Consciousness Is…

What is Consciousness?

[00:45] Consciousness is That Which Makes Existence Relevant

Jai Guru Deva.

It’s a very obvious question to ask, although it’s rarely asked: what is consciousness, actually? What is consciousness? Consciousness is basically the nature of existence.

When I talk to my friends who are in the world of astrophysics, astrobiology, cosmology, physicists, and scientists who analyze the nature of the universe, the leading-edge thinkers, the next Nobel Prize winners, are people who understand this basic concept: consciousness is that which makes existence relevant.

Let’s dive into that for a few seconds. Consciousness is that which makes existence relevant. So, would existence be relevant if there were nothing and no one, no entity that was conscious of it? There’d be no Knower. Without a Knower, the Known is unknown.

And so existence is only capable of being relevant by virtue of consciousness existing. From the Vedic perspective, consciousness and existence go hand in hand. Even the least conscious version of unmanifest existence, that is to say, there is a layer of the reality of things which is the least prepared to become manifest. Unmanifest, pure existence is not unconscious, it’s just that it’s least conscious.

And we’re going to give this a name. In the Vedic language of Sanskrit, it’s called Brahmani. B-R-A-H-M-A-N-I. It’s a very beautiful sounding word, Brahmani. Pure existence, Is-ness, pure existence. But Is-ness is not unconscious. It’s just the least conscious aspect of the unmanifest reality.

When we talk to physicists, we hear about the great expansion which is nicknamed the Big Bang, where all matter and all space and all time, that’s all sequences, emerged out of a singularity. A singularity which it is theorized by reverse engineering the ever-expanding universe. You only have to reverse engineer all those numbers and you can figure out that everything came from the point of a point. And when you ask a physicist how small was that point of a point, the answer is infinitesimally small. Physicists don’t usually like using the word infinite. Mathematicians love it, but physicists no.

Infinitesimally small. Smaller than the tiniest sub-nuclear particle that’s ever been identified. 

[04:15] Is-ness, Am-ness, I-ness, My-ness 

And what was outside of that small thing? No-thing-ness. Nothing. And what was inside of it? All of space-time was inside of it. And when all of space-time is inside of a thing, and it suddenly expands relative to itself, it expands, then you have what we call the Big Bang.

And when we do the numbers on the Big Bang, it turns out that the universe expanded to about 50% of its existing size in one 10,000 billionth of a second. All tendencies are tendencies of that singularity and all of its properties. One of the properties of the universe is that it is conscious.

I’m conscious, you, my listeners are conscious, I have a room full of people here who are also conscious. We can make the assumption that we are conscious. And all things that exist, all properties, all forms, all phenomena, are properties of this singularity, this oneness. Since consciousness exists, consciousness also is the nature of existence itself.

Everything that exists is something that springs forth from the fundamental nature of pure existence. So the capacity to be aware of itself is the nature of existence itself. And in the Vedic view, we take this expansion of awareness through four stages: pure existence or Is-ness, and then Is-ness, developing a sense of what we call Am. There’s no I yet. It’s just Am-ness. That is to say, primordial awareness of existence.

The next layer of it is I-ness. So I gets added to Am. I am. There’s a sense of being I. The next layer of it is called My-ness. What are, if I am, what am I? What are my qualities? What’s my potential? Is-ness, Am-ness, I-ness, My-ness. Existence progressively becoming more and more conscious. First of all, recognizing its existence, then moving into a sense of I, and then moving into identification of potential qualities. And from there, we get the Big Bang.

We get the question, which the question is, if I identify myself as one, one is a comparative statement. I am one. It begs the question, compared with what? Compared with non-one? Compared with many? I am one. May I be many? And that’s when the boom happens.

[07:38] Repertoires of Consciousness

So, the many is the diversity that emerges out of the oneness. Both from the Vedic perspective and from the modern physics perspective, we live in a universe whose nature is consciousness. This is relatively new, newly accepted in the world of physics.

For those of you who would love to dive a little bit more deeply into this subject, I can recommend the YouTube lectures given by two professors. One of them is Sara Imari Walker. Sara is spelled without an H, S-A-R-A, middle name I-M-A-R-I, last name Walker, as in the one who walks. Professor of astrobiology and astrophysics at Arizona State University.

