“Consciousness” is a highly abused word. It is used in many different ways.
As a piece of life, as a body, you are a certain amount of earth, water, air, fire, and ether, or akash. And there is a fundamental intelligence that puts all these things together in a particular way to make life out of it. The same ingredients that are lying there as mud sit here as the life you are.
What an incredible transformation!
There is a profound and unimaginable level of intelligence that can make simple things like air into life.
Whether it is a tree, a bird, an insect, a worm, an elephant, or a human being – everything is made up of the same simple material.
We call this intelligence that makes life happen “consciousness.”
If you are unconscious, you do not even know whether you are alive or dead. If you are in deep sleep, you are alive, but you do not know it. The only reason why you experience life and aliveness is because you are conscious.
Being conscious just means that you are in touch with the root of who you are.
What you call as consciousness is not an act, an idea or even a quality – it is the very basis of creation.
Consciousness happens not because you are doing something, but simply because you have allowed it. Life is happening to you, but it is not your doing. What we are calling consciousness is the basis of your life and your existence.
The question is only whether it is available to you or not. You are always available to consciousness – you cannot escape that – but is it available to you?
Consciousness is not of the mind, but if consciousness is on, it clears the mind.
It forcefully finds its expression through the mind and body, and through every cell of your living being.
Consciousness is not a bunch of thoughts or a certain level of understanding, it is a boundless dimension. We have different aspects or dimensions of intelligence functioning within us; our body and cellular structure has its own intelligence, there is a conscious level of intelligence, of intellect which is discerning in nature, there is an emotional intelligence and a genetic intelligence.
All these dimensions of intelligence are ruled by the memory that we have accumulated. Our genetics, intellect, emotions and the very way our body functions is ruled by the memory that it carries.
What you call as memory is a certain kind of boundary. For example, “This is my friend, this is a stranger,” how did this happen? This person is in my memory, this person is not in my memory, that is what differentiates the two.
Memory creates possibilities, but a limited possibility within the boundary.
In the Yogic sciences, what we are referring to as consciousness, or turya, is a dimension of intelligence which is free from memory. It is boundless in its nature.
This is one person and that is another person, simply because this embodies one kind of memory and that embodies another kind of memory. Memory does not mean just what I remember and you remember. There is genetic, evolutionary, elemental, atomic, karmic, inarticulate and articulate memory.
These different dimensions of memory are playing on a daily basis. For example, today, if we eat dog food, we will not become dogs. Something within us remembers, no matter what you eat, this has to be transformed only into a human being – the evolutionary memory is absolute.
People think that their thoughts are free. This is a joke because your memory is determining everything. In one word, we call this karma.
Karma is the residual impact of all the memory that you have.
It is impacting your every thought, emotion and action. The very way you sit, stand, breathe, understand and perceive life is determined by this memory. But there is an intelligence beyond memory which we call as turya or chitta. This is consciousness.
If you are strongly identified with your physical body, the boundaries of what is you and what is not you are distinctly clear. In this state, you experience yourself as a separate existence. This means you are in survival mode, which is what every other creature is in, too. When you identify yourself as the body, the boundaries of who you are, are 100% fixed.
What we refer to as consciousness is a much subtler dimension of who you are, and it is commonly shared by everyone. It is the same intelligence that is turning food into flesh in me, in you, in everyone.
If we move people from being identified with the boundaries of their physical body to a deeper dimension within themselves, their sense of “me” and “you” decreases – “you” and “I” seem to be the same.
Essentially, we do not raise consciousness.
We raise your experience so that you become more conscious.
All of us are conscious to some extent. The question is to what degree you are conscious.
You do not have to raise your consciousness – you have to raise yourself to find access to it and experience it.
Consciousness is there all the time. If it was not, you would not be able to convert your breath and your food into life. You are alive – that means you are conscious. But so far, you only have minimal access. As your access improves, your sense of boundary expands.
If you become identified with consciousness, you will experience everyone as yourself. This is what Yoga means.
The word “Yoga” means union. Human beings are trying to experience this sense of union in so many ways.
If it finds a very basic expression, we call it sexuality.
If it finds an emotional expression, we call it love.
If it finds a mental expression, it gets labeled as greed, ambition, conquest, or simply shopping.
If it finds a conscious expression, we call it Yoga.
But the fundamental process and longing are the same. That is, you want to include something that is not you as a part of yourself. You want to obliterate the distance or the boundaries between you and the other. Whether it is sexuality or a love affair, ambition or conquest – all you are trying to do is make something that is not you a part of yourself.
Yoga means becoming one with everything, or in other words, obliterating the boundaries of who you are.
Instead of talking about it and intellectualizing it, we are looking at how to raise your experience from the physical aspect of who you are to a dimension beyond the physical.
Expanding the sensory boundaries in such a way that if you sit here, the entire universe is a part of yourself, is Yoga; this is raising consciousness. We are not doing it philosophically or ideologically but experientially, using a technological process that everyone can make use of.
The nature of a technology is such that it will work for whoever is willing to learn to use it.
You do not have to believe it; you do not have to worship it; you do not have to carry it on your head.
You just have to learn to use it.