“Best to remain unconscious.” First thought, best thought?
But it takes a thought even to consider this. And a thought is conscious, on a spectrum, or as a toggle, it is very difficult to call even one thought unconscious. It may slip away, but at least for even one moment it has the life of the mind in its full attention. The gaze is alive, and the capacity to shift attention from it is yet more proof that it is alive. You are unable to remain unconscious because the only thing that can evaluate unconsciousness is some form of consciousness. Thus, unconsciousness does not exist without its counterpart. It cannot be known, and it has no meaning, except as it relates to consciousness. Take sleep, for example. Dreams, remembered or not, are not unconscious; they have a life that defies full comprehension, but even the word “dream” insists by its definition means that it has substance in the mind. And sleep itself, of course, is somewhere at the headquarters of consciousness, among the support troops, in the armies of the night, ensuring that the battles against unconsciousness for the next day are prepared and as fresh as possible in the day to follow the mustering of regenerations. No, there is no escape from consciousness, and the bromide “ignorance is bliss” reveals only another kind of temporary retreat from the life of the mind, from the extension of consciousness reaching from its own center, like a vast bazaar of marketplaces in a series of limitless empires. There the mind is continuously, without rest, finding yet more new cultures, interfaces, ways to greet and ways to include, ways to exclude and ways to enhance, ways to enrich, and ways to magnetize, and ways to dissolve unconsciousness. We are always, finally, gathering, even as those gathered things also dissolve and slip away and make room for new empires and new marketplaces within the realm of mind which extends by action into the realm of the social, where yet another kind of mind is being compressed into being, like gaseous nebulae forming new galactic clusters. It is as if our individual selves are stars, and our social realms are galaxies, and neither exists without the other, and each is an influence on the other. There is no way to best remain unconsciousness of all this, because those galaxies of the minds’ world are calling, and further, are moving; it can hardly even be conceived that we will not move with them. Gravity, it appears, is larger than the universe itself. We can hold that up, and then let that land, and landing, of course, is always a form a gravity, as well. Landing. Think about it. It is always just a question of how graceful that moment of first meeting our balance; how standing upon a given surface is met, as we bear our own weight, and also that which is assigned by the consciousness of the moment in its own gravity laden context. Do we flutter down, or do we pounce? Do we stumble into a new posture? Or do we have ballet like pivot points that transfer the load into all the limbs that we embody? All this, of course, is consciousness, in fractured part, or triumphant whole. To say it is “best to remain unconscious,” is to say it is best not to exist. And that is not possible, for gravity will always be there to remind us of the heft of our existence? Death, you might say? Certainly, there is the relief of unconsciousness there? Perhaps, it is a point. But one without proof. One, we might say without gravity. Though the gravity of the body is born into the ground at the grave, it is, after all, only a manifestation of consciousness that is once again being transformed. And the ripple effect of our consciousness continues to flutter in imperceptible waves across the galaxies of the social spheres. Is Gandi gone? Martin Luther King? Or even Ghengis Khan? They continue to exist, transferred from their living sun, now extinguished, into our mind’s light, and into the galaxy of moving lights within which we live. They are not unconscious, they are moving us towards something, though the complexity of it all, you might say, is the source of our relative unconsciousness of what it all means. Best to remain unconscious? Best to remain in shadows and confusion? If you are reading this, no doubt, you have answered this question yourself in many ways, and will continue to do so. Sorting this all out is our job, and we will continue to do so, probably…
By Paul DeLong
On January 22, 2022
The rest of my writing was cut off, unfortuantely. Here is the rest of it …Sorting this all out is our job, and we will continue to do so, probably, as we pass along what we are and what we know, until the last human being breathes her last breath, which by the way, is a form of consciousness as well. We will continue to subsist and toil in this relative unconsciousness, unearthing it, until then. Yes, there is unconsciousness for consciousness to work on, infinitely so, but that is the only best thing about unconsciousness, it gives us something to work on, something to make more conscious.