Why Consciousness?

Everything alive is moving toward something.

An ant is moving toward sugar. A plant is moving toward light. A mosquito is moving toward you, and then — the moment your hand rises — away from you. A person is moving toward food, or safety, or a partner, or pleasure, or rest. Sometimes knowingly. Mostly not. Across every month of every life, in every living thing I can think of, this is what is happening. Movement toward.

I have been trying to find the simplest true thing I can say about consciousness, and this is where I keep arriving. Not at a definition. At a door.

Two doors

Put two doors in front of you. Your task is to go through door one. Not door two — door one.

If you look at door one and walk to it, you arrive. That is the whole task, and it is complete.

But if, on the way, you turn to talk to someone, or your mind drifts to a conversation from this morning, or to one you are planning to have tonight — you may find you have opened door two. You have lost. Nothing was wrong with your legs. Nothing was wrong with the doors. What was missing, for a few seconds, was the simple knowledge of what you were moving toward.

That is all I mean by consciousness in this article. Knowing what you are moving toward, while you are moving toward it. To make any move well — to make it precisely, or to make it better than last time — this has to be there first.

It sounds too small to matter. I think it is the foundation of everything else. The things I trust most are the ones that apply to everything, to everyone, at any time — the way time itself does. Consciousness, in this plain sense, is one of those.

The plant that turned back

When I was a child I had a plant that leaned toward the outside wall, where the light came in. I wanted it to face me instead, so one day I turned the pot around. Then I forgot about it. For a while it seemed to be looking at me, and I liked that.

Some weeks later I noticed something. It had grown new stems, and every one of them was leaning, again, toward the outside wall. The plant had not argued with me. It had simply kept moving toward what it needed — without eyes, without a plan, without anyone telling it where the sun was.

I am not making a scientific claim here about what a plant experiences. I do not know, and this is not the place to pretend. I am pointing at something plainer: it was moving toward, and it was not distracted.

Ants are the same. Spill sugar somewhere awkward — behind a jar, up a shelf, inside a cupboard you were sure was closed — and by evening there is a line of them, having solved a route you would struggle to describe. Try to catch a fly with your hand. It is gone before your hand arrives. Nobody trained it.

Now take that and associate it with anything. Any action. Any living thing. Any day of your life. Something is moving toward something, and how it goes depends on whether the moving is done with attention or without it.

Not science, not religion, not a rule

I want to be careful about what I am not saying.

I am not saying this is a law of the universe you need to study. I am not saying it belongs to any religion, or that anyone needs to teach it to you. Put food and a stone in front of a hungry person, and nobody has to explain which one to eat. You already know. You can choose.

The only requirement — and this is the entire point — is that you consciously know what you are looking at, and what you are choosing. Not afterwards. While you are choosing.

That is the whole of it. Simple, simple, simple. Small enough to fit inside a moment, and underneath everything I will ever write about here — work, health, learning, sport, family, food, sleep, the hard days and the ordinary ones.

Why this comes first

This is why the first entry in this journal is about why, not how. There will be practices later, and observations, and questions I do not know the answers to. But every one of them will come back to this: a living thing, moving toward something, either knowing it or not.

So take one thing from this article, and try it on whatever comes next. A task at work. A meal. A conversation. A goal that will take years. Ask what matters most to getting it done — what the main thing is — and the answer is always the same one. Call it attention, call it focus, call it presence, call it anything you like. It is simple consciousness. Simple, simple consciousness.

Consciousness is not something you go away and find. It is the difference between door one and door two. It is already here, in the next thing you do.

You only need to notice it.