Resurrecting Awareness at the Mad Tea Party: I Think, Therefore I Am
Awareness, in its strange and spiraling ways, tends to creep in between sips of thought and bites of habit, asking curious questions like, “Who are you now?” or “Have you noticed you’re awake?” And so here I sit — a guest at my own becoming — wondering whether to stir in sugar or silence, and pondering what it really means to think, and therefore... to be.To be conscious is to be awake.
To have awareness is to perceive your surroundings, your inner landscape, and everything in between — the known, the mysterious, the sacred, the strange.
But maybe that definition feels too stuffy. Maybe awareness is more like being painfully sensitive to reality, like standing naked in front of a mirror that stretches across space and time, where everything — thoughts, fears, dreams, echoes of the past and future — looks back at you with unblinking eyes.
“I’m not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”
These days, awareness is a buzzword, tagged and tossed around to oblivion. It's in yoga studios, on social feeds, printed across t-shirts. And yet, like many powerful words, its meaning has quietly faded under the weight of its misuse. Time, with all of its confident grace, erodes all things eventually — even language. Even us.
But not entirely. Not always.
Much like the story of Easter, not just in its Christian telling, but in its older, wilder roots. Tied to spring, rebirth, and the waking of the earth — consciousness is the messy, miraculous act of becoming again and again. A return. A rising. A reminder that even the most decayed things can become new.
And yet, in our quest for understanding, in our hunt for control, we often press too hard. Some mysteries are meant to be felt, not solved. Like the Fermi Paradox, or the nature of God, or time itself. Perhaps certain truths are better left unturned — not from fear, but reverence.
Still, the human mind keeps questioning.
“Your hair wants cutting,” said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech. “You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Alice said with some severity; “it’s very rude.”
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was,
“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
We, too, move through Wonderland — dodging between dimensions, thoughts flitting in and out like characters at a tea party, illogical and essential all at once. We are terrified. We are ecstatic. We are endlessly curious. And curiouser.
Our minds are not tidy journals. They are tangled streams. Thoughts arrive like lily pads drifting on a subconscious current. Some overlap, some flip, some decay. Some linger along the muddy banks of habit, entangling themselves in routine.
But every thought matters.
In Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, Dr. Ogi Ogas and Dr. Sai Gaddam introduce the concept of embodied thinking — the idea that mind = brain + body + environment. In other words, our thoughts are not confined to the skull. We are not floating brains in jars. We are flesh and weather and memory. The mind is not an island; it’s a system of interconnected roots growing through every part of us and beyond.
Another critical function of our mental life, according to the authors, is habituation. This molecular process prevents our minds from getting stuck in loops. It helps us distinguish a raven from a writing desk. It gives us the capacity to feel emotion, to make plans, to turn pages in a book and actually remember what we read.
In essence: our habits are us.
We are creations of our circumstances. Our environments. Our routines. And yes — our dreams and even those thoughts that hide so deeply inside us that they’re never spoken aloud. These unseen parts of us are still active participants. Every interaction is a reflection — not just of the world, but of the self.
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
The universe is one vast hall of mirrors. Friends, enemies, joy, grief — it all loops back to us. Our fear of the unknown is, more often than not, a fear of the self. And buried even deeper is a fear of true freedom.
We like to talk about “free will,” but maybe we've misunderstood it. Maybe freedom isn’t just about choice — maybe it’s about awareness. Maybe to be conscious is to be free. Not in the sense of control, but in the ability to witness, to reflect, and to respond rather than react.
So maybe this strange little gathering of thoughts — some mad, some meaningful — wasn’t about solving anything at all. Maybe awareness doesn’t need a neat definition or a finish line. Maybe it’s the act of noticing the way our thoughts ripple, the way our habits cling like lily pads, the way we speak to ourselves when no one’s listening. To be conscious, then, isn’t to have all the answers, but to recognize we’re even asking questions in the first place.
And in that recognition — in that witnessing — there’s a kind of resurrection. A soft returning. Not to someone new, but to someone aware. Someone who doesn’t just float through the party, but pauses, looks around, and says, “Huh. This is curious indeed.”
So drink the tea. Ask the questions. Let your mind wander. Because maybe, being aware of the wonder is the wonder.
As the earth wakes up from winter, as we shift seasons both around us and within us, ask yourself:
What thoughts are drifting in your stream today?
What habits are holding you down, and which ones are carrying you forward?
What parts of you are decaying — and what is quietly, miraculously being reborn?
