Patterns of movement in Consciousness

While eating breakfast a picture of a flock of birds flying appeared before my inner eye. Isn’t it amazing, and wonderful, how they fly in a group, twisting and turning together in the most complex and delightful patterns?

And I realised: Yes, this is simply a movement in Consciousness. A movement which encompasses, sweeps up, a number of (apparent) individuals. It happens – one cannot say that the birds are doing it. Have they held a meeting and made a democratic decision? Have they formed an artistic flight club and practiced various choreographies? Of course not – but then, why does it happen? And how do such small animals, even the youngest, know to perform their migrations? Surely their cognitive capabilities could not manage this.

And then I thought of the famous monarch butterflies of America. Their migrations, from North America to Florida or Mexico, can be as far as nearly 5.000 kilometres – not bad for a butterfly which weighs less than a gram. The Eastern North America population spend their winters in Oyamel forests in Mexico. One has to ask oneself: How big can their brains be, when the whole animal weighs less than a gram? Could they remember the way? Surely not. So again, how does this come to pass? Scientists are finding some mechanisms which help them navigate, but how do they know to do it at all?

Collective patterns in Consciousness

What we are seeing is a pattern in Great Consciousness, at a higher level than the individual organism. A group or conglomerate level; we might also call it a part of the morphic field of butterflies, or of birds.

Let’s be sure we’re not putting the cart in front of the horse: A group of butterflies do not create a collective consciousness which was not there before. Groups of butterflies, indeed all elements of manifestation, do not exist as objects independent of Universal Awareness and Great Consciousness. Rather, they are the products of these two. Great Consciousness ‘dreams’ the apparently material world and Universal Awareness observes it, thus making it ‘real’. The end result is similar to a film in the cinema. Let’s take a persons physical body and energy body as an example: The physical body does not generate the aura, nor the aura the body. Both are expressions of a small clump of Consciousness, just on different levels.

As all manifestation, including all beings, is an expression of Consciousness, it is ultimately meaningless to talk about individuals. As an analogy, think of the air of this planet, and imagine that one cubic metre of air, right there where it is, expresses one human being. So twenty cubic metres, located near each other, would express a group of 20 people. Some smaller volumes of air will be expressing birds, and others butterflies. Now a breeze comes and moves a largish volume of air – the birds fly in a flock, a swarm of butterflies sets out… But you cannot view the air as separate; it is not, it is all simply the air.

Ultimately, all there is is Awareness and Consciousness.

The expression of Consciousness in humans

The question arises: Can we observe such patterns in or as humans? Not so easily, because humans have big brains housing small minds. Frontal lobes saying “I me me mine”, loudly and repetetively. Imagine an individual bird or butterfly thinking about what it should do, what it wants to do, what is the morally right thing to do, or weighing up which course of action will provide it with the most personal advantage. Will the swarm flight still work? No way. These animals do not have the cognitive capacity for such thoughts; they simply are. And as such, their actions follow the subtle impulses from a clump or area of Consciousness. These impulses are there for humans too, but are mostly totally drowned out by the cacophony of thoughts in small mind.

A human can notice, and be guided by, broader (non-individual) swathes of consciousness – but for that, you will have to quieten your mind. Bhagwan likened it to a bird singing very quietly – it was always singing, but before you didn’t hear it.

So the next time you see a flock of birds flying, become still, and see a pattern in Consciousness.

You might like to notice that you are not separate from THAT.