And she’s recently written books on the subject of what’s called assembly theory. How it is that the universe assembles itself. How consciousness has a trait that’s recognizable in the physics world. Evolution, according to Professor Walker, is not merely a biological thing. It is a physics tendency. The world of atoms is constantly assembling itself to cause life or self-awareness to come into existence. We live in a bio-friendly universe. This is the latest thinking in the world of physics and astrobiology.

Another great physicist from University of California at Santa Cruz, Federico Faggin. Faggin is spelled F-A-G-G-I-N. I recommend you look at YouTube lectures given by Professor Faggin. He’s professor of physics and quantum mechanics. He’s also known for being the inventor of the microchip, the inventor of the microprocessor, and the inventor of the touchscreen. And so you have in your pocket something that Professor Faggin invented. And he waxes lyrically on the subject of consciousness being the nature of existence itself.

So what is consciousness? We can tell consciousness by virtue of its repertoire, degrees of consciousness. Consciousness of a bunch of molecules floating around in the sunlight in your bedroom when the shafts of light come in from the Sun. You see those little motes of dust floating around. Are they conscious? Well, if they exist, they are conscious.

According to Professor Faggin, and also Professor Walker, what is the threshold of the sophistication of a thing which would allow us to say that that thing is conscious? And their answer is unified and they’re not the only ones. There are dozens of other physicists who would say the same thing. The threshold of sophistication of a thing to qualify as being conscious is one word: existence.

If a thing exists, then to some extent or another, it is conscious. So degrees of consciousness are able to be identified by repertoire. 

[11:24] Everything is a Response to Observation

What is the repertoire? Capability, spectrum of responses to other things.

So when we see a sunflower using phototropism to follow the sun across the sky and maximize its sun exposure, then phototropism is one of those aspects. We can say that sunflower is conscious. Can the sunflower give a lecture or make toast for you or something? No. It’s not within its repertoire to do that. It has a repertoire.

The repertoire of the sunflower is greater than the repertoire of a flower that doesn’t have phototropism as one of its responsive qualities. The repertoire of what we would refer to as a biologic system, in astrobiology these days we talk about pre-biological, which is the buildup of assembling atoms and molecules into structures that are about to become capable of reproduction and capable of having identifiable conscious repertoire.

But even with an atom, if we take an atom and we bounce an electron from the atom out of its orbit and we move the nucleus away, that electron will find its mother nucleus anywhere in the universe that that nucleus is gone. This is a response to stimuli, an identification of home place, and so on. Even atoms behave in ways that demonstrate a repertoire of responses to stimuli.

So whenever we see a capacity, a repertoire of responses to stimuli, we have consciousness at play. And the play and display of consciousness is a play and display of becoming increasingly more conscious. This is the trend of the universe, to become increasingly more conscious and evidently the few lead the many. There are patches of consciousness that are more conscious than other patches, but there are no patches of anything in the world and the existing universe that’s non-conscious.

So consciousness and existence, these two things go hand in hand. What is it that is the threshold for a thing being conscious? Simply a thing existing. Anything that exists is conscious to some degree or another.

So consciousness is the capacity, demonstrated by the capacity for response to stimuli. And everything that we can look at in the whole of nature from the perspective of quantum astrophysics, everything is a response to observation, a response to consciousness observing itself. It’s one of the fundamental tenets of quantum field theory and quantum mechanics, the most successful theories of modern physics.

[14:57] Maximizing Capability

So what is consciousness? There’s nothing that’s not it. This is the answer. There’s nothing that’s not it. Everything is consciousness. 

Everything that exists is consciousness, degrees of consciousness. Now what about you, my dear listeners? How conscious are you? What is your repertoire of responses to a variety of stimuli?

This is really one of the big questions that has to do with our sense of well-being. We have well-being to the extent that we have maximum repertoire of responses to a variety of stimuli. If our repertoire of responses to a variety of stimuli is limited, then we know all about that.

Somebody might say, “Would you like to come out and have coffee with me?” And you might say, “Look, I’ve had a really hard day, I just can’t. My repertoire of responses to a given stimuli are minimized today. I have to stay in bed. I’m capable of lying down and going to sleep. I’m not capable of anything other than that. Check in on me on another day.” So limited repertoire of response to a stimulus indicates lack of capability, right?

