Who am I? Why am I here? Where do we come from? What's the purpose of life? Our increasingly busy lives leave us almost no time to think about these fundamental questions. It seems that thinking about these things is a privilege only for spiritual or religious people, philosophers and other scientists. The rest of us rush through live, fairly strictly adhering to the schedule and demands placed upon us by our worldly, materialistic "needs"; we have a career to pursue, a clock and a calendar to regiment the rhythm of our lives and when vacation is finally there, we have a checklist as to not miss any of the sights to be seen. So take this time and come with me on a journey to our consciousness.
I'd like to start by telling a story. It's an old myth from Indians that lived somewhere in a jungle near a shore in South America during the times the Europeans came to take all their gold. This story tells of a tribe that used to pass by the sea-shore every day to add fish to their daily meal. One day some of the Indians got worried; they saw in the distance a strange motion in the water. The waves of the ocean seemed to behave differently than they were used to... But it was far away, and the sea kept producing fish, so all was good anyway.
source: Max Pixel
The strange waves however didn't go away; in fact, they got bigger each passing day, and at some point they could more clearly see the mysterious waves: they had a strange V-shape and went diagonally over the normal waves that moved in parallel to and towards the shore. Even the village medicine man had no explanation for this uncommon behavior of the seawater.
Then suddenly one day the tribe arrived at the shore again and they had the biggest surprise in their entire existence: there lay, on the shore a number of small boats and a couple hundred meters into the sea they saw a gigantic wooden monster of a ship. The Spanish conquistadors had arrived... And the rest is history.
What you should have noticed is this: the Indians were able to see the wake of the ship days in advance, but not the ship itself!
Science now knows why they couldn't see the ship: it is because their brains had nothing to compare it with. They simply lacked the entire concept of a giant sail-ship that could carry dozens of sailors and soldiers. Scientists, in their quest to explain "consciousness" now know that our brain is a prediction machine that tries to predict the outside world by comparing sensory input to things it already knows. We are visual creatures primarily and we are highly attuned to recognize faces; being able to communicate with each other in small and large societies demands from us the ability to distinguish individual faces, so we're very good at that. But that is also the reason we see faces everywhere in everything; as soon as an arrangement of objects consists of two circles and a straight or bend line, we see a face and we're even able to say if it's a happy, neutral or sad face.
Our seeing is mostly recognizing and what we don't recognize, we don't see. Our brain, our consciousness is in a dark place, there's no light inside our skulls, yet that's where our picture of the world is made as an approximation of whatever reality is out there. I brought with me someone who can explain exactly how much of a hallucination our experience of reality really is. Anil Seth explains how far science has come in explaining consciousness, and how far away we still are from a full scientific understanding in this mind-expanding Ted-talk:
Anil Seth:
"Consciousness, for each of us, is all there is. Without it there's no world, there's no self, there's nothing at all."
So, scientists even say, admit that "consciousness is all there is". Even our own physical bodies are a hallucination of our consciousness; it's just the most persistent hallucination of them all, since we're born into it and it has always been with us. Or has it? I find it remarkable how modern science seems to move in a direction Eastern philosophies already arrived at long ago. So, what has Buddhism got to say about the self and our consciousness? We'll get there soon...
I often have this feeling, this inner certainty that my thoughts are not my own. Think about it: from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep, thoughts keep entering your mind, your consciousness. And you can do nothing about it. It's impossible for you to think of nothing, to just be your physical body and nothing more. Unless you're dead of course in which case I advice you to stop reading now and move that body to the nearest hospital and donate yourself to science.
For a very long time now I am convinced that we are not our physical bodies, that we do have a soul or consciousness that's somehow outside of us. That the things we call reality and self are creations of our consciousness, and that we truly are a focus-point for the universe itself. Our souls are the conduits through which the universe manifests itself as well as the lens through which that universe tries to understand itself.
source: Wikimedia Commons
Now before you go "there it is... he's lost it, I always knew there was something strange about this guy...", think about it for a second. Science also teaches us that all atoms in the periodic system, all the "stuff" the planet and ourselves are made of, come from the insides of exploded stars. According to the Big Bang theory the early universe only had Hydrogen and Helium atoms scattered through space. It was dark and cold. Under influence of gravity ever larger groups of these lightest of atoms clustered together and amassed so much that in the center pressure and temperatures became high enough for nuclear fusion to take place, creating heavier atoms and a lot of energie in the form of the first light as the first stars were born.
These stars got bigger, aged, and died in an explosion, slinging their guts, the heavier atoms into space... These also clustered together, repeating the process, creating even heavier atoms. If I remember correctly (read too many books, saw too many lectures and documentaries), "our" atoms, oxygen, carbon et cetera, "the stuff live is made of" were exploded into the universe by fourth or fifth generation stars. The really heavy and valuable stuff came even later, and that's why gold isn't rare on our planet only; it's rare in the entire known universe. This I do remember: Lawrence Krauss, a rather well known theoretical physicist once said, in a lecture with the tantalizing title "a universe from nothing", something like:
"Forget Jesus! It's The Stars that gave their lives for us!" And he's right: we are all made from stardust..."
I hope you begin to see a beautiful one-ness in all of this, like I do. How we're one with the universe on the level of consciousness and even on a purely physical level we're made from the universe itself. If you "feel" that, then you're ready for my next guest, Alan Watts who will try to explain the Eastern way of looking at the grandest questions in life.
In short, Alan Watts proves you that you don't exist, and shows your existence, the existence of a self, to be a hallucination. Now I can't help but see almost nothing but agreement between Science and Buddhism, as both my guests make almost the same points and observations. Maybe I should have titled this "Science Proves Buddhism". I cannot speak from experience though, in the sense that I never reached the state of being described by Watts or ever even seriously tried.
If you want to read a beautiful account of a western experience with these eastern philosophies, I highly recommend you reading @zipporah's account of her solo journey through India and Nepal, during which she bravely took the challenge of a 10 day meditating session of complete silence and total inward focus. read The Accidental Designer if you want to learn about practicing what I only talk about.
The inspiration for this "soul-quest" came from her and also my fellow Helpies @meno who regularly goes down the philosophical path in his highly entertaining posts, @hz432creations who challenged my intellect (the little amount I have anyways) to think about giving and sharing, and the same goes for @chbartist, whose post Learning To Be Grateful... just has to be read. And let me not forget @nathankaye, whose songs and lyrics very much tell the same story I try to tell here.