In contemplating the question “who am I,” I have been given this statement about 3D existence…
“I am consciousness, creating moments of individual experience, in a physical world, as a human being, who evaluates information through awareness, and interacts with energy through choice.”
Thoughts?
Okay. Nice. Now what? haha
Well, in attempting to recognize “who I am,” I had trouble seeing myself outside of accomplishment and material worth. I felt I needed to strip away all “reason” for who I am, and discover the lowest common denominators that create my existence. The above statement is where I landed.
I see information and energy as the “ingredients” that make up our combined physical and metaphysical experience. It would seem to me that the presence of both is necessary for us to be aware of, and experience, our existence, and that awareness of experiencing individualized moments is what offers the possibility of evaluative thought toward both physical and metaphysical reason.
I suppose this was me “tracing the trunk to the roots” of who I am, and with any luck, I can now slowly “climb the tree” back up into the illusion of life with a view of its substrate rather than its perceived form or demands.
Reality is, at its core, made up of experiences, and so i figure to conceptualize reality, I should have some understanding of the mechanism by which I am perceiving it— or how I am experiencing my life situations. This helped me recognize how my individual identity (my knowledge, belief systems, influences, and memories) shade the lens I am viewing my life and self through. Knowing there is a “tint on the lens” allows me to accept some of the pressure I feel toward existence as illusory, thus allowing fear to subside and faith taking its place.
If I read you correctly, then your tree climbing has given you a broader perspective, and this takes pressure off your outer life.
I’m just shooting my mouth off here, so don’t take any of this too seriously.
What does one do with a model of energy and information and layers of being? Does one use it as a roadmap to travel by or just sit around and read the map or talk about it in the internet or…I dunno? It seems like it should be operational somehow…to me.
I would say the climbing has showed me a “release valve” to relieve some of the internalized pressure I create within my self when evaluating the “outer life.”
To use your road map analogy toward use of this idea, I would liken it to finding a new map along your travels, as opposed to studying a map you had prior to beginning the journey. Gotta orient yourself to it before you can use it, even if that orientation comes by way of rambling to strangers on the internet. lol
The inner work is often hard to show, especially when we have no prior interactions by which to compare previous to present states of being of the other-self. With the only way to express ideas, without being in each-other’s company to perceive non-verbal communication, is words, and they often leave much of the whole picture unpainted, allowing for opportunity of misconception, both on the part of the observer who must assume they know what the picture would look like competed, and the speaker as to the reasoning for the response received.
I believe this is why a true view of my self is so important, so that the least distorted communication may have its opportunity, without the unrealized portions of myself having too much sway.
I see.
When you say, “I am consciousness,” Do you mean that, I, the personality, is consciousness, or that I, the consciousness, is the personality or what? In practical terms, is the oak really the acorn?
If this be so, then you as personality is conscious of all, correct? Or not?
Where is the overlap? How does the acorn understand the knowing of the oak tree?
Please don’t take this amiss, but this seems all folly as it is based upon the word “I.”
I is a bubble floating in the waves. I is vain fiction with which we seek to comfort our insecurity. I is the noise, not the signal.
Or, alternatively, I am a fool.
Perhaps I is just one portal among many through which infinite grace shows her face for just a moment, be ye acorn or mighty oak or anything else?
It later occurred to me what I was trying to say above. If you have a map showing that you are pure consciousness, then why not travel there and visit to see what that is like?
I would guess that this is made difficult by some barriers lying between you.
I am consciousness, the same as you are consciousness, and all other-selves are consciousness. You may prefer the word “love.”
In this statement consciousness is that which allows us to perceive all that we experience in this incarnation, physically and metaphysically.
Maybe you might understand it as “consciousness is that which binds the mind, body, and spirit into a mind, body, spirit complex, allowing that complex to be perceived by all its parts.” I am not well versed in RA vocabulary, so this may be a poor translation into your tongue, but we are all “I” in this journey.
