I never thought consciousness could have objects. After asking who is actually doing the listening when I say “hello, hello, hello” inside, it became clearer who was. Michael Singer does a great job explaining it in “The Untethered Soul“. He says awareness is the listener, and your thoughts and experiences are objects of that awareness.
Maharishi Yogi introduced this concept back in 1959 through his Transcendental Meditation technique now well known in the West. Based in the Vedic tradition of India, it was delivered as a guide to navigate awareness. Before him, there were many with similar maps. My favorite current-day GPS’s are Sadhguru and Dr. Michael Joseph Levry.
Programming also has it’s maps
Comparing programming to consciousness may seem odd but there are crossroads where they meet. In Object-oriented programming, programs are designed out of objects. An object in programming is a type of data structure that hold information you can engineer into larger things. Objects of consciousness also hold things. Thoughts, emotions, and experiences, for example, are all filtered through the human system as information, which can be consciously engineered to achieve specific outcomes. Getting to know “your piece of life”, as Sadhguru puts it, is key. The more you get to know it, the more you’ll be able to design a pleasant inner world, and beyond that, will realize the endless objects passing through it are not you.
The objects in programming have become my signposts. Thinking of them reminds me my thoughts and emotions are structures too, which is important because I sometimes hardly notice the listener. Behind my close identification with my personality is my awareness, always there whether I notice it or not. So leveraging code to bring me back to reality works in this way, especially when I begin to attach myself to this or that.
