My confrontation with Consciousness
It’s strange how sometimes the most distant memories of our past can surface if one peers long enough into the days gone by. What’s more intriguing is how crystal clear these past memories can be inside our minds, remembering every little detail of those moments. One such memory surfaced to my mind recently. It is from the time I was in primary school.
It was the start of the new school year when all the children entering the new grade would be reshuffled and sent into different sections. All my fellow classmates and I the stood in the hallway waiting to be seated. You could here the chattering noises of excited students waiting to be seated in their new classrooms . What was fun about going into the next grade was that since your class pool was shuffled, you never knew what section and people from your grade you were going to end up with. Atleast, not until the first day of school in the new academic year. This was one such day.
Funnily enough, a to-be classmate of mine had chosen to play a unique game as we waited in the hallway. She exclaimed to all of us standing in a group, “I challenge you to touch and show me“. Strange enough as it was sounded, we were unfazed by the challenge and one of us quickly grabbed her hand and said, “There! I touched you“. But then she proceeded to say something astounding and deeply profound, “You only touched my HAND and, Not ME“.
“What?!”
We didn’t quite understand what she was getting at. Yet thinking about it for a moment this absurd statement started to make sense. In this argument, this 7th grader was bringing up the stark distinction between her body and Herself – which her inner person, her soul”.
I remember someone saying,” What if I touch your eye?”. She replied, “You would still be touching my eye and not ME“. I don’t know how she came up with this assertion or knowledge, but even in that moment I realized what she was saying was profound and something that carried weight and implication.
I sense that there is a purpose as to why I reminded of this one moment after all these years. And this might hold true for many people. For me a few moments of my young life stand out as a revelation to me of my own personal existence. When I was very young, too young to understand many things yet old enough to think, I remember waiting on my mom for something I needed help with and suddenly my mind wandering off , “Here I am, I have arrived, I’m alive, and there is no escape” Somewhere in those that realization, there also was fear, fear of the reality and the fact that truly I had no escape.
And although these thoughts were hard to understand for my young mind, as I think about them now, I know that they revealed the truth about my existence and my consciousness as a living being, my mind which was different from my physical body. Consciousness is something that sets humans apart from the material world – our distinct soul, our personality.
If we really think about it, we are souls. People with thoughts, aspirations, dreams and a personality which transcends the physical body and that’s something unique about us.
Few months ago, I had a chance of reading about a similar experience of a Neuroscientist during her younger days. Sharon Dirckx writers in her book – Am I just my brain –
An early childhood memory of mine is of sitting by a window on a rainy day, watching the drops splash against the pane. Like all normal children, I spent most of my life racing around. But at this particular moment I was still , and my mind had time to drift. I remember a series of questions popping into my head: Why can I think, Why do I exist, Why am I a living, breathing, conscious person who experiences life? I don’t really remember where the questions came from. Neither do I remember my exact age. They were just there. Unprompted.
Even though these moments of revelation and of heightened consciousness are sporadic and sparse through our young lives, I believe that they are profound reminder and reflections of a deeper reality about our existence – I believe they reflect the truth and the existence of the very mind that created us.