The Thing That Was Always There

On consciousness, illness, and the awareness that was always there

When meningitis took hold of my body, the usual priorities of life - the plans, the worries, the sense of being a particular person with a particular story - became insignificant. What took centre stage was the fear of death. It was in that fear, or the dark night of the ego, with the help of an energy healer, that I found something I didn't have a name for yet. Or rather, it found me.

The healer told me early on that I was disconnected from my soul, and that it was the soul and universal energy that heals, not him. I had no idea what he was talking about. So I did what the mind always does. I tried hard to find it, I searched and reached and concentrated, bringing to the task all the effort and determination I would apply to anything else that mattered.

Finding your soul requires the opposite of how we normally go about doing things. It requires complete relaxation, letting go, and surrender. And when I stopped trying to grab it, there it was.

Pure awareness, observing the thoughts, observing the body, just present in every moment. It hadn't appeared from nowhere, and it hadn't been created by the crisis or the healer. It had simply always been there, beneath everything else, waiting with extraordinary patience for the moment I stopped looking outside of myself.

ZEN BUDDHISM

Teachers have called this your "original face," the one you had before your parents were born, and the Zen tradition holds that it is not something earned through years of practice but something always already present, obscured only by the very effort to find it, so that the moment you cease seeking is often the moment you arrive at what was never absent.

What strikes me, looking back, is that this discovery required no monastery, no decades of meditation, no particular belief system, but a crisis severe enough to strip away everything else, which is perhaps why so many genuine awakenings happen not in places of peace but in places of extremity. The illness was, in its own strange way, a doorway.

Science can take us remarkably far, and psychology can map the mind's patterns with increasing precision, but both eventually hit a wall where they can describe the contents of consciousness - the thoughts, the emotions, the neural correlates - yet cannot explain why consciousness has a felt quality at all. Philosophers call this the hard problem of consciousness, and it remains genuinely unsolved, a gap at the centre of our most rigorous understanding of the mind.

This is where the mystics step in, not as an alternative to reason but as explorers of the territory that reason cannot map, navigating from the inside what science can only observe from the outside, and doing so with a consistency across cultures and centuries that is itself worth pausing on.

ADVAITA VEDANTA

The ancient Indian tradition of non-duality names this pure awareness Atman, the witness that cannot itself be witnessed because it is the witnessing itself, not something you have or acquire or cultivate but what you are beneath every role, every story, every mood that comes and goes like weather across an unchanging sky.

Carl Jung mapped similar terrain from the West, distinguishing the ego - that constructed, narrative self, the one with opinions and ambitions and a persistent need to be right - from the deeper Self beneath it, and suggesting that most people live their entire lives from the surface without ever suspecting there is anything further down. Alan Watts said it with characteristic mischief, that the reason you cannot find yourself is that you are the one doing the looking, and Ram Dass spent decades pointing to the same place with four words that contain everything and ask only for your full presence in this moment: be here now.

Since that experience, something fundamental shifted in how I move through life. I still have problems, difficult emotions still visit, life still brings its weight, but there is now a space. A small, reliable gap between me and whatever is happening, and that space changes everything. Before, I was my emotions, anxiety wasn't something that arose but something I became, fear didn't visit but took up residence, and there was no distance between the weather and the sky. Now the emotion comes and I can watch it, not coldly and not without feeling it, but without being consumed by it, because I have come to know the difference between the storm and what notices the storm.

Life used to feel like a punishment. Now it feels like a game. The same events but completely different experience.

This isn't naivety or spiritual bypassing, a pretending that hard things aren't hard. What has changed is a deep, evidence-based trust, built from looking back honestly at my own life and seeing that even the things that felt like disasters were, in some way, exactly what was needed, that the hard moments weren't random cruelty but clearings, each one releasing something that no longer served, making room for what was trying to come. 

Hard, I have come to understand, is a perspective, a construction of the mind, and not a fixed property of events themselves.

If you work in marketing, you have almost certainly used the Hero's Journey. Joseph Campbell's framework of the call to adventure, the descent into the unknown, the transformation, and the return as a structure for a compelling story or sales narrative. It works, reliably and across every culture and audience, and the reason it works is worth sitting with for a moment.

Campbell spent his life studying the myths and stories of civilisations across every continent and era, and what he found was not a collection of different stories but the same story told over and over again, in cultures that had no contact with one another, in languages that shared no common root, separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles. His conclusion was not that humans are imitative but that they are all drawing from the same source, that beneath the surface differences of culture and time there is a shared inner landscape, a collective well of human experience and wisdom that each of us carries and that the greatest storytellers have always known how to reach.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

The Hero's Journey is not a copywriting technique, though it has become one — it is a map of the inner life, of the universal human experience of being called out of the familiar, descending into darkness and disorientation, and returning transformed, carrying something back for others. Campbell called this the monomyth, and he found it everywhere, because it was always everywhere, because it describes not what happens in stories but what happens in souls.

When my illness stripped away everything familiar and I stood at the threshold of that fear, I was living the descent, and I didn't know it then, but something in me did and what I brought back was not a technique but a direct experience of the awareness that had been there all along, waiting beneath the story I had been telling about my life. 

This is what the mystics and the monks have always understood, and what the purely analytical mind struggles to accommodate, that some knowledge does not come from accumulation or experiment but from a kind of listening, a willingness to be still enough to receive what is already present and has always been present, beneath the plans and the worries and the stories we tell about who we are.

I follow many teachers, from Ram Dass to Alan Watts, from ancient Vedic texts to contemporary voices and I hold all of them lightly, taking what genuinely resonates and releasing the rest, because I have learned not to follow anyone blindly, not spiritual teachers, not mainstream institutions, not even my own mind, which I have watched change its certainties at the drop of a hat, confidently holding one position in the morning and quietly abandoning it by evening.

And this, strangely, is where I feel most free. When you stop outsourcing your certainty to authorities, traditions, or the loudest voice in your own head, what remains as a compass is the awareness itself, that quiet steady presence discovered in illness and confirmed in every year since, not a belief and not a conclusion but something more like a direct sense of what resonates and what doesn't, in this moment, right now, without needing to be explained or defended or held onto.

It took losing almost everything temporarily, health, control, the ordinary busyness of being a person with priorities, to find the one thing that couldn't be lost, which was, of course, the only thing that had ever really mattered.

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Sometimes only in the spaces between can we see our own being, not through the mind's understanding but through the resonance of the being itself, and the Zen masters knew this, and Campbell knew it, and the mystics of every tradition have pointed to it across thousands of years with different words and different maps, all gesturing toward the same territory. If you are reading this, perhaps some part of you already knows it too, and is simply remembering.