If we can maximize our capability, we’re maximizing our repertoire of responses to given stimuli, then we have the ability to be increasingly adaptive and interactive with stimuli. It doesn’t mean you have to say yes to every coffee invitation, but it means that you have the capacity to have a wide variety of interactive and adaptive responses to demands that are being made on you.

When you exist, and all of you exist, when you exist, one of the elements, one of the bits of evidence of existence is that demands are being made on you. And when demands are being made on you, they involve change of expectation. We don’t consider a thing to be a demand if there’s no change of expectation inherent in it.

And so what’s a demand? We just heard a drill start up on two floors up where they’re drilling into the walls or something like that. Well, that was a change of expectation. And then what is the adaptive response to that? What is the variety of responses that one could have?

If one has a very limited repertoire, then one goes into baseline survival mode, which is fight-flight reactivity. When we identify what is stress, stress is a good thing if it saves you from death. You have the capacity to either fight a demand that’s asking you to change, to kind of kill the demand if you like, to stop making a demand on me to change, otherwise you’ll not exist, It’ll bring an end to your existence. Or flee from the demand.

I can resile, I can move back, I can back away from the demand, flee from it, or go catatonic and play dead. This is fight-flight reactivity. It’s the basic survival mode that is binary. I have two things I can do. If I’m not capable of meeting a demand interactively, I can either fight it or I can flee from it.

Now, when we remove that limitation that gives us only fight-flight reactivity, I might have a broad spectrum of ways in which I can deal with the demand that represents a change of expectation to me. And the broader my repertoire, the more consciousness this evinces. I have more consciousness, one has a greater consciousness, one is more conscious, based upon the breadth, the breadth of repertoire of responses to a stimulus.

So there we have it. Consciousness is the nature of everything and consciousness is constantly growing in everything. Consciousness or repertoire is constantly growing in everything. Our whole universe is in a process of making itself more conscious, consistently and continuously. This is the universe in which you live, of which you are product.

[19:49] Q: Where was the one thing before it became many?

So if there’s one thing and it becomes manifested and it’s everywhere, before it’s everything everywhere, and it’s just one thing, where is that? Like I struggle with that concept. And I don’t know if my question makes sense.

[20:04] A: Everywhereness Inside of It

It’s still everywhere. The everywhereness is all inside of it. And it simply gets bigger relative to itself. And so, we are actually living in a singularity right now, which is continuing to expand. The outer edges of the universe in which we live, the space that all the galaxies are floating in, that space itself is still expanding.

And although nothing can move through space faster or even approaching the speed of light, the space itself is stretching faster than the speed of light. The outer edges of the visible universe, the galaxies, the pulsars, the quasars, and other stellar objects that are out on the edge, some of them are vanishing from our telescopes because they’re moving away from us faster than the speed of light, because the space that’s carrying them is itself expanding faster than the speed of light, on its periphery.

Here, at this place in the universe, space is also stretching and expanding, but it’s not expanding as fast as that. And so the Big Bang is still going on. There is some perspective from which we’re still living inside of a singularity. It’s just that relative to itself, it’s getting larger.

How big is big? Well, how tiny is tiny? Compared with what? When there’s only one thing, we can say that compared with what we’re looking at now, it must have been really tiny. The whole of space-time was compactified into a point.

And now, when we look at distant things, they could be 100 million light years away, light would take 100 million years traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second to get to us. When the universe is smaller, light still travels at the same speed, but the light which carries information causes the whole system to self-inform much faster.

When the universe was tiny, light traveled at the same speed, 300,000 kilometers per second. But the universe was so tiny, the whole universe was communicating with itself. Everything that was happening in it was communicating with everything else instantaneously.

Now it got bigger and what’s happened is time got created, sequence got created because space got larger, it stretched, and so now light has to go for a long, long time across space. If something happens on the Sun, like a big solar flare, it takes nine minutes for the gravitational or light effect of that to come to the Earth. Nine whole minutes to get from the Sun to here. When you feel sunlight on your skin, that was the light that left the Sun nine minutes ago, traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second.

So our universe is getting bigger, and time sequences are getting larger. It takes a larger time for the universe to understand what it itself is up to because of this limitation of nothing being able to move faster than light. 

[23:36] Once Upon a Time

What it does is it’s creating sequence. It’s creating story.

There’s no story if, when you open the book and you say to the child to whom you’re reading, “Once upon a time, everything was one, indivisible and whole, and everyone lived happily ever after. Good night, time for bed.” The child’s going to say, “What the heck? That wasn’t a story.”

