From Caetextia To Excitextia
For thousands of years, various schools and teachers have taught the primacy of consciousness as the singular source of all existence. This means that all manifestations of life, including all human beings, arise from this single source. Although it may appear, from the perspective of an individual human being, we are living in a Universe of separate objects and we conceive of ourselves in the same way, these teachings would say that this is not the case. It would point out that this belief in separateness is an illusion that disconnects us from seeing that we are the single consciousness that contains all things.
Why should this belief cause psychological suffering? Because it creates a story of a life that is untrue when we look deeper into our experience. The story establishes that we are our thoughts and feelings, and the environment in which we live is not part of us but separate from us. In short, we are a separate person living in a world that is separate from us. There are so many reasons why this story would cause us to suffer psychologically.
Essentially, we have reduced our existence to that of a physical object trying to survive. We have stripped out any deeper context of our lives. We have equated ourselves as a mortal object, and our feelings and thoughts must be responded to as they are now the context of our being. We have become "context blind" or, to use the Latin – "Caetextic" to our more profound experience of being. (The Latin word caecus, meaning "blind", and contextus, meaning "context", - a term attributed to Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell in connection to Autism but here used with respect to the experience of Self). Living in the context of thoughts and feelings is like living like waves on a stormy ocean, always praying for calm waters. We place ourselves immediately at the mercy of our mind and body survival systems, a highly sensitive evolved mechanism of protection. Every second, it responds to events and alerts itself based on what it thinks is potentially dangerous or nourishing. It is a constantly changing context of thoughts and feelings that is a highly tuned mechanism of physical survival. However, believing we are it, we fully identify as it.
No wonder we feel "seasick" when we identify as being the context of our thoughts and feelings. We slavishly try to control them by looking to what we see as the separate environment as the fix. We take possession of what we believe is the separate environment, fundamentally viewing it as a "thing" for our satisfaction. We seek to obtain things from it as if we were buying magic medicine that could make us feel better. We believe that because we feel momentarily relieved of the seasickness of our thoughts and feelings when we get money, food, sex, a relationship, a house, a holiday or any other experiences, these events are the cause of our happiness. We organise our entire lives around getting these experiences, and we criticise ourselves terribly when we cannot. Based on the premise of being a separate person in a world of separate people, we create a global media system to report what other people have, and we apparently lack, making us feel even worse. Even when we get the things we think will make us happy, we live in a hidden state of impending doom that we will lose them, so we never fully enjoy having them. The Buddha states that life in this world is like living inside a burning house. All is temporary. We live like a person spinning plates and running around to keep them all going.
That is, until we remember, we are this singular source of consciousness and not a separate body and mind. This remembering is not a remote possibility. It is a question of recognising that, of course, all existence must be a singular self-contained process and that, as individuals, we must be a manifestation of it. It is then simply a recognition that an imminent experience, along with the experiences of thinking and feeling, is the door to this singular self-contained totality. It is not a transcendent reality out of our reach; it turns out to be an imminent experience which we have temporarily forgotten because, in our Caetextic state, we have become so focussed on the objective experiences of thoughts and feelings we cannot see there is a much deeper context of our being. This experience does not take any effort to realise. In fact, effort takes us away from it. It is, we find, the only effortless experience we ever have. It is just a question of recognising it. This experience is our Awareness of our thoughts and feelings. This Awareness is all-encompassing. At first, we may think of it as the observer of our thoughts and feelings until, more deeply still, we see it as their creative source.
At this point, we can radically let go of the belief in being a separate person based on the experience of being Awareness that we cannot know has any limitation or is born of the human mind. What we previously believed were separate people talking to us are simply thoughts arising from the same single source of consciousness, expressed through separate bodies. Suddenly, all notion of separate personhood drops away. Though thoughts from the immediate mind and other minds may still indicate separateness, because we were at one stage believing to be separate and have built up habitual neuro-pathways of separateness, we, now identifying as the single consciousness, no longer have to pay attention to these. They lose their power. They no longer matter. Reconnected with the Awareness we are, we instantly re-discover the experience of our innate wholeness, permanence and peace.
From here, we can assume the correct relationship to the survival mechanism of the mind and body. We do not depend on it for our happiness but respect it as a careful attunement system to guide its survival. Free of psychological dependence, we can listen to it clearly, as the clouds of anxiety thinking that were there disappear. Here we are conscious of the context of Awareness we are. We are "context awakened" or "excitextic" (from the Latin word Excitavit, meaning "awakened", and contextus, meaning "context" - a term created by the author). At this point, we realise that the function of the psychological suffering we were experiencing was not to help us survive physically. Indeed it was getting in the way of that. It was to help us remember what we were. Thus, caetextia is a beautiful reminder system to take us back to excitextia.
Freyja
June 2023
