Consciousness is like a bomb, isn’t it? It’s like a bomb going off. People talk so much about consciousness these days. People say so many things about it. It is of course so very easy to blab on and on about consciousness – we don’t even know that we are blabbing. We don’t even know that we’ve been born. We are blabbing without even knowing that we are blabbing, we’re blabbing without even knowing that we’ve been born. We don’t know why we are blabbing on in the way we are and we don’t really care either. We never look into it. We’d be better off reigning ourselves in, wouldn’t we? Not saying so much. We’d still make fools of ourselves it’s true, but not quite so much. Not quite so much.

Consciousness is a bomb and when it goes off it’s like nothing we could ever have imagined. It’s like nothing we ever did imagine. It doesn’t kill us when it goes off, it just destroys everything we thought we knew. It comes at us from an angle we never expected, an angle we never could have expected. It comes at us from an unsuspected source. We were always looking somewhere else, we always thought that it would be somewhere else or something else, we never it would be where it is or what it is. It comes from a disregarded place; it comes from the most disregarded place of all, the most disregarded place there is. We do know this place but we never look at it – we never expected anything to come from here. We were contemptuous of this place. Our interest, our attention, our enthusiasm was always somewhere else.

When the bomb goes off it hurts. It hurts because it reverses everything we thought we knew. It hurts because it catches us unawares. It hurts because we’re ashamed, because we have been caught out. Ashamed is too mild a word really – we’re appalled. We have been so terribly caught out and it hurts so much. What we looked down on so much is everything that ever mattered. What we looked down on is where the whole of life lies (not that we ever knew what life was, anyway). When the bomb goes off then we know that we had got it all wrong. We realize all at once, we realize in a terrible flash. A bomb goes off in our heads. There’s nothing wrong with that terrible flash, it’s what the flash is showing us that is wrong. It’s us that there’s something wrong with. That’s what the bomb shows us so pitilessly. Never did we see anything so clearly.

What did we think life was all about? What did we think it was supposed to be? We never knew, we never had a clue. We thought we knew but we couldn’t have been more wrong. We never stopped to think about what it was we thought we knew – we never thought to stop to think about what it was that we thought we knew! We were in too much of a hurry for that. Always in so much of a hurry, along with everyone else. Afraid to miss the boat. We were always in so much of a hurry to look in the wrong place, so much of a hurry to put our money on the wrong horse. And ALL the horses were the wrong horces, every single last one of them. We were always so very greedy and we didn’t even know what we were greedy for…

When the bomb goes off it doesn’t just hurt, it traumatizes – there is pain in it that we just can’t process. There is too much to process. There far too much to process. It’s the pain of our entire lives. A life misspent – and every life is a life misspent, isn’t it? We’re all in the same boat there. Our whole life was spent facing the wrong direction, after all. Our whole life was spent neglecting what really mattered. But we all like to talk about consciousness just the same though, don’t we? We love to blab happily about consciousness all day long and say how wonderful it is, how great it is, how cosmically-empowering it is. So many positive things to say about consciousness – all those spiritual channels on the Internet are full of people waxing lyrical about consciousness and spirituality and getting so excited about it. Whoever talks about the trauma of consciousness? Why does no one talk about the horror of it? What kind of conspiracy is this? What’s that all about? It’s always sweetness and light, isn’t it?  It’s always Oneness and Compassion. It’s all so marvellous and great that we just can’t stop talking about it. Our mouths are running away with us. No one says that is like a bomb that goes off one day and leaves us racked with trauma. No one ever says how terrible it is…