But if you open the book and the book is this thick, and that’s just volume one, and then there’s volume two and there’s volume three and there’s volume four. Wow. “So once upon a time there was this and then this happened and then that happened and that sequenced into this and all these other beings came into creation and they all began interacting and interplaying and all that.” Now that’s a story.

Evidently our universe is interested in an epic story. To get an epic story it has to get big, and it has to have delay time so that there’s sequence. When you take all the whole universe and reverse it and squash it back into a singularity, the whole story is, “I am”. End of story. I am one indivisible whole and conscious. Boring.

So the universe has to expand in order to get sequence in it. It has to have time delay. So if you, somebody says to you, “Where would you like to go for lunch?” And if you have like an instant split-second answer, it’s a little bit boring.

But if you go, “Now let me think about that. Do I want enchiladas or do I want a cheeseburger? Hmm.” That’s interesting, because there’s a moment of consideration that’s happening. This is the universe going expansive and creating time sequence. Why is the universe doing anything that it’s doing? It’s for the creation of story.

It wants story. It doesn’t want to know everything all at once at the same time. Everything all at once at the same time is Is-ness, Am-ness, I-ness, My-ness. Well, you’re still inside of a singularity. You haven’t gone Big Bang yet. There’s no time. There’s no sequences. And no time is lack of variety. Lack of variety is boring. Sequence. 

[26:26] The Variety that Creates Storyline

This is a very interesting question because it has to do with the subject of degrees of consciousness. So when we have degrees of consciousness, we have degrees of capacity either to know or not to know. Not to know means ignorance. We’re just going to call it ignorance for the moment. “I don’t know. I don’t have information. I’m not informed.” Or, “I am so well informed I know everything.”

Now, the variety between those two states is the variety that creates storyline. If we know absolutely everything all at once and we continuously know absolutely everything, there’s no story. There’s absolutely no story. What story is dependent upon is lack of consciousness.

That is to say less consciousness, which is ignorance, has to come into being conscious and then you have a story. If you don’t have ignorance, you don’t have story. Why is it so wonderful that you learned to meditate and you got more conscious and you had a wonderful repertoire of behaviors and all that? Because relative to how you were prior to learning meditation, this is great.

But if you were born like this, you’d be a freaky, strange baby. Baby comes out and knows how to speak five languages and says, “E = MC squared.” Nobody wants that baby. You want a baby that looks at the mummy and goes (makes baby noises) and then the baby’s first word is always a little bit not quite right. “I wa wa wa”.

And the mother takes a video of that. It’s so cute. “My God, I wa wa wa. I wa wa wa.” The mistake, the incapacity of the baby is absolutely adorable. An adorable, incapable being. So lovable because we can see that one day that might be, I don’t know, it could be anything, a chef or an astrobiologist or whatever. Starts off with “I wa wa wa.” We celebrate mistaken speech. And so the range of creative intelligence from less conscious, less capable, lower repertoire to increasingly more, increasingly greater repertoire.

[29:17] Lesha Avidya: The Faint Remains of Ignorance

In the Vedic worldview, the most enlightened people have a tool and their tool is not consciousness. It’s a fascinating subject. Their tool is the capacity to turn the consciousness down, to become less conscious at will. This is what’s referred to as Lesha Avidya. Lesha Avidya means the faint remains of ignorance, the capacity to not know.

It’s kind of fun not knowing. When you have capacity to know, I was saying this last night in one of my lectures, everybody has these auxiliary brains now, your phone. And you probably have access to AI in Google search or other kinds of searches, Anthropic, or any of those search machines.

You can find out just about anything about anybody anytime within seconds. But isn’t it fun not to know? You sit around with each other and somebody goes, “Who was the producer of that movie?” And then if one of you says, “Let’s just not know for a little while, because we’ve all seen the movie. We all know the one that we’re talking about, let’s see if these brains work,” rather than making the brain lazy and defaulting to an AI search.

Which can tell you instantaneously whatever you want to know with a degree of accuracy. Not always 100%. It also makes mistakes and has hallucinations.

