Everything is Alive, Are You?


Are you Alive?

Are you alive? You would probably reply: Yes I am.

Are you conscious? Since you are reading this you are most likely not in a coma and so you would say: Yes I am conscious”

Who is this “I” you refer to? Do you point to yourself?

Is your body conscious?

Is all of it conscious, or only parts of it? Your left big toe? No?

Is your brain conscious? Is the fat lining the nerves conscious?  Are your teeth alive? Is your hair? Is the calcium in your bones alive?

How about the food you just ate? That food (other beings) becomes you. Will it be alive again when it is incorporated into your body as building blocks for liver, brain, and skin?

Look closely, it seems as if your body is part conscious, part unconscious, part dead, part alive, part you, part not you.

And we have not even considered the billions of microorganisms that is an integral part of your body’s commune. You actually have more non-human cells than human cells.

Yet you are convinced that there is a single coherent entity called ME, and that that entity is alive and conscious.

So, who is answering this question: Are you alive and conscious? Who am I asking when I address you? And moreover; what in my body is addressing you?

You say: “It is me and you! We are alive and conscious, actually, I am the most conscious being, I am the human being! and I know my thoughts, emotions, and my bodily sensations and I feel more alive than anything I see around me.”

Why do we feel like this? Because we take ourselves as the centre pointe of our world. The experience of ME is the standard I compare everything to.

The reason we take ourselves as the standard of being conscious and alive is that we witness aliveness and consciousness in ourselves so clearly, and because it is true; YOU are the ultimate existence, aliveness and consciousness. However, there is a catch, the catch is that it is not your body, your mind, or your ego, that feels like the ultimate existence and aliveness … it is your consciousness. Consciousness is what is alive in the mind and the body. This consciousness does not belong or originate in the body; it is simply universal pure consciousness; an unbroken field of pure undifferentiated existence. The body and mind originate in this infinite and eternal consciousness, like fish in the ocean. This consciousness is not personal or individual. It is whole.

So why do we call it “my consciousness”?

You (as consciousness) due to being alive and using the instrument of the human body and mind, perceive the alive consciousness in the human being as different and separate from the field of undifferentiated consciousness. But your sense of individuality is just a wave in the ocean of being.

Why don’t we see the ocean of being? Because we sit inside this body of hierarchical aliveness and levels of consciousness that we have identified with, we think we look out and that we perceive different levels of realness, aliveness, and consciousness. We look through a distorting mosaic of mirrors (our senses) and see a mountain, a bird, a tree, and a human baby and say some are conscious, some are alive, and some a dead, and some are unconscious. We look at bats. They do not see light and we think they live in a limited world of darkness. But they know neither light nor darkness. We know some animals see and hear things we can’t perceive. We do not understand their world.  We are not conscious of how a plant, a mushroom, or a rock experience the world. We struggle to even see how our most intimate friends see the world and how it is to be them. Yet unquestioningly we take ourselves as the golden standard for being fully alive and fully conscious.

What if we begin to question that?

What if we are as blind as bats? What if the hierarchy of aliveness is just a misunderstanding based on how we see the world with this clumsy human stethoscope?

What if you begin to listen and observe? What if everything is in fact conscious and alive?

If you listen to consciousness itself and see beyond objects, concepts, and change, you will discover something amazing; Everything is alive and conscious in its own specific way.

Just drop your mind and look. The sage tea steaming peacefully in my glass on the yellow table is alive. The water changes when heated, it disperses out into the air riding the energy boost of the conscious live fire. Separating from the water, it becomes steam. Steam is individual water droplets or water molecules bumping against different kinds of air molecules, dust, nanoparticles, and pollen. They react, absorb, combine or reject each other according to their nature. They are all being carried by air currents of consciousness that are floating in the conscious ocean of air. It’s a field of eternal change, but through all this, nothing has happened to consciousness.

