It’s been a couple of days since I completed my introductory course on guided meditations. To be honest, it has not been completely ‘life changing’, but definitely paradigm shifting. After the recent experience that lead to the understanding of the self and the consequential illusion that it generates to convince us (again, who?!) of it’s existence, here I am catching a glimpse of the meaning of consciousness.
The dictionary typically defines it as the quality of awareness (perceptive) and responsive of one’s surroundings. This definition is definitely not helping. The author of the sessions says that consciousness is the prior condition of everything: feelings, emotions, thoughts, vision, sounds, pressure, temperature and so on. In other words, it is the canvas on which everything else appears. Even the self, which is only but another thought, appears on this canvas. The fact that we are noticing a thought, or a feeling is like it is at the center of the canvas/consciousness. Like an object in your visual field. This canvas is so fluid that things appear, disappear, and re-appear with no control whatsoever.
If time is a consequence of this fluid canvas, shuffling and juggling around objects appearing on it, then it should be possible to lose track of time and be stuck in some sort of limbo. Unless the passage the time is an appearance in consciousness itself, in which case, there cannot be a state of limbo where you lose track of time.