Not knowing is a beautiful ticklish thing. And it actually creates texture in life and it creates context and it creates contrast. All of these things are the elements of story. Not knowing, if you’re reading a beautiful epic, I don’t recommend that you close the book. Go into AI and say, “Please give me a summary of this whole story, what the storyline is and how does it end? And what happens to this character who’s my favorite character?”

Well, it’ll tell you in five paragraphs and that’s just spoiled the story. So you don’t get to participate in the sequencing, the genius sequencing of the story. And so existence relies upon degrees of knowing and not knowing and the play and interplay between them. The knowing and the not knowing.

The play and interplay between knowing and not knowing. 

[32:09] A Blend of Ignorance and Consciousness

Knowing absolutely everything? Boring. Not knowing anything? Also boring. Getting the right mix? Perfect. So this is the very fascinating story of consciousness in play. In order for there to be a play, there has to be a blend of ignorance and consciousness, a blend of less conscious and more conscious.

When you have that perfect blend, you have sequence, and sequence is fascinating. The universe is fascinated with itself, and it plays by virtue of creating this sense of non-oneness, which we call “other”. Non-oneness with revelation of oneness. “You’re really me, aren’t you?”

And that’s what happens when we fall in love with somebody, which is one of the most fascinating experiences. You fall in love with somebody, and what are you falling in love with? You’re falling in love with yourself. Everything you love about them are the things that you love about yourself.

“You like the same candy as me. Oh, fantastic. You like the same movie as me? Fantastic. We both like the same movie stars? Fantastic. We both like riding in the same car? Fantastic. We both like…” What are you loving? You’re loving yourself in another person’s body.

But you don’t want to stand in front of a mirror winking at yourself all day. That’s too obvious. So you like to get that selfiness inside of somebody else who has a bit of variety. They have a bit of non-self going on, but mostly you. They’re mostly you going on. If they have mostly you going on, “Oh, I’m in love with you. I’m in love with me in you.” This is the great masquerade of our universe is creating this concept of other so that we can find ways of relating to other, which is the Self relating to the Self.

It’s the Self relating to the Self. The whole program of the universe is a program of consciousness playing a game of self-discovery. That’s what the whole universe is up to. Consciousness playing a game of self-discovery.

[34:42] Q – Is more consciousness better?

This is a question I’ve sometimes been asked and I would love your answer. So is more consciousness and more repertoire necessarily better? Because with more consciousness also, it can also bring more destruction, faster destruction. And so people often compare animal consciousness with humans. They have less repertoire, but also less possibility of destruction and violence. So I would love your thoughts on this.

[35:13] A: The Animal Kingdom is More Violent Than the Human Kingdom

When I saw the other day a dog killing a cat, which I saw, there was a dog killing a cat. Grabbed the cat by the neck, somebody’s pet, broke its neck, swung it around everywhere, tossed it to the ground, and then after killing the cat, just walked away totally indifferent, licking his chops. That dog was somebody’s pet. That cat was somebody’s pet.

And we’re always saying, “the animals, they don’t have violence.” They have teeth. Like those teeth are designed for killing. And killing is in their nature. It’s in their nature. So the idea that somehow they’re better off than us because mostly we think about animals as our little cutesy pets.

We do the killing for them and provide the carnivorous material that they get to eat in a very peaceful fashion so they don’t ever have to go hunting and we don’t ever see any of it. But we humans have created that kind of animal. That’s a human-created animal. That’s not actually the animal kingdom.

The animal kingdom by and large is far more violent than the human kingdom. From the bacteria all the way up to the big carnivores, they’re all in the process of killing each other or escaping from killing. Some of them are plant-eating animals that are really kind of like plants with legs that the carnivores love to devour.

And they have a repertoire of functions, which is to stay away from the carnivores and defend themselves from them. And the carnivores have a programmed instinct to kill everything that it can possibly eat.

But from the comfort of our homes, sometimes we look at our pets and think, they’re so cutesy-wootsy. They don’t ever want to do anything or kill anybody. Yes, they do. If they don’t get their canned food today, they’ll be killing all right. Repertoire. Repertoire should also include capacity to zoom in and out of how conscious you are.

[37:32] Content vs Context

Let’s think about content versus context. This is a really fascinating subject. So when you go to somebody who has greater knowledge than you, let’s say you go to a therapist. You have a problem and you need to get some perspective on your problem. And there’s been some social, sociological upset or some individual internal turmoil.

