The Dawning of Awareness

It is said that there is 85 to 90 percent shared DNA between chimpanzees and humans. We are simply very smart monkeys, and all of the many problems facing life on Earth are quite simply monkey business. A monkey with an IQ of 150 is still a monkey.

The web of life on planet Earth created by eons of the sophistication of Awareness is being shredded by the private interests of its smart monkey.

When that Awareness which is the foundation of all life awakens to its self, it represents the emergence of an entirely new kind of being: the creature of the Earth has become the child of the Universe, and one for whom the unity of all life is glaringly obvious. The smart monkeys are destroying the very fabric of life. 

Only the dawning of Awareness can save life from the smart monkeys.

Meditation is a good place to start.

The Practice of Awareness is Enough

I began experiments in meditation when I was 13. In my mid 20s I moved to a remote shack at the end of a rough dirt road and the silence I enjoyed there resulted in the culmination of my meditative efforts. With fasting and sitting meditation I was eventually able to at will enter a Samadhi, and in this state I was able to at will generate a field around me that gnats, and flies, and mosquitoes would not enter. The field extended about three feet all around me and if some companion sat within that zone the bugs would not come in to get them. This state required the complete dissolution of consciousness into Awareness. With much practice I was able to assemble speech while remaining an artifact of Awareness. All of this was very arduous, but the door had been opened to that Awareness which is the substrate of all life, and I found myself increasingly a creature of Awareness and consciousness became a necessary and useful faculty.

Of course my life at that time was one built on the foundation of identification with Mind, and the complications peculiar to humanity were well articulated in my day to day existence.

But that's not the point. The point is that I have known meditators with years of practice and find they remain firmly entrenched in the clutches of consciousness. Their years of meditation have solidified their personalities, and I have come to the conclusion that sitting meditation is not necessary. It is an extraordinary exercise and will yield benefits to any who enter into practice, but it is not necessary to the awakening of Awareness.

One can quite simply practice Awareness. Be aware of your consciousness. No repression is necessary. Simply make a habit of being Aware of the weavings of the mind and that is enough. It's like a magic trick, or training a dog. The practice of Awareness is enough.

The practice of Awareness is enough.

Pyotr Ouspensky and the Cro-Magnon

It is said that we are the Cro-Magnon. Within the statistical variations of human physiognomy if an infant from those scores of thousands of years ago were dropped down and raised amongst us, we would find before us a human being basically indistinguishable from the rest of us. The Cro-Magnon of 50,000 years ago had the body, the brain, and (ostensibly) the personhood, of ourselves. 

Peter Ouspensky (d.1947), writing in his early Gurdjieff years of around 1915, expressed words to the effect that "one could go mad from contemplating an ashtray". I was in my mid 20s when investigating this material. I was surviving as a sculptor in copper, and I imagined Ouspensky in deep contemplation, settled in comfortable surroundings and smoking a cigarette. As he tapped the ash from his cigarette into the copper ashtray at his side he was flooded with intimations of all involved in its seemingly innocuous existence.

Between a Cro-Magnon fascination with a strange and wonderful substance sweated from the rocks of which he'd made his fire pit to the existence of Ouspensky's ashtray lie thousand of years of inspiration and iteration: thousands of years of innovation and intuition and (quite simply) Genius. And this is true of every aspect of modernity.

All the advances in practical solutions to everyday tasks have led to our ever-so-modern "fifty dollar-answers-to-five cent-questions" and to fabulous answers to questions that don't even exist.

All of this is the product of Cro-Magnon consciousness.

The sleep of Awareness is undisturbed.