Consciousness, or pure existence has, like an ocean with waves, stayed unbroken and whole. Every appearance in this world is a beautiful mirage, an illusory wave pattern in consciousness, a pattern which only appears to the mind, to your mind. Just now, these black shapes called letters are producing a voice in your head, you listen to the voice, you may argue in your head with the voice. The voice is an illusion. The meaning of these shapes is an illusion too.  This illusory pattern you are witnessing IS the mind perceiving its own movement.

But the mind on its own is blind and “dead like a rock”.  It is the pure consciousness that is alive. It shines through the wave pattern of the mind and produces a mirage of this world. Consciousness projects the individual mind’s opinions and its attempts to make sense of its own existence. This projection is seen as this world and the ideas of lifeless and lively, sentient and insentient, intelligent and dull. This world of changing phenomenon is simply consciousness twisting itself into the shape of human intelligence. Intelligence is then obsessed with figuring out the code of the twisted world. Intelligence is busy deducing the mode of right conduct when interacting with the infinity of beings brought into existence by consciousness shining through the wave pattern of the mind. And as intelligence it tries to decipher this mirage of its own making. A painful and confusing separation seems to have crept into the field of universal consciousness.

Mind feels separate from matter. You feel separate from the world. You long. You miss. You strive. This sense of separation is dependent on the experience of being individual, being ego. Ego is like a tiny knot on an infinite thread, a knot which has forgotten that it is infinite and whole. The ego feels lonely and knots itself up even more in the search for oneness.

Ego has forgotten that consciousness playfully said “I” and now the all-powerful consciousness is under the delusion that it sits here like a frog in a well. It sits here as the limited appearance of “Me” longing for oneness with consciousness. In its well of personhood it keeps quacking “Me, me, me!”

So here I am. Me writing this page. Under my desk lamp. I look at the light bulb.

The light bulb is sending me visible light when the coil in it is heated. It is alive. But not alive like your body. The rug under my feet, reflecting light in a pattern that pleases my eyes (that is why I bought it), is alive. The wool of its thread is alive. The wool used (according to our self-centered standard) to be “more” alive when it grew out of a sheep’s hair follicle. The light I see being withheld or reflected by the pigments blended into the consciousness infused molecular structure of the wool, is reflected due to the interaction of consciousness between the light and the pigment, which creates a conscious signal of consciousness. Like that, a light photon is traveling as a certain pattern of vibration, which by my living conscious eye is signalled as impulses of consciousness along living nerves into the conscious brain that, in collaboration with the mind, construct an image made out of another kind of living consciousness. I behold the image and believe that it is outside and separate from me and I think I like it or I don’t like it.

But remember that you, as the human being, is not the universal standard, understand that the universal consciousness is not the same as your human calibrated consciousness, nor any other creature’s custom diminished consciousness. This pure and infinite consciousness is not specific to any kind of animal, plant, nor any kind of matter or space. It is universal and non-specific, yet everything is saturated with it and appears in it. The image seen and created by your mind in this moment, is an image of the living consciousness folded into the appearance of a world. And like when a shawl is folded, the shawl appears different but is unchanged. This folded image world is not inside the brain, neither inside the eye, nor in any way separate from them. It is not out there, nor in here. This appearance arises in a field of what the mind, due to limited capability and its identification as a separate appearance, divides into three phenomena: perception– perceiver—the perceived. In reality this trinity is one continuous unbroken happening. And this happening is illusory, causeless, without effect, begginingless and endless. The separation in to parts is not real, this world is one single swirling wave of continuous appearance inseparable from the infinite field of pure consciousness.  

When we understand that nothing in this world of matter and light, space, and solidity, is separate from anything. When we realize that all division is a concept created by the bluntness of the senses in interaction with the limited human mind, then everything is seen as alive, as life, as consciousness, as you. As oneness.

With this realisation of oneness, you will lose nothing, become nothing, achieve nothing, need nothing, miss nothing. You will be everything, have everything, permeate everything and love everything. If everything is life and consciousness and you are aware of it, you are that consciousness, that life.

Gone are the sad days of seeing the world as half dead, half alive, half awake, half asleep, half you, half not you. Gone are the days of going and coming. The days of feeling separate or connected. Gone are the days of too little time, or too much time. Of beginnings and of endings. Of before and after. Of cause and reaction.