What does a therapist do? The therapist listens to your content, the content of your consciousness as it is today. They can see where the contextual boundaries are. You’re seeing within this range or perhaps this time context. And now the job of the therapist is to make the context larger, to increase the span of time in which you are seeing an event.

So, an event is content and what is the context in which, what are the bookends of this content? If you can expand the context, you can take the time perspective and make it larger, then that person can contextualize their content. And when we contextualize content, we have a thing called perspective.

We gain perspective on a thing. Perspective means a greater vision, a greater capacity. Now, I’ll give you a great example of somebody with massive context. My daughter, Mary, who’s now 27, but when she was only about, I guess about four, one morning she was lying in the bed with me. We were all awakening, and she had come and climbed into the bed and the Sun was rising and the birds were beginning to twitter.

And she was lying there and she says, “All the birds are singing.” I was half asleep lying on the bed. “All the birds are singing.” And I thought, “So lovely, she’s so poetic.” And she said, “The Sun is streaming in through the window.” And I thought, “Even more poetic.” I was half asleep listening to this.

And she said, “The butterflies are all butterflying around outside.” And I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “And we’re all going to die.” And that woke me up. I said, “What?” And she goes, “It’s true.” She said, “That’s all that anything’s doing. All the butterflies are dying. All the birds are dying. All the people are dying. And we’re all dying. We think we’re lying here enjoying all this stuff, but actually what we’re doing is we’re dying.”

I thought, “This girl’s going a long way.” And I said, “Well, that’s a bit of a gloomy way of looking at things.” She goes, “No, it’s not. It’s the only thing that’s happening. Dying. Everything is dying.” And I said, “Well, okay, what about the Sun?” She goes, “It’s dying. The Sun’s dying. Thommy told me.” Thommy’s her older brother.

“What about the universe?” “Universe dying, everything dying.” If you get your context really big, really giant, and you don’t have the ability to move around inside. So what we want is we want the ability to have mobile contextualization. If somebody says, “I love you, you’re the sweetest, most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” And you’re gazing at each other’s eyes and your response is, “Yeah, but we’re all dying.”

I’m going to put it to you that you’re missing the moment. You have to squeeze in that time context, get inside that moment and really get into the love. In order to harvest it, you’ve got to get away from, “Yeah, but the whole universe is going to expand into a vast coldness.” And so too much consciousness can also be problematic, which we have to have the ability to change our context. Change the context.

[42:15] The Ability of Enlightenment

And with reference to what? One thing: enjoyment. If you’re not enjoying, that’s when you go to somebody who’s supposed to be wiser than you. Some guru, some therapist, somebody, some teacher, some relative, some Auntie or some uncle or some kid. Could be a kid or it could be your little cat that you feed meat to. And get some kind of change of context.

Context may become more relevant if you squeeze it in, or it could be more relevant if you expand it. What does the moment call for? What is the need of the time in order to harvest the maximum potential of a moment? Do we want to bring the walls in and dive into just what’s happening in that five seconds or that five minutes? Or do we want to go all the way out here?

And it all depends on what is going to bring the greatest capacity of enjoyment of the storyline. That’s really what it’s all about. It’s what everything’s about.

So, what is problematic is stasis. That means you’re stuck out here or you’re stuck in here. Being stuck and not having contextual mobility, that’s problematic in life. We need to have mobile context. We have to have mobility of context. And then we can be highly relevant to a one-minute epoch of time, or we can be relevant with regard to the play and display of everything.

Being stuck out here? Very problematic. Like, someone comes to you and says, “Your brother just died.” And you go, “That’s all right. I knew my brother in the previous life, and I know where they’re going in their next life. And I’m going to be their father in the next life, so everything’s okay. I don’t care.”

And people are going to go, “What? I just told you your brother died. And you’re talking about all these lives and everything. What are you, some kind of freak?” Nobody can relate to that, so you’re stuck out here. It’s like you know the entire book already. If you know the entire book from cover to cover, that’s not a story for you anymore. There’s no sequence.

Enjoyment of life, we have to have contextual mobility. That’s the secret of life, contextual mobility. And to get that, we have to have the capacity to expand. When we have the capacity to expand, we have also the capacity to contract. We can expand and contract at will.

Having that ability is the ability of enlightenment. That’s what enlightenment actually is. It’s not that you’re stuck out here in maximum expanded context. Also too boring. We want mobility.