About 30 years ago I wrote something almost every single day: poetry, essays, lengthy monologues. I hung out with writers and attended a weekly open mic poetry reading. Like when I’m in a band, I write songs for that band to play. I thought a lot about “stream of consciousness” and usually just started writing until I stopped. Some interesting things developed as a result that’s for sure.
But it makes me wonder – when people say stream of consciousness, what exactly do they mean? And how, exactly, is consciousness anything BUT a stream? Is it ever a lake, or ocean? Can it also be a mud puddle, a leaky faucet, or a urinal? When we say we regain consciousness, are we talking about a merely awake state or an awoken one? If you are truly conscious, are YOU even really there? The Buddhists and some Hindus suggest that what you perceive, what you are conscious of at that lower level, is a mere aggregation of sensate objects and receivers, with no permanent or underlying substance whatsoever. Not a void or nothingness, but simply an absence of uncaused phenomenon.
Is there really any other place where we exist, EXCEPT in the streambed of inspiration, as the Celts would have put it? In that sense, does a fish comprehend the nature of water any more than a bird appreciates the nature of air? A medium for temporal energy dispersion, nothing more, and the outside that makes the inside stay where it is, at least when we’re not really conscious of how we are interdependently connected to each and every other thing across all time.
Imagination, creativity, inspiration, exultation, joy, happiness. Are these things actually anything other than the perception of truly being alive – those moments when the dull dust of every survival is rubbed clean away and we are able to connect fully to the universe? As I wrote a while ago, a place where “we are not lost in these woods, nor are they lost in us.”
If we are REALLY all connected, is it possible for any of us to actually disconnect? Or is that simply another illusion, a deception we buy into when we need for whatever reason some “alone” time? That’s another oxymoron, isn’t it? Alone time. If time is a never-ending spool that stretches back into the past and forward into the future, ad infinitum, with only a spec of a dot at the point where the Speed of Now creates the coordinates that look like us, how could we EVER really be alone? Wouldn’t we be co-existing not only with every other thing throughout time itself, but also ourselves in whatever the smallest increment of evolutionary change we can imagine might be?
So, is consciousness a stream? If it’s not a stream, is it consciousness? If we claim to be awake, or awoken, what is the state in which we are not? Is that not also part of the stream?
01 APR 2025
© 2025, John Litzenberg. All rights reserved.
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