by Paul Micarelli
Last night, my girlfriend & I were having one of our usual deep discussions. She had read something by
Osho & asked me what I thought of him. When looking up information about him, this led to our discovery that Osho's parents practiced
Jainism. I told her that she would identity with that belief system- because they were not only vegetarians, but they avoided harming or killing all living things, including plants.
This, in turn, led to me discussing the idea that our human
consciousness is only one form of
consciousness. Any living system that
receives input, then interacts & communicates with other living
systems is fundamentally conscious.
Even vegetarianism is narrow-minded, in the sense that thinking it's okay to kill a plant, but not an animal, ignores the fact that you are still destroying & consuming a living system to absorb it's stored energy and physical nutrients. Just because it doesn't have "consciousness" in the form of human senses & thought-language, does not mean that it does not have some form of consciousness. A plant can sense changes in its environment, send signals to other plants or animals, and react to stimuli.
Then, I took it a step further & said that on a quantum level, consciousness is all-pervasive, even in seemingly non-living forms. The base energy field, from which our reality arises, is inherent in all things, and must be able to store and transmit information for any observable coherence to exist, at all.
This information snowballs into ever-increasingly complex systems & forms:
Quantum fluctuations give rise to -> atomic waveforms -> elements -> molecules -> larger biological & elemental structures.
This cumulative formation of complexity is nothing more than a infinitely intertwined play of energy- originating at the deepest level of the single, unified field of all being.
This
"unified field" is talked about frequently in religious philosophy & spirituality, as well as physics. It can go by any name you'd like - God, Tao, Quantum Field, Brahma, The Source, etc. As soon as we name it, however, we lose it. It is not something that can be conceptualized. It is beyond conception.
It is EVERYTHING, on all dimensions & scales.
Anyway, what really spurred me to write this post was seeing the quote below on
Daily Zen. It describes the difficult notion of a single, seamless reality-
"The Clear Light" -that is beyond our limited conceptions of separateness and individual phenomena.
"When the stains from old habits
Are exhausted,
The original light appears,
Blazing through your skull,
Not admitting other matters.
Vast and spacious,
Like sky and water merging
During autumn,
Like snow and moon
Having the same color,
This field is without boundary,
Beyond direction,
Magnificently one entity
Without edge or seam. "
- Hongzhi (1091-1157)
