The Sea of Sensitivity

We live in a vast Sea of Sensitivity. We call it the Cosmos. It is an ocean of invisible Livingness that, when we turn to look at it, is astounding. This infinite pool of pure awareness cannot be seen with the eyes, but we can directly experience it with the cells of our bodies. The Sea generates everything in the material realm that we see around us. That part of the Sea that we are allowed to directly access we call our consciousness. The Sea is omnipresent in our lives. It connects us to our world. It makes it possible to be alive. It is pure Livingness, pure Being, that has graced us by sharing Itself with us for a period of time. It is our greatest gift. We rarely notice the pool of Living Space behind our eyes. Like fish swimming in the ocean, we are unaware of our basic medium. We can be forgiven for overlooking this, our primary miracle. It is wholly intangible. We can perceive Its effects, but it has no substance for our perceptions to hook into. Living space is dynamic. It makes things happen. Reality emerges out of It. It is generative. It continually throws forth and metamorphoses the universe, deleting the worn-out from existence and ushering in the fresh and the new. It is continually throwing up structures never before seen in the universe. We call that creativity. It is our link to life, endowed by living Mystery to enable us to participate in reality, both inner and outer. It is an exquisite sensitivity to the creation of the Cosmos. It enables us to perceive reality, orient ourselves in time and space, and proceed with the business of living. Another reason that we do not often perceive the pool is that it is covered by thoughts. The pool is not the same as thoughts. Thoughts are momentary confluences of energy that appear, move through the pool of consciousness and disappear, to be succeeded by the next. We live each day with our thoughts strung like pearls on a string, one after the other, moving though consciousness. The pool itself, the living Field that hosts the thoughts, lies serenely and silently beneath them. It is the medium that they float through, the invisible, alive Field that holds and records them as they traverse our minds. The moving thoughts seize all of our attention. In our restless jousting with Reality, we are aware primarily of our thoughts as we plot and plan our strategies to try to keep ourselves safe and flourish in the world. We become mesmerized by the siren of our thoughts and their relations to the turbulent world. As tiny children, we begin an internal conversation with ourselves that lasts a lifetime. That conversation is so compelling that it demands and receives our full attention over a lifetime. In the process, we overlook the silent, underlying, alive, impressionable Field that makes the conversation possible. The Field of awareness within the human being is pure Being. It is the primary component of reality, both at the interior, personal level and at the cosmic level of the Universe. It is alive, conscious, intelligent and infinitely mysterious, a Field of Sensitivity and life that is the Matrix of all of our experience. Our individual consciousness is that part of Being to which we are given temporary access. It is on loan to us. In due time, it will be taken back. While we have it, however, it supports our life, registers our experience, and allows our personal sound and light show to continue. The experience of consciousness is like having a handful of diamonds in our head. These are no ordinary diamonds. Like their carbon counterparts in the material world, they catch light in their facets and send it in many directions. Unlike carbon diamonds, they are living and self-luminous, lit from within by the very fires of Life itself. Our experience of our consciousness is an experience of being lit up inside our head. We are bathed in light internally as we watch from some mysterious vantage point the phantom images that parade through our minds. Another way of thinking about this is to focus on subatomic particles, the material equivalents of the diamonds of consciousness. The subatomic particles in our brains are very talented. We know that our material brains are composed, like all matter, of electrons circling around their nuclei. At these microcosmic levels, we are mostly space—intelligent space—with a few floating packets of energy and information widely separated from each other. This is the nature of all material, including our brain. Scientists have no idea how the leap occurs from the material brain to totally immaterial consciousness. They have concluded that the material brain somehow produces the miracle of consciousness. Having leapt over this crucial chasm, they have proceeded to map the brain to determine which portion of it fires to produce each phenomena of conscious experience. Beneath this entire enterprise is the dying assumption that assumes that the material realm is the only true reality. The scientists, in looking for the way that the material brain produces non-material awareness, are asking the wrong question. The assumption that matter produces consciousness has it backward. The prime reality in the universe is consciousness, innate and fundamental to Being throughout the universe. The material realm emerges as a byproduct of this invisible Livingness. We do not invent ourselves or our awareness. We are not the result of haphazard accident involving material molecules. We emerge from universal Life, the intentional recipients of life, experience and consciousness. Living, generative space is not only the nature of our experience inside our head. It is also the nature of the entire Cosmos. The material level of reality is secondary to it, an effect of its cause. Being, in all of its invisible mystery, is the generative source of both consciousness and material. Perhaps we have only now matured to the point where we can begin to see this. We are still evolving out of our primitive animal past. We are still encountering new realities as our evolution proceeds. Contemplating the mystery of consciousness is still a stretch for us. We must, and will, grow in time into a larger awareness that puts Being and Living Consciousness at the center of our understanding of reality.