I had a thought as I was walking up the coastal shore here in southern Oregon. I saw a jellyfish in the sand, very beautiful, just a small guy like the size of a sand dollar, tanslucent, with a beautiful pattern within. And it occurred to me that, you know, a creature like that is alive and aware of one landscape in which it thrives, but it gets washed up onto the sand, a different landscape, where it can’t live, and maybe it just settles with dying, the way we settle with a spouse or a job that isn’t what we bargained for.
That little jellyfish doesn’t really have the wherewithal to adapt to its new landscape. It’s just stuck in the sand. I suppose its consciousness, generally, is just what it is to be a jellyfish – at one with its ecosystem. What floats by, if it is something it needs, or something dangerous, it perceives it – if not then it probably doesn’t really even notice it. Sort the way some people tend to be plant blind, or never have the slightest curiosity about their neighbors.
I suspect, the jellyfish in the sand is not experiencing too much fear or pain, either. Both fear and pain are, perhaps, more complex sensations, and the consciousness of a jellyfish may be somewhat blind to them. So perhaps its demise is more as if it were falling asleep than what you or I – humans – think of as dying. The jellyfish just relaxes. It feels uncomfortable, and it finally dies, just as we might fall asleep on those nights when we’re uncomfortable and restless.
Our consciousness is so acute that, in general, transitions of any kind are disturbing because we can’t figure out how to move from one landscape to another, like from wakefulness to sleep. But, we can’t resign ourselves to it, either. We know we’re not necessarily stuck there. We want to think our way through it. We are problem solvers.
However, the problem is, ultimately, not in how we can invent tools to change an unknown landscape like death to suit us, but rather to alter our perception of it, and by so doing bring it into existence.
Yes, bring it into existence. Think of it like this: the landscape we live in today does not “look” the same as it did a billion years ago when plants first evolved, and started to oxygenate the planet. Before that what did it “look” like? It all depends upon what qualia these primordial beings were noticing; upon what qualiadelic relationships they were developing that made the unknown landscapes sensible. Our ancestors evolved and make their landscapes look the way they do simultaneously, and we inherited their ways of looking at them, of seeing them, sensing them – perceiving them.
And this helps explain why death, for us, is so much more complicated. Our perception of landscapes have evolved, first, as animals with basic senses, and next, as mammals with complex nervous systems, and finally, as humans with complex brains. The qualia we notice is exponentially more abundant than the beings that came before us because of our ability to interpret and reflect upon the qualia our senses share with us. So the question is whether we just fall asleep in death, like other creatures, or, if upon entering this new landscape of dying, we have no choice but to figure out a new way to sense it?
Our tendency is to try to control how it will manifest itself. However, the key is to notice qualia that is revealed to us as we lay dying as potential gifts. In ritualing with them – in cultivating our awareness of them – we are sharing qualia, the way our ancestors did in their qualiadelic relationships. Out of this sharing our senses evolve too, only the sense we are working with now is the brain and the mind’s interpretation of death, or what is termed, in Buddhism, the Bardo.
When we think of death as falling asleep, we tend to think of being awake one moment and asleep the next, and perhaps it is like this for a jellyfish and most of the other beings with whom we share the planet. But because we have all this qualia in our minds, bouncing around and kaleidoscopically increasing our perception of reality, falling asleep, for us, is an entirely different experience. And so is death.
I like to call it theta consciousness. This was something I practiced during my senior year of high school, albeit unwittingly. I would put a record on the record player, usually one with a song that would last the whole side (25 minutes or so, maybe “Close the the Edge” by Yes, or “Dark Star” from the Live Dead album, the New World symphony of Dvorak). Then I’d lay back on my bed and drift lightly between dreams and wakefulness, but never slipping fully into sleep.
I was aware that this was a special state of consciousness, and I loved it – I could have done it all afternoon. But I knew better than to over-indulge in it – I felt that would dull my enjoyment. In any case, those were the days when at the end of a record the arm would lift the needle up off the vinyl, but mine was broken, so I would have to get up to stop the shhhck, shhhck, shhhk at the end of the record. It was my theta alarm clock.
And that is really the key to capturing qualiadelic gifts from, well, from death. But, like the Buddhist bardo, it is a practice of noticing that we must begin while we are still alive. It necessitates noticing when your mind has taken you away from the silence, or the music, or the flow, but it is a lot more important.
Theta consciousness is creating the new landscape that is death, or, during conscious wakefulness, in liminal moments of in-between and brief periods of uncertainty – even during such mundane experiences as, say waiting for a bus, or after finishing a project and not knowing what comes next.
Depending on who your influences are, say Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, or someone else’s take on death, your interpretation of the qualia that theta consciousness reveals can lead you in fascinating directions. It is all about the journey because the destination is unknown. Your final landscapes will be created by the qualiadelic relationships you develop, both with your own theta thoughts and with the dream thoughts of others in your community.
I pity the poor jellyfish, for whom death may be merely a falling into sleep.