Where do we come from?

Attention is your true source of wealth, even more than time—because you can waste time being distracted. - Sam Harris

Attention

A spotlight shines in the silky darkness of an infinite abyss; whatever it hits is illuminated into the forefront of our consciousness. I’m describing your attention as fundamental to how you experience life; we experience life; it doesn’t come to us.

Let me describe this strangeness; I’ll use some of the senses to explain what I mean briefly; waves enter your ear and vibrate your eardrum, your brain takes this information (not yet sound) and processes it, you hear sound. Light waves enter your eyes, and your brain processes this information and makes you experience the sight; you see in real-time, as though you were seeing the outside world, but in reality, you are seeing what your brain has accurately processed. When you eat chocolate, the chemicals released within the substance are picked up by your tongue receptors, and your mind makes you experience chocolate in all its sweet glory.

The experience machine

Everything you experience (hear, taste, think, see, act upon, etc.), anything that is real to you, is appearing in your consciousness, consciousness, and its content is the only thing that genuinely cannot be faked. However, there is no self watching the movie of your life go by; you are the movie, what you experience is you, and there is no observer of thought or experiencer of experience. You are the thought and the experience.

Consciousness gets interesting when you realise that processes are occurring that you are unaware of; for example, you’re now thinking of chocolate; in fact, I mentioned chocolate earlier, and now you’re thinking of a specific type of chocolate, but not in flavour, I mean a chocolate Ferrari, you're thinking of a chocolate Ferrari, a full-scale model of a chocolate Ferrari, a chocolate Ferrari with you inside of it gripping a chocolate Ferrari steering wheel with your hands. Think about it: how did you get here? Do you know? Did you experience the catalyst of all of the thought processes? If you did, that would mean you knew what you would think before you thought it, and that is impossible. What was it that led you to process a chocolate Ferrari in your consciousness (If you still have this image in your head, you may have a chocolate addiction; seek help) The truth is that we don’t know, but what we do know is that we can experience it.

There is no other moment—no other reality but the one that's here. Revel in this. - John Astin

The implications here are profound; for instance, do we ever experience the outside world? Do we ever really experience anything external? Or is all I know produced by myself and appears as the content in my consciousness informed by all my senses? Am I under the illusion that the world is ‘out there’? When I experience love and the warmth of someone’s touch, and I find them beautiful, truly beautiful, is that love and warmth produced by me? Or by my partner? After all, it is the brain that creates your consciousness. When I share experiences, did we share them or separately but near each other? So close that the mind doesn’t recognise that it produces the world?

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. - Albert Camus

Eternal sunshine

The question ‘Where do we come from?’ starts to take on a new meaning. Realising the nature of your mind through non-dual meditation can bring you face to face with the reality of your consciousness until you realise there is no face-to-face to confront, no thinker of thoughts; you won’t find yourself anywhere you look, only the entire universe, only that. People have come to these profound experiences through the use of psychedelics and it‘s postulated that our minds are receptive to these experiences; just as a key fits into a lock, the brain may be a receptor for us to experience the true nature of our selves; we just need to turn the key.

So, where do we come from?