Causal Only?
I thought of the night last summer where I woke up during a lightning storm, and there was just pure awareness - nothing else. There was no sense of time. No sense of space. No sense of any form of conceptual knowing, and no sense of awareness of the absence of conceptual knowing. No associations, and no awareness of the absence of associations. No knowledge of being a human being, in a room, watching lightning outside the window, on Earth, in this universe. There was just pure awareness of the situation, absent of all this.
After some time - which I later assumed could have been 30 seconds to a few minutes - there was a slight discomfort stirring, an emerging awareness of the not knowing, and this lead to the "booting up" of my conventional knowledge and associations. I then realized that although there was no sense of time, there had been several lightning strikes so it must have happened over some time - maybe up to several minutes.
Looking back at it now, it seems that this could have been the causal level apparently functionally isolated from the other levels - apart from the physical obviously, since this body sat up in bed, opened its eyes, and looked at the lightning flashes outside of the window.
There was just pure witnessing, pure awareness. Pure causal level.
Until, after some time, the other levels functionally came back in.
Maybe the main outcome of this episode was a renewed and deepened appreciation of all these other levels. The causal level alone, functionally isolated from the others, is not really that interesting. It is just a big eye, taking it all in equally, and not much else.
With the other levels, it provides a sense of disidentification and liberation which is wonderful. But alone, it is not much to write home about. To anthropomorphise, I guess that is why all the other levels are around, to flesh it all out and make it more interesting.
Labels: witness