Participating consciousness

This is a term used by historian Morris Berman to suggest a largely lost way of experiencing the world. By it, he is referring to a sense that the borders between oneself and the environment are permeable; that consciousness is not just something inside one’s own head but is extended.

When you feel pain when your beloved weeps, that’s a sense of it. When you feel a thrill as a pair of Crows swoops and dives on a blustery day, that’s an inkling of it. When you feel the shared peace and contentment of a herd of dozing cattle, you’re getting a glimpse of it.

There’s a kind of symbolism to the thinking: things in the world are not just separate disjointed clumps of matter, they are part of your world and redolent with meaning. Song lines are a great example… the world is history, ancestry, map and story made into song and art. There are a couple of helpful short videos about song lines here and here. The map and the territory are interwoven not separate.

I find something powerful in this…

There’s also something powerful in the admission that what happens on the outside affects the inside… The admission that we are entangled with the environment and other beings.

We cannot stand outside as observers: we are always within. ALWAYS.

Here I think it’s easy to misunderstand what I feel is important about Iris Murdoch’s idea of unselfing. It sounds like the self is subtracted entirely from the world one watches – but only the egoic self is silenced. The larger self – consciousness, awareness – breaks loose of the limited confines of ‘my’ wants and needs, fears and desires and expands into a consciousness of wider life. What we lose in unselfing is not the fact of being a unique individual but the limitation of being an atomised individual. We become a being-in-life or a being-in-being or a being-among-beings that is larger, richer, more complex. We let go of selfishness to relish the universal wonder of a biospheric community in the process of birthing and growing and sinking and dying and decomposing and being transformed.