The Echoes of Maya

I was having a beer recently with a friend when, as it often does, the conversation spiralled headfirst into consciousness. I mean you don’t have to not ask me twice to go from there. Period.

“So, what do you think it is?” I asked.

“For me?” She retorted.

It’s a very valid question because it isn’t just one thing — I’ve never felt it was. This is where it made complete, and no sense. Let’s dig a little deeper. . . Deeper? Into what? Where is consciousness? Deep within? Within what? And how deep?

Yes, it’s lunatic rambling, but, bear with me and my need for ill-placed dramatics, I feel its calling in words as much as I do in life. It does however, help me segway into a bigger train of thought when discussing consciousness. We seem very sure it’s within us. It feels like it’s within my chest, but logic says it should be somewhere inside my head. When I think of my physical being, I know how deep it is, but this confused entity within, the holder of consciousness, seems deeper. So deep, in fact, that it seems impossible to pinpoint the exact coordinates. If you are one who can, could you help show me?

It feels so deeply within me that it seems to lie deeper than the thoughts it utters, or the dreams and ideas it concocts. An objectively immaterial, ineffable concept that somehow exhibits the behaviour of physical presence. Or perhaps it’s so beyond me that I’ve broken it down into something I can somewhat comprehend. At least a little. Odd, isn’t it? We wander through life most often without wondering that we are wondering…

“I think, therefore I AM.” is a famous statement by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. His idea was that the very fact of questioning one’s own existence proves existence. Now, I don’t know Descartes, I’ve never read a book he’s written — Hell, If I’d only ever read his name and never heard it, I’d probably pronounce it with the “S.” Does that mean I’m not going to talk about similar things, having little to no understanding of the subject matter, in turn leading me to talk nonsense? No, you bet your ass I will!

“I am.” is a complete sentence. There’s no need to explain it further for it to make sense. It is, unto itself, a small but meaningful sentence. To me, it is the most profound sentence that has ever been. It makes consciousness an active voice, bringing it from the great beyond to the very heart of what is within you. ‘I am’ becomes the truest reflection of consciousness.

It can create a sense of hope and happiness when a friend asks another, “Are you coming over for drinks this weekend?” “Yes! Of course I am coming!!”

It has been the culmination of great suspense and created incredible, unbelievable drama to a movie scene: “No… I am your father.”

It could also be a form of liberation from the chains of definitions that are pinned on you and letting people believe they know who you are. As the great esoteric poet Slim Shady once said: “I am, whatever you say I am; if I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?”

Juvenile exposition aside, what I think most about is that its many contexts seem to conflict with the very essence of the term itself. It has an air of finality, yet without the weight of hopelessness. It holds a sense of exclusive identity, but never truly stands alone. It feels whole, yet almost always requires context to give it meaning. Because, generally speaking, we always tend to add to it: we add nouns and pronouns to identify individuals and ourselves, adjectives to describe the specifics of who we are, and vocations to tell people what we do, and so on. All of these are necessary in the course of everyday conversation, but none of these sentence structures truly define the original statement.

The sentence itself, untouched by context, definitions, and conditioned labels, that don’t truly define reality… That is you. All of you and your entire being. Not who you are, what you do, where you’re from, or a hundred other distinguishing factors that mark you. Just you.

So, what exactly does any of this mean? To be honest, I don’t know. As we established earlier, I am no Descartes. He laid the foundations of what is Western philosophy as we know it and developed the basis of what would become modern graphing, calculus, and physics. I, on the other hand, stretched a two-word sentence into twelve hundred words just so I could fill a couple of pages.

Long before Descartes, and far to his East, closer to home, there existed the term ‘Aham.’ I’m sure most of you are at least somewhat familiar with it. It literally means ‘I am’ in Sanskrit, and has been in continuous use for over three thousand years. Depending on the context, it is referred to as both the creator and the creation — everything within creation and everything outside of it. Mind you, it is also argued that the ‘self’ is both all of these things and none of them at all.

Here’s an example: In Vedanta philosophy, the two most famous schools of thought are Dvaita and Advaita. They speak about the relationship between the self and the divinity.

· In Dvaita (Dualism): Aham refers to the individual soul (Jiva), which is eternally distinct from Brahman (God).

· In Advaita (Non-Dualism), the “Aham” that people identify with (ego/self) is seen as Maya (illusion) — the true “I” is pure consciousness beyond individuality.

Fascinating, don’t you think? Even as far back as 3,000 years ago, people were pondering this predicament, and some of the more thoughtful and articulate among them wrote it down. When it comes down to it, though, the more words we add to it, the more we dilute the sanctity of the statement. It’s like adding water to a good whiskey — it might make it go down easier, but the essence is lost, or at the very least thinned. I hope to spend a lifetime seeking to understand what this could mean, and I also hope I never find it. Perhaps, in our search for an identity that fits our being, we created and added an entire universe and the divine to ‘I am.’ And in doing so, we forgot that it never needed an external identity. It starts and ends there — as an answer to a question that does not exist. And that’s okay, at least it is to me.

When you consider everything I have ever been — now an illusionary memory — or everything I will be, the unknowable, the only thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, in this very moment, I AM…