Ordinary Consciousness

If enlightenment were just this seeing or having insight, it would not be so spiritually enlightening as to bring about a complete riddance of evil passions and the sense of perfect freedom. Intuitions could not go so penetratingly into the source of life and set all doubts at rest and sever all bonds of attachment unless one’s consciousness were thoroughly prepared to take in the All in its wholeness as well as its suchness. Our sense and ordinary consciousness are only too apt to be disturbed and turn away from the realization of truth.

D.T. Suzuki in his 1926 essay Enlightenment and Ignorance explains something about consciousness that were are not trained to recognize. There is an aspect of our consciousness that is always flowing in the stream of awareness where all physical experiences develop. We ignore this stream or we label it as something outside of ourselves. Our beliefs are rooted in separation not in wholeness.

The belief in separation alters the main line of probabilities. Christian theology teaches the end of the world in certain terms with a grand God coming to reward the good and punish the evil-doers. That system allows for no other probability. Others see the world as a great disaster and man finally ruining the planet. There are others that see peace and expansion. The interesting fact about those thoughts is they all exist somewhere in reality. But, there's another group that believes another dimension of selfhood exists where consciousness is fully explored, and the potential of each soul is uncovered and experienced. That is a facet of some sort of reality as well.

All these beliefs hint at the degree of separation that exists in ordinary consciousness. We have been taught to focus and believe in one self. The huge differences we see in the beliefs of others are rooted in the fact that we are meant to judge our physical reality. We are meant to realize that our experiences are the materialization of our thoughts, feelings, and images that the inner self forms and then manifests.

In order to experience other dimensions we must sense the greater power of our objective feelings and thoughts. We think we destroy, but we don’t destroy anything. We might imagine we can annihilate a reality, but we only assault it as we know it. All realities continue to exist in some form, but our ordinary consciousness is conditioned to be disturbed. We turn away from inner truth and feel the end of something is coming based on our beliefs, which are influenced by objective associations. We still have a partial awareness of a greater self or religion would not exist in this reality.