“Consciousness”
I asked myself:
Am I flesh?
Am I bone?
Am I a breath of life?
Am I this charm,
this beauty, this sensitivity,
this creativity and this power?
Spreading this light,
Am I this worship?
Am I this dignity, divinity, and grace?
I asked myself again:
What are the faculties, qualities
And projection of a human?
And I asked myself,
And I looked into my soul,
And asked myself,
Again and again –
The same question,
(because I was not getting any answer).
Like a lost man,
Who does not find the way to his destiny,
I was looking for that fact of life:
Where and what I am.
And I found in the depth of myself:
I am not the moon,
I am not the flesh,
I am not the breath of life,
I am not the power,
I am not that perpetual, calculated,
well-settled, well-established monarch.
I am just a part of consciousness!
Then I asked myself:
In this world of mine,
And in this ecstasy of mine,
Of my consciousness,
(which is always with me
From the day one to the day last
And thereafter,
And that is the only thing which shall always
Be with me,
And live with me,
And I shall live with it.
It is the most beautiful, divine Godly power.
It is the only psyche which keeps me,
And gives me the fulfillment,
Satisfaction,
And the joy,
And the beauty,
And the happiness).
Why am I not in a position of relationship to that?
Are my senses that powerful?
Am I that degrading?
Is some curse on me?
Has the devil over taken me?
Have the angels not helped me?
Has the God abandoned me?
What am I doing on the earth without my consciousness?
I asked –
And I found a very simple answer:
Consciousness was standing before me, asking me,
Why don’t you love me all the time?
Though you feel me,
I feel you,
And it is a relationship.
Without this relationship,
Neither you exist nor I exist.
Why is it not mutual?
I looked at my consciousness,
Standing with absolute beauty,
With absolute radiance,
With absolute love.
But, I could not find an answer within myself.
I went to sages,
I went to my peers,
I went to society,
I went to Holy men,
I went in search everywhere,
To know:
What is the situation,
That between me and my consciousness,
I was unable to create a relationship.
And I found,
I was given my love,
I was given my religion,
I was given my clothes,
I was given my house, land, property,
Everything on the earth.
But not the secret message –
Without consciousness,
I would be nothing but an animal.
Nobody loved me enough,
And nobody took care enough,
To teach me,
In the depth of my own valley of consciousness.
To make me understand:
In the father’s mansion are many rooms,
But there is only one common corridor
To all entries,
And that is called consciousness.
Nobody told me,
The love,
The beauty,
The trust,
The joy,
And the enjoy of all the plentifulness of my life
And the youth
The old age
And my childhood are nothing,
But a part of consciousness.
Nobody told me,
All the heavens and the hells,
The angels, the demons,
And all that logic and psychology and numerology.
Of all the whole world of mine,
Is nothing but my consciousness
I tried –
I took a paper,
And I tried to spell it,
And then I found out,
I cannot spell consciousness.
I could not spell it with a pencil,
I could not spell it with my personality,
I could not spell it with my intelligence,
I could not spell it with my character,
I could not spell it with all my heart, from my head.
Because….
I did not learn to spell it right.
I was tired.
I was heart broken.
I had wasted years of my life.
I looked toward the sky:
Perhaps the stars can talk to me –
And to my surprise,
A change happened in the sky and stars joined together,
And I read the word consciousness.
And I found that is what all the heavens are about.
Since then,
What I read, I saw.
What I saw, I read and understood.
It was written in my heart.
And lo, what a change!
I have to do nothing
I became the consciousness.
I spelled consciousness,
Here, there, over, under, everywhere.
And finally I found out.
And every consciousness started relating to me.
And every consciousness became consciously my conscious.
And this unity was more divine
than going to heaven,
or by-passing hell.
I feel, in the depth of my own feeling
And in the feeling of all,
And all in one:
That love
And beauty
And joy
And perfection;
In a synagogue
In a temple
In a gurdwara
In a mosque
In a church
Or where anybody worships
And in communion
And in prayer
And in everything which is being done,
Is being done (directly or indirectly),
To prepare a human being,
To be conscious.
In relation to others,
But almost mostly,
in relation to one’s own self.
And now I pray,
As I saw in the stars in the heavens,
And I read it and felt it and know it
You all, in the same way
May see, may feel.
And I pray,
You may become a living consciousness,
You can spell it out to all
And you can spell it out to yourself.
And if you can live in the spell of consciousness,
You are a living God
And I bow to such a God.
Click on the link below to view Yogi Bhajan’s “Consciousness” as it originally appeared in Beads of Truth in the 1983 Winter Edition:
Leave a Reply