Only an infinite state of existence remains. Only the original oneness.

The door to that kind of freedom is the sense of “I am”. Knock on that door with your unending observation (meditation and self-inquiry) until you know that that door is your appearance as a human being, that the door of “I am” is the knot between matter and spirit. Know that matter is also just spirit. Just consciousness. The door is the way you came in, and it is there for you to leave through. That door must vanish. It vanishes when it is realized as being just the illusory sense of otherness, just the subtlest and original illusory projection of difference in the unbroken field of consciousness. It is the non-existent ego. So now, walk through the door of annihilation and become true immortal and infinite existence. As you are annihilated as a separate thing, the door is annihilated by your annihilation and then there will be no outside and no inside, no contracted or expanded state, no far or close.

The patterns in the weave of the world are realized to be just the thread of infinity. The yarn of illusion has unravelled itself.

The yarn is put down to be as it is. But if the weaver still exists, then a wish arises for the yarn to exist as something. The yarn, deluded by the concept of solitude, has a sense of nonexistence and longs to be spun into another object with a new pattern. But yarn remains yarn. Existence is unchanged. The weaver is the root of maya, the wish to become something is your desire sprung from a false sense of not being whole. That desire is karma.

Pure consciousness is the resting root, intelligence is the composer of the exquisite harmony of the pattern of life. That intelligence is seen when a new-born baby separated from its mother reaches for the nipple, for connection. When oxygen is extracted from the air your lungs have inhaled. When liquid blood separates from the broken blood vessel and becomes exposed to air, it coagulates to form a hard and protective crust. It is seen when you feel a sudden wish to pee when you hear running water that you can drink.  This is the ancient game of separation and connection. Attaching and detaching. Letting go and holding on.

The idea of separation and connection is the weaver of the patterns of the tree of life. The tree letting go of its leaves and of the rotting fruits feeding the seeds so they can grow roots to commune with the earth and shoot sprouts to drink the air and grow leaves for talking to the sun and flowers to attract the bees that move pollen containing code from plant to plant. This moving of pollen happens in order to shuffle the cards of genetic coding to see if the next round of combination will produce a freer being, to see if more intelligence will be allowed to shine through and project more understanding of how to be free of this illusion, of how to step  through that door of “I am”, into pure infinite existence.

From beyond the door that we pass through, as we detach from the belief that the show is real, we look back onto the beautiful projection of mind. We see it brimming with consciousness. You see it as yourself and you now know why we, when we felt loved, true, immortal, connected and at one with everything, we felt immersed in heart-breaking love for the world because it pleased us, and why we experienced a deep painful heartache when the world made us feel small, mortal, false, wrong, separate and cut off.

Now when you are no more under the illusion of being alone and separate, the same world that used to make you hurt, is now nothing but beauty and love. It is benign. And you see how the hurt was there to wake you up to your true nature. When you know your true nature, you will stop being confused. You see that path you walked was not a path, that the goal was not real, and that you walking it never existed. You never begun this journey. You never went anywhere, you never left. You have never not been home. You have never been home. You are home itself. Home for nothing. Home for pure existence as pure existence. You enter pure consciousness like water poured into water.

This amazing game begun before time began. Space and distance are a result of this game. This game has created itself to become aware of itself and to be free of itself.

You are unwittingly playing that game of bondage and liberation every day but you call it work, ambition, waiting for the weekend, planning a trip, cooking a meal, making love, having a fight, feeling alone, having a baby, dying. Each of these are at their root the simple desire to understand the projection of the mind. A desire to turn to the source (pure consciousness), walk back through the door of confusion and to be free. To be eternal and happy.

Be aware that all you ever were, was the unbroken field of consciousness being conscious in everything. See that you were this from the start, in the middle and in the end.

Everything is alive. Everything is consciousness.

Copyright, Kaare Troelsen-Vijay Shyam, December 2020


Nothing changes or dies but illusion.

+ There are no comments

Add yours

Leave a Reply