You know, I may have misunderstood you from the very beginning. When you typed, “I am consciousness,” did you mean that I am all of conscious, I am a portion of consciousness, I am one with consciousness or something else?
What I was trying to get at (maybe not so skillfully) was the experience of being consciousness of something larger than the normal individual measure of consciousness, for example, the experience of yourself as part of your soul stream. That’s what I was getting at with the map business.
I did something like this once online in a class taught by a woman who is a student of a student of Ramana Maharshi. She had me be present with some miscellaneous items I could see in front of me where I was sitting at home, and then turn my attention around back on myself. At that point I could sit simply in the presence of my own awareness. Pretty good.
I asked her what’s next, and she said that’s it, just do it regularly. I did it some, and it’s useful, but what I’m seeking is outside that box.
Yeah, the barrier is being alive. Lol. Or as RA calls it “the illusion.” The search back to that purity is the whole point of forgetting, isn’t it?
We all experience this whether we are aware of it or not, don’t we? Isn’t the recognizing and working with the “self as part of your soul stream” that which lets it become more accessible, or “reads the map,” to continue your metaphor?
Well, to speak to both of the above answers, the descriptive cartographic verbiage I would use is that I have a personality which is mainly oriented to worldly survival, to personal connections and to social concerns. My spirit doesn’t care if my car works or if I have money in the bank, etc. It cares about experiences and lessons of spirit, having to do with caring, giving, worship or creativity. Largely, it cares about me learning more about love so that I might pass the 3D final exam.
In order to bring these two together, my personality has to enter into zones that spirit cares about, and then maybe they can begin a decent relationship. Such a zone might be meditation, devotional practices or whatever.
Then, beyond just being in the same zone together, can we work together on projects? To what degree can we merge? This requires significant dedication, but can be done. But you can’t skip steps along the way, you have establish yourself in each area before proceeding to the next.
What I’m getting at, returning to your OP, is the individual becoming a partner with the larger self of larger consciousness. That’s what was in my head when I asked, what’s next. The barrier to that, I would say, is the effort and focus required to go through some sort of process of working out a relationship. I mean, the pieces are there, right? One way of putting them together is the process I outlined above. There are probably better ways out there as well.
Oh, the beauty of discussing metaphysics. 
This is a side point, but maybe worth pointing out: being dead is no passport to high level realization. Among psychics and channelers there a phrase, “Just because a spirit is dead, that doesn’t mean they have accurate information.” Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon depicts this in dramatic fashion. My point being that polarization–intensity of seeking–is probably better built here than there, and the more polarization one builds, the easier is the work.
Think of a magnet. You’re a baby magnet with all the characteristics of a larger magnet, just smaller scale. If you can increase your charge, you may then attract a larger magnet to your proximity. When you are charged enough and the two magnets snap together, then you are part of a much larger magnetic field which, as I said, can do projects, or “do work” together.
The key is building up your charge…if you’re into this sort thing.
This happened to me recently, actually, with a small group of monks whose order has been continuously meditating in silence for 1000 years. Somehow we’re compatible, and that extra vortex is absolutely amazing in terms of orienting and refining my connection with larger consciousness.
Sounds like a magnetic experience.
Magnetic, yes, in terms of the sudden (and unexpected) snapping together feeling, but the connection has an organic sense to it (as in “organism”). It’s as though I’ve been grafted onto an enormous, sprawling, nurturing root stock. It’s very steadying, and is helping me settle into whatever it is I’m going to do following my hypnotherapy training 3 years ago. Also, I’d say I’ve cleared my energy field of a great deal of anger over the past several years, and that is also making this possible.
KRS ONE has an extremely beautiful take on this subject and conciousness in general.
In essence if you hold your breath as long as you can the first thing that that happens is your body is preserving consciousness itself… It’s like it’s hardwired into preserve consciousness which is non-local., your heart doesnt stop, you don’t go brain dead and you don’t die..but you do “lose” your conciousness … Since all things are one if any piece of this consciousness died then we would possibly all have no consciousness This is very hard to explain in that manner in our language