Chapter 1: An Open Door is an Invitation.

A good introduction is like welcoming a visitor. It invites entry, gives a reason to stay, stimulates interest and arouses intercourse.

As my subject is consciousness, my task is to invite you, not as the host but as guest into your own head. The first step should be to leave your mind, go out and the porch and ring your own doorbell. This is called Meta-consciousness and is more than a curious diversion or entertainment. If I am successful, it will lay a necessary foundation of concepts I will explain to you later in this book.

The reason I need to take you out of your head is because the mind is designed to ignore the familiar. It does this automatically, I believe, to save processing space. Remember when you learned to drive, ride a bike, or play an instrument? The tasks seemed complex, difficult and required your undivided attention until when they became familiar, you perform them almost entirely without awareness. Strange as it sounds, DVD technology underwent the same evolution. DVD1 formats recorded every pixel over and over for every frame. This required a lot of information and storage so movies needed to be recorded on more than one disk. DVD2 formats only record the changes. A white pixel remains white until one of succeeding frames changes it to another color, thus saving storage space on the disk, and now we have enough space on a single disk to record special features.

There are times, however, when you need to step back and look at a task with a beginners awareness. Typically when a task appears to be routine, but in truth is not; the consequences of which can range from anything as harmless as loosing the beat in a musical passage or as dangerous as riding your car off a cliff. Some Buddhists refer to this as "beginner's mind"and is meant as no exaggeration. Through years of physical privation, mental and emotional self flagellation, and exhausting contemplation of "Koans", logical paradoxes and problems without solution, these practitioners attempt to revert to a level of awareness before rational thought, perhaps even as an infant would be before language. It is important to note that when one achieves "beginner's mind", it may not be desirable to remain there forever. In fact the real achievement may be in realizing you have a choice many levels of consciousness.

Still, this is not a book on meditation. Levels of consciousness only serve as a platform for what we construct upon them. We cruise through our lives oblivious to how much of what we take for granted as "real" is in fact a concept with very recent history. Most, if not all, of what we see is a projection of our mind into the world.

Look at the concept of "zero". Even though there might have been some record of a "zero" going back 2000 years, it was not in common use in the West until the middle of the 15th century. This is why several clocks in European town squares still use Roman Numerals ( a system without zero). Before you dismiss it and say, they must have had some concept of zero, no they didn't. This is precisely why long division and multiplication were only practiced by the most highly educated (and well paid) doctors of that age. Without a zero, arithmetic was very difficult.

Try it yourself. Take MCMXXV and divide it by LXVII.

The concept of zero opened a door in human consciousness and allowed those who passed through it to make arithmetic a subject within the grasp of a 10 year old. Not every culture in the world is there with us in the West. Some peoples only have 3 numbers: one, two and everything else.

Another concept that we mistakenly believe is objectively "real" is color. Except for some medical conditions, most people can perceive about the same range of frequencies of light. But colors are a subjective concept that is culturally bound. Some tribes only have words for 5 colors, and will take our blue, lavender, purple and indigo and lump the together without the ability to distinguish a difference between them.

When we start to explore our conceptual constructions, we find that very few of them are universal to our species, let alone to our western culture. Another interesting example is pitch interval in music. In the West we use several scales but the notes are all built on a chromatic frame of 12 steps or "semitones" before the quality of pitch repeats in the next octave. Having been raised around western music most people here can tell the difference between C and C sharp or C flat. In India, some folk music has a framework of 24 steps, and they can hear twice as many differences in pitch, e.g., they could hear a difference between C sharp and C sharp sharp. Other concepts in music are also recent historical developments and very subjective. Dissonance is a constantly changing quality within the western cannon itself. While a baroque musician used to playing instruments fixed to a set key and scale would probably hear modern jazz as a grinding noise, a modern listener would likely hear little dissonance. In fact modern composers are finding it difficult to make anything dissonant to a modern ear, because we've heard it all.

As if conceptual constructs aren't fragile enough, dependent on culture, history, exposure and education, they are also sensitive to biological windows in the development of each human being. Language is based on only a select collection of sounds. When an infant begins to babble, it will voice sounds from all possible human languages. As it grows into a child, it will remember how to speak the sounds of its native tongue to the exclusion of the rest, eventually forgetting the others for good. Feral children, deaf children and children raised in unusual circumstances will be mute or have a stunted ability to speak if they are not exposed to language at the right age. The same is true with vision, where a child raised with one eye will never have depth perception even if sight is restored in both eyes in adulthood. Symbolic thinking, mathematical reasoning, dimensional thinking and several others are best taught only at certain times in a person's life.

None of what we conceive as essential to our view of the world is in fact essential to reality. Some people some time, somewhere have probably got along without all or any of our particular set of concepts. I haven't even mentioned more complex constructions, such as property, beauty, morality, spirituality or justice. But to say that they aren't objectively real isn't to say they are of no value. Quite the opposite. I hope to show you that they are less windows through which we glance passively at the universe, than they are doors that give us access to the host of the multiverse. By acknowledging the ephemeral nature of our world view, we can let go of concepts that do not serve us, that even hold us back or harm us. We can set ourselves free to pick and choose whichever mental construction or level of consciousness is most appropriate at any given moment.

I am reminded of passages in the Buddhist scripture, "The Heart Sutra." They read:

"...All past, present and future awakened ones come to rely on the perfection of wisdom with no hinderence in the mind. No hinderence, therefore no fear. Far beyond deluded thought. This is Nirvana........Gone, Gone, Gone far beyond to awakening, the great perfection of wisdom."