What is life? What is perception? In the transformation of death, is there a separation between life and consciousness? What is the relationship between consciousness, awareness and life?
‘Life’ is one of those words confused within a linguistic category of consciousness, being, awareness and physical survival. But it’s not only us ‘spiritual’ people who lack definition in the amorphous web of terms. At the frontiers of science, the borders are also breaking down. This is why in Centers of Life Science and Engineering, we can find every discipline – from biology and medicine, through to physics, chemistry, materials engineering, mechanical engineering, all the way to computer science.
For as long as people have studied life they have struggled to define it. Even today, scientists have no satisfactory or universally accepted definition of life. Prof. Lee Cronin of Glasgow University defines Life as “Anything that can evolve.” Pioneering energy research, this chemist made TED headlines (Making Matter Come Alive) with his research into the creation of sterile conditions in which life can begin to form out of conventionally “dead” inorganic particles.
To a non-scientist and one absorbed in spiritual inquiry, the open scientific question and unfolding trail of discovery (from star dust that comes to life, through to the qualities of plasma), opens an experiential inquiry.
An initial wake up came when casually watching a video on Facebook, I heard Jeff Foster mutter:
“Life is not the opposite of death. Birth is the opposite of death. Life has no opposite.”
The truth of this is resounding and opens a world of illusory opposites positioned in co-dependent power struggles seeking existential aspects beyond the deeply-ingrained duality of mind. (For example: the opposite of shame is disgust. Purity has no opposite).
Later. a student and wife of a scientist shared with me that she gets a lot of flap from her husband’s colleagues for her interest in spirituality. “There is no life after death.” they state, “It is a scientific fact.” I became passionate.
“It is a scientific fact that there is life after death! It might not be your individual, personal life, but that life persists, is beyond question! This life is part of who you are! A greater part!”
So the road to inquiry unravels. What is life? What is perception? In the transformation of death, is there a separation between life and consciousness? What is the relationship between consciousness, awareness and life?
There is an often used quote of Nisargadatta:
“Wisdom says I am nothing. Love says I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.”
Here is the rub. I believe Nisargadatta uses words with great precision. This life “flowing” between the nothing and the everything, is itself perceivable.
It seems Nisargadatta was describing the movement of perpetual creation, from a space that contains creation and destruction itself, from a space where nothing and everything are one. From this source, or from “THAT”, perception itself emerges, and somewhere through the causality of dimensions, life itself (as we are here in the physical dimension), is emerging.
This life (perceived by us) is evolving, while at the same time being utterly composed of THAT through which something and everything are one. This life, composed of THAT, is at the same time subject to change, evolution, process, time and space. It is moving, we are not. This is in time and space, THAT (the origin of perception) is not.
It could all be trashed as semantics, except that the more we allow that common-place, ubiquitous ‘THAT-ness’ which is beyond even consciousness and awareness, the more we see the effect of the allowance – an acceleration, intensification, freedom from form, liberation of perspective, disempowerment of experience and easy, almost unlimited, intelligence.
THAT cannot perceive itself. How could it? But the many layers of form can witness and observe the effect of allowing ourselves to surrender back into THAT – the unknowable and the unperceivable source of ourselves. When perception (consciousness and awareness) surrenders to THAT, these perceptive forms become free – free but not absolute.
This is not doctrine, but an invitation to inquiry into that to which we are attuning in every perceptive blink.
In a brief interview with Nobel Laureate Avram Hershko, of Technion Israel, there was a moment of celestial mystery. This humble scientist is the pioneer of the ubiquitin system which is found within all living cells. Ubiquitin is the protein which decides ultimately which cell should live, and which should die. It is called ubiquitin because it is (like descriptions of God), ubiquitous to every living cell.
Prof. Avram Hershko, Technion.
“What is the intelligence behind ubiquitin?” I asked. After all, this seems to be the component at cause at the seed basis of the polarity of creation and destruction. He smiled and waved his hand – in the way that scientists do, when they shrug off that which is still way beyond reach. Today, understandings do emerge about how ubiquitin gets out of balance with critical implications for the health of the whole (neurodegeneration, cancer, autoimmune disease). Stress is a key factor in its deformation, together with genetics and environmental pollutants.
What comes forward from the dimension of spiritual healing, is that physical disease can arise out of a struggle between existence and life. They are not the same. The agenda of life is not the same as existence – which is free of agenda. No-one could resist life without first containing the war from a source which is unconditional even to life itself (Out of what container does a person make the movement of suicide or ‘ending’ their life?)
If life is defined by scientists as that which is evolving, then we must also allow that which never evolves – the stable container – that which can never be denied and which is not defined even by consciousness or awareness. Existence itself. We must allow this same unified and utterly unentangled existence in the contemplation of a universe which is suggested (and experienced) to be at once expanding and imploding.
Through that existence where we are one and undifferentiated in every cell and particle of space dust perceived or unperceived, this life, which is my life, is flowing.
This is not about semantics. It is about the way we humans conceptualize our freedom into being here, now.
As long as we believe that perception defines who we are, we will not be free to fully manifest through all the layers of the physical dimension. We resist the miracle. Perception is a window to the edge of a dimension. It is not an end-point. It is also a critical inquiry at the junction of spirituality and science – where inanimate particles reveal an ability to become organic, and where one particle can be revealed as simultaneously a particle and at the same time its own antiparticle.
Again, it is Nisargadatta who steps out of popular teachings which claim that consciousness or awareness, love or light, are absolute:
“In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, making everything shine. Unperceived, it causes perception. Unfelt, it causes feeling. Unthinkable, it causes thought. Non-being, it gives birth to being. It is the immovable background of motion. Once you are there, you are at home everywhere.”
