Satellites of the Mind
Searching for the Faint Traces of Other Minds in Non-Dual Awareness
In the night sky, a mindless glance often mistakes a man-made satellite for a natural celestial object. However, an expert observer, lingering for a moment, will see the telltale signs of speed, pattern, and location, and will posit human inventiveness and industry as the reason for this object’s existence. While both the natural and man-made objects in the night sky respond to the larger cosmic forces of gravity, the application of knowledge to manipulate these forces alters the activities of the satellites we have launched into space.
As I meditated one day, I considered whether I’d be able to detect the most subtle evidence of a manipulation of consciousness by an entity with more advanced capabilities, what I deemed a satellite in my mind.
The sort of entities that could manipulate consciousness outright seem like gods. Reports of another consciousness interacting as no-self directly in one’s non-dual consciousness—famously ranging from the purported Machine Elves of psychedelic trips to the arrival of the godhead to those experiencing religious ecstasy—are one extreme of such encounters. I have had far more subtle, ambiguous, and brief experiences that I outline in the post entitled “Is Consciousness an Innie or an Outie?”
I start to experience consciousness as a field, as a network, from outside “myself.” I am at one with a plane of infinite continuum consciousness. I feel that my experience is distributed.
Am I missing something in my practice that would enhance my efficacy to recognize even a subtle signature? Am I quiet enough? As an atheist, am I bringing in aversion to my practice to the possibility that such an entity might exist?
For the experienced meditator, this is a hard problem. On the one hand, an optimal sit is simply just one of being consciousness, complete non-dual awareness. Any intention beyond this, like arriving at a taxonomy of qualia, is bound to bias a sit with grasping, the path to an unsatisfactory mind. Also, any labels you add to qualia are cognitive.
By my definition, a satellite of the mind would not be conceptual or cognitive, it’s not that you’d see it in the darkness behind closed eyes. Instead, it would arise in the formlessness as something more than a feeling. Or maybe as pure love, like in Ram Dass’s mash up of loving-kindness and infinite awareness, which he repeats as his definitive mantra, “I am loving awareness.” A satellite of the mind must arise from within that non-dual state as an unequivocal manipulation of the fabric of consciousness by another consciousness.
Consciousness may differ greatly from what we assume. In his book Reality+, David Chalmers, the Australian philosopher who gave us the concept of the Hard Problem of Consciousness, posits that while statistics point to the likelihood that we live in a physical hologram compiled from a digital simulation, structuralism requires that there is a still more fundamental conscious continuum below the digital. Our brains are one sort of antenna that allow each of us SIMS access to an application program interface for our special breed of subjective experience.
If you find this description of the metaphysics of our world compelling for its ability to clarify the it-versus-bit, mind-body, and non-dual awareness conundrums (and I do), then the idea that continuum consciousness may be the source of love, grace, and kinship does not leave you wanting for a deity, but describes the only one worth any reverence.
And that deity and you are one. As Alan Watts clearly articulates, “you are it.”
Watts’s simple persuasion stems from his conjecture that the central theorem across Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian mystical traditions is that with practice, we can all become mindful entities that recognize ourselves as infinite awareness, establishing ourselves as the godhead, the eyes of the world.
In all this entangled infinitude, your deified nature as the likeness of loving awareness is the launch code to shower satellites of loving kindness throughout the cosmos.
Start simply. Next time you’re in a crowd and feeling literally conscious of a self that is an illusion, send out loving-kindness satellites. Instead of being self-conscious, make space for a networked continuum of nodes in loving-kind relation to one another. We are all in this together.
This is my meditation at concerts. I am more aware of the music and my dancing if I am repeating, “may you be happy and know the causes of happiness” to those enjoying the music now, also across all space and time. I envision encapsulating this compassion in waves interacting with motion and music around me.
The grace of loving-kindness meditation—offered by an entity of divinity such as yourself—may awaken the subtle awareness in another, a satellite in their mind, that we are unified loving awareness. No one is alone.