The Visual8

A card arrives in the mail. You have not heard from this friend for years.

Without putting the keys down, you tear open the envelope. Your eyes scan a single page.

The tone is light. The handwriting vibrating with excitement.

He begins talking about the travelers of the Argo and Jason’s adventure with them.

Then he connects this concept of Argonauts with astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts.

ChatGBT reveals that they are all travelers in space, but spoken in different languages. The prompt also offers other information.

That the brave who explore the depths of the ocean are aquanauts. Those who travel in air are aeronauts.

Your attention darts back to the letter.

He askes whether you have read the Bhagavad Gita. He explains that thousands of years before we explored the space under water, or the space beyond our atmosphere, people have explored the interior landscape of the mind.

Bhagavad Gita is simply a story to explain this adventure.

He shares that the last few years have found him on a similar journey. That people, who take up the challenge, are called Innernauts.

Then he invites you to meet him.

Your forehead creases. Your eyes move to the window.

The sun bathes the landscape. Nothing stirs outside.

Thoughts overtake your mind. How strange to take up such a practice. To concentrate, to meditate, or to contemplate the nature of consciousness.

Your gaze softens to take in the whole picture. You stop listening to the voice telling to get back to what is due. A sensation overtakes you. You promise to close your eyes only for a moment.

An open field appears in front of wall of trees. The breeze creates waves on the tall grass. You move forward along a crease to find a narrow path. A figure appears from trees.

You step forward. He calls out a greeting.

The Materialist approaches closer.

He is dressed with fitted clothes. Round glasses and trimmed hair frame his face. Tucked into his shirt pocket is a biography of Sir Issac Newton. Stacks of paper are tucked under one arm. They remind you of differential equations. He is plain spoken. His words are carefully arranged as facts in logical order that end with a conclusion.

Your conversation with the Materialist stumbles onto the note from your friend and the nature of consciousness.

He assures you that there are four types of consciousness.

The first type is consciousness of being awake.

This is a medical diagnosis, he explains. It is meant to discern between cognitive function and deep sleep. It is the realm of anesthesiologists who put people into a state where no pain is felt. The light switch gets turned off in the nervous system.

The current theory is that microtubules control this biological function. However, we haven’t really proven it to be labelled as a Law of Nature.

The Materialist points to another experience.

He invites you become aware of your weight of your body pressing down onto the Earth. You weren’t thinking of it before, but you are now.

He reminds you that before breakfast, your stomach told you that it was time to eat. These are somatic experiences. These are consciousness of the experiences of our body from the inside. Our eyes, ears, and finger sense the world outside, but our mind knows an inner domain.

Emotions can be located in the body, too. Once you set your mind to find where they are.

The Materialist lays out a gameboard.

He invites you to game of Checkers.

With each turn a disc slides across the board or hops over the opponent. The game ends with many kings chasing each other for one final epic battle. When the game completes, you both reset the board.

Game after game, a pattern emerges. You see opening moves. You encounter the midpoint where each side claims a certain position on the board. Then the end game begins.

The Materialist calls the game a system. When you study objects moving in space, you become aware of the system that lies beneath.

He reminds you that your body has systems, too. It has a skeletal system, a pulmonary system, a vascular system, a muscular system, and a nervous system. Each working like members of a single team. A system of systems.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Then the Materials points to the night sky.

Evening has come. Clusters of stars twinkle. He speaks of the discovery of Dark Matter. How the math of known, solid objects would not calculate correctly without accounting for some other invisible entity.

It could not be observed, but only inferred. We became aware of it’s existence by the effect it had on galaxies.

The Materialist invites you to consider one more thing. The universe is made of atoms. Each composed of sub-atomic particles. If we were to blow up a nucleus to the size of a marble, then the electrons that spin around it would be a football field away.

He tells you this story to illustrate the Void. The space in between matter.

You did not really think about it until just now. But it has your full attention.

The Materialist packs up his things, adjusts his glasses, and thanks you for an enjoyable conversation.

He continuous on his journey heading back to where you started.

You write down the four lessons about consciousness he shared with you: Being Awake; Inside Sensations; Systems; and the Void.

Then darkness overtakes the field.