend who assists you, and our awareness of the waves comes into focus when you no longer complain about how the waves are looking today, how it is not the same wave as yesterday. It is not that it does not matter, it is just not in your control, it is exactly how it should as how else could it be. It is in the cessation from our constant chatter and gossip about the wave that we get to hear it, and the music of the waves is available to everyone, it is the silence that everyone carries within them, it is where you intuition dwells, where a child would point to their hearts (which shows how wise you can be, when unburdened by knowledge) and where the witness views the world from, it is the objective view in comparison to the subjective thoughts of the mind.
That is the wave that we are interested in riding, the wave of consciousness contained within us, that constantly brings our awareness to the present moment, that is our experience of this moment, and it is this moment, consciousness is present in the current moment, it has no past or future, it is current experience expressing itself in the moment. It may travel through time, we might be able to remember our past, fear our future, but the wave of consciousness is now and always present, our choices is whether to ride it and our experience of it.
