What it’s for.
Field Notes of Rahgah - 20261002-S7
There are times you are deposited exactly where you intended to be. Other times it is a mystery, and sometimes it is both. When what’s waiting for you is stranger than anything you planned for, walk toward it.
This week I’ve come across a couple sources that approach consciousness from perspectives that I no longer subscribe to but the questions they both pose and things they touch on got me thinking. One was an article written by someone who spent a lot of time with mindfulness practices that now warns against them. The other was a podcast and interview with the most balanced materialist I’ve come across yet, however the views and way of life are still what I’d call soulless.
My intent here isn’t to lay out why both perspectives are wrong, they’re not… because they’re perspectives, completely valid all by themselves. What I want to do is briefly address the common question between the two sources. Both end up with the same immovable and dead-end of a question, “Why are you interested in consciousness exploration? What can you do with that knowledge?”
Both questions assume the payoff has to land outside of you to count. A skill, a product, an answer you can carry somewhere and use. The payoff I found landed inside first, and then it showed up everywhere else.
Sit still long enough and what’s buried comes up. Some of it is terrifying. Some of it is shameful and hard to talk about. It’s also the most important part of yourself to look at, because it has been running things the whole time from where you couldn’t see it. Shine awareness on it and it resolves. The energy that went into guarding it comes back. That is integration, and it’s the part neither source reached. One went deep enough to hit it and called what came up damage. The other never goes below the layer where everything is a skill to be fixed.
Here is what I can do with it. There were situations I avoided my whole life because I knew I’d fail in them, or because they’d be uncomfortable. Some were trivial, like a fear of bugs. Some weren’t, like walking around a difficult conversation instead of into it. I don’t avoid them anymore, and it didn’t take years of therapy to get here. I’m calm about all of it, more confident than I’ve ever been, and I see my life more clearly than I did when I was actively turning away from the weird and the woo.
I was on the other side of this once. I wrote off every spiritual practice as useless. I mocked chakras out loud, well before my own kundalini awakening. That life had less joy in it, less wonder, and much less acceptance. Acceptance is the big one. Avoidance runs on refusing something, the failure, the discomfort, the part of you a situation would expose. Accept it and there’s nothing left to avoid. The calm doesn’t need managing after that. It’s what remains.
So, what can you do with it? You can stop guarding. You can walk into the room you used to walk around. If you want something to measure, measure what you avoid before and after.
The irony is that I never came to any of this for utility. Wonder came first, it didn’t have to justify itself, and it paid out anyway.