“Sharon” is a composite of several military veterans I’ve worked with as a clinical psychologist. We used Sharon’s story in our yoga psychology book (Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity”) as a way to illustrate in very practical, down to earth terms how what Sri Aurobindo calls the “physical consciousness,” “vital” (or life/pranic) consciousness, “mental consciousness”, “inner’ (or “subliminal), “subconscient” and the consciousness of the “psychic being” play out in our every day lives.
SHARON’S STORY: A REASON TO LIVE
Sharon had nearly given up trying to make sense of her life. She saw no reason to go on living. It had been more than a quarter century since she had returned from tending wounded soldiers in Vietnam. Now forty-seven years old, she felt it was unlikely she would ever understand what had happened during the war to so completely undo her sense of who she was and what her life was about. She couldn’t imagine anything else she could do to resolve the persistent feelings of futility. Her childhood faith – which had been a source of comfort for her growing up amidst the violence and poverty of the inner city – no longer offered any solace. And none of her achievements – neither setting up her own successful business, nor being elected the first African-American councilwoman in her district – seemed to make any difference.
After walking away from her job as councilwoman, Sharon went to stay with her father for a time. She spent her days sitting by the pond in his backyard, trying to gain some perspective on the mounting tension she’d been experiencing in recent years. One day, several weeks after she arrived at her father’s house, watching a leaf fall from a tree overhanging the pond, she began to feel a warm, embracing Presence.
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Whether or not we’ve experienced a personal trauma, for many of us the world has become so complex that, like Sharon, we find it hard to make sense of things. In the modern world, an increasing number of people find that religious faiths which had their origin in a very different time, do not speak to the need for meaning in their lives. Turning to science, we find a wealth of truly amazing facts about the birth of the universe, the process of evolution and the intricate workings of the brain. These facts by default have come to represent the story of our world and who we are. However, the facts in themselves offer us no way of understanding why we are here or what we need to be doing.
There are different ways of understanding the scientific facts about the universe, each of which carries with it very different implications for our lives. Perhaps the facts with most relevance to our search for meaning are those that relate to the nature of our consciousness – how it has evolved and how it works. After reviewing the details of what scientists now understand about the evolution of consciousness in the universe, we’ll explore two contrasting ways of viewing them.
But before embarking on this journey of exploration, we’ll first go back and look more closely at Sharon’s state of mind when she first arrived at her father’s house. In subsequent chapters, we’ll look at what happened in the intervening weeks that led Sharon to the experience that began to resolve her suffering, and gave her a reason to live.
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Caught up in a reverie of disjointed memories, Sharon hadn’t noticed the sound of the truck idling on the street behind her father’s house until the engine was turned off. She cringes as the sound of the truck door brings her back to the medical compound in Vietnam. She imagines she hears the sound of soldiers unloading the dead bodies from the back of the truck parked on the dirt road just outside the compound. She remembers the smell of the jungle air thick with death and a feeling of nausea sweeps over her. Closing her eyes, she sees the faces of the dying soldiers for whom she had provided comfort in the final moments of their lives. She feels her hand grasping the metal cup half filled with water as she prepares to lift it to the parched lips of one of these men. Startled, Sharon opens her eyes and glances down, seeing not a metal cup but the bottle of pills she is holding in her hand. Attempting to reorient herself, she quickly looks up and surveys her surroundings.
Her eye is caught by the light reflecting of f the rippled surface of the pond in front of her. Several bright orange goldfish with long flowing tails swim to the surface for a moment, then dart away. A cardinal on one of the higher branches of the oak tree to her left is singing. It had only been a few weeks since she arrived at her father’s house in this quiet residential area, a world away from the noisy urban neighborhood where she had served as councilwoman for the past 10 years. Leaving her job at the peak of success, she thought that spending some time with her family might help her to make sense of her life. Her mother had died several years before, but her brother Willie lived down the street, and her sister Clarissa frequently drove there from her home two hours away in the mountains.
Thinking about the senseless killing of Bobby Thompson, Sharon recalls the flashbacks that began not long after she’d heard about his death. She can hardly believe, sitting here in this quiet place, that the crime-filled neighborhood where she spent her childhood is only a few miles away. She is so lucky to have had such a loving, close-knit family, her parents instilling in her a sense of endless possibility, and so carefully nurturing her passion to make a difference in her community. How had things come to this? Neither the drug addicts nor gang members who populated her childhood neighborhood had distracted her from actively pursuing her ideals – organizing youth groups, marching for civil rights, running successfully for student council president. Her path had seemed so clear – she would study nursing, go to Vietnam to help tend wounded soldiers, come back to study medicine, and work toward establishing health clinics in her community.
She recalls how after Vietnam, none of this seemed to matter. She had lost all interest in becoming a doctor, and tried working briefly as a nurse, but could no longer bear being around illness and pain. She recalls her family’s futile efforts to comfort her, their inability to understand why she was unable to continue on the path she had set out for herself. Somehow their cheerful faith in her had left her feeling even more despondent.
She half-smiles thinking of her next move – relocating to a distant city, hoping she would find some new way to live out her ideals, imagining that might help resolve her uneasiness, help her to lessen the sense of burden she was carrying. She set up the boutique soon after meeting Nicole, and it wasn’t long before they had become successful enough to donate a significant portion of their profits to help fund community projects. But the unease and restlessness continued to grow, and when Martin suggested she run for office, she was happy to move on. Though she turned out to be a good politician, she didn’t like some of what she saw in herself during that period – the ambition, the ease with which she got drawn into questionable deal-making, the determination to win even at the expense of others. But still, she had done good things. Even before the end of her first year in office, her proposal for creating an agency to help women get started in small businesses was already off the ground.
But it seemed that with every new success, the sense of burden and meaninglessness only grew deeper. She had money and respect as well as many opportunities to do good, but she still couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing mattered. No amount of success seemed to quell the painful restlessness she felt. And the more she was admired, the lonelier she became. She’d never really been able to give herself to the men who pursued her; she only ended up feeling more desperate and alone when she was with them. It might have been different with Bobby…
In the eyes of others, she had been functioning well enough. But she knew she could not continue what she was doing while sinking further into despair. And now, just a few weeks after leaving her job, she can’t imagine there’s anything she can do to change the way she feels.
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Bearing in mind the questions with which Sharon – and perhaps each one of us – is grappling, we’ll go on to the story of the evolution of consciousness. We’ll then consider different ways of looking at that story to see if there’s one that might illumine our pressing questions.