The mystery of life we take for granted
At this moment you are enmeshed in a deep mystery, whether you think about it or not, the mystery of life. No matter how you explain human evolution, life is immediately present to everyone. A body that breathes and thinks is alive; a stone on the roadside is not. Cells are living; the atoms and molecules that make up a cell are inert. This feels obvious, and for biology and medicine it is extremely useful.
Few dispute the hard line between what is alive and what is not, but if you look closely at your direct experience, this divide begins to blur, and a more radical question emerges: What if the only truly living presence is consciousness itself?
From biology to the building blocks of matter
The scientific distinction between bodies and rocks or cells and atoms is precise, but when we look more deeply, we see that both living and nonliving things are composed of the same elements. Atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are the essential building blocks of all organic chemicals inside living creatures. The difference is not in the basic particles themselves, which go on to form incredibly complex proteins, enzymes, DNA, and so on.
Yoga and Vedānta: how reality is known
So far, this is a story told from the outside. The perspective from Yoga and Vedanta asks a different question, not what things are made of physically but how they are known. From this angle, both living and nonliving things are known and experienced in consciousness as vṛttis, the Sanskrit term for fluctuations, waves, or modulations of awareness.
What you experience as mental activity—sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts—are all vṛttis. Every experience you have ever had, whether of a stone, a tree, another person, or your own body, is a pattern of fluctuations rising in consciousness. In practice, this is how we know reality first-hand. When you hold a rock, the rock as experienced is a vṛtti: a particular combination of visual form, weight, texture, and meaning appearing in your awareness.
When you smell a flower or feel your own heartbeat, that too is a vṛtti. Interwoven sensory and conceptual ripples give rise to “flower,” “heart,” and “me.”
Five vṛttis in the Yoga Sūtras
The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali classify all mental activity into five broad types of vṛttis: correct knowledge (pramāṇa), misconception (viparyaya), imagination (vikalpa), sleep (nidrā), and memory (smṛti). Every perception, belief, fantasy, and recollection fits into these categories. All are ways consciousness moves and presents itself to itself.
So far, this sounds like abstract philosophy, but in direct experience philosophy and biology are both simply appearances in awareness, registered as vṛttis.
Only consciousness is truly conscious
Now comes a subtle and radical point. If everything we know—bodies, brains, rocks, trees, and even the sense of being a personal self—is experienced as vṛttis in consciousness, then none of these objects are themselves conscious.
Rocks are not conscious.
Trees are not conscious.
Brains are not conscious.
Bodies are not conscious.
Humans as persons are not conscious.
Instead, these are phenomena within the wholeness of consciousness, perceived separately as patterns or waves of mental activity. Even the thought, “I am a person, I have a self, I am this body-mind,” is a vṛtti with no special privilege among the infinite vṛttis that emerge from the field of pure consciousness, the source of creation. Once this subtle but powerful point is understood, we can say that nothing is fundamentally consciousness except consciousness itself.
We are deceived by the habit of feeling separate. There is no separation in the field of pure consciousness that is our foundation and true home. Pure consciousness has no location, no boundary, no form. It is the field in which all experiences—of living matter, nonliving matter, and the sense of being a person—appear and disappear.
Rethinking enlightenment and the “awakened” person
From here, the question of enlightenment takes on a different meaning. We traditionally say that certain beings—for example, Jesus, the Buddha, Rumi, great sages and avatars—were personally enlightened or awakened. But if they, too, are experienced as appearances in awareness, what does it truly mean to say that they were awakened?
Enlightenment is not about the person acquiring extraordinary knowledge or maintaining a permanent special state. It is about seeing through and beyond the illusion of being a separate individual self. To be awakened is to recognize experientially that all phenomena, whether “in here” or “out there,” arise and dissolve in one field of consciousness. Everything in your life—thoughts, feelings, sensations, biological processes, the world, other people—comes and goes within the same awareness, which is your true identity.
Consciousness itself does not awaken; it is always awake, present, and aware by its very nature. What awakens is your sense of identification: the mind stops misidentifying as a separate self and recognizes its identity as consciousness. Instead of “I am this body, this mind, this story,” you abide as the witnessing presence in which all experiences unfold. This is the meaning behind phrases like “I and the Father are one” and “the kingdom of heaven is within.”
The ego does not become enlightened; rather, the illusion of an ego as an independent entity dissolves. What remains is the clear recognition that consciousness alone is aware, not the mind, not the body, not the individual character in the story.
Ultimately, awakening is reality’s own recognition of itself, free of identification with any particular vṛtti or form. In that light, we can say that the great saints and sages became “divine” only when they ceased to identify with a personal name and story. When the identity as “Jesus,” “Buddha,” “Rumi,” or any human persona fell away, only the divine field of consciousness remained shining through that human pattern.
What is truly “living”? Awareness itself
With all of this in mind, the original question of “What is living, what is nonliving?” gets reframed. The deepest life does not belong to organisms; it belongs to awareness itself, endlessly expressing as stones, trees, bodies, and beings. Awakening is the shift from being a character in the field to knowing oneself as the field that holds every character and every world.
Practice: Resting as the field of consciousness
Sit comfortably and let the body be at ease. Close your eyes or soften your gaze.
Notice sensations, sounds, thoughts, and feelings as they arise. Silently recognize: these are vṛttis, fluctuations in awareness.
Let each experience come and go without holding on or pushing away. If a thought appears—“I am meditating,” “This is peaceful,” “This is difficult”—ask gently: To whom does this appear?
Notice that even the meditator is another appearance in consciousness. Rest as the open presence that knows it all.
Allow the recognition to deepen: I am awareness itself, not the changing contents of experience.
Practiced regularly, this contemplation loosens identification with the body, the mind, and the label “person.” What remains is the simple fact of being aware—the same consciousness in which all worlds, living and nonliving, rise and fall.
Namaste,
Deepak