Rather Suspect

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.

He says.

Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.

So writes Kurt Vonnegut to introduce chapter two of Slaughterhouse Five. This section seems as good as any to spend a bit of time exploring the unique relationship between awareness and consciousness, two concepts I think about frequently.

It seems we could, imperfectly and in a backwards fashion, define consciousness as, simply, second-order awareness. That is, consciousness is “awareness about awareness.” If we are standing on a mountaintop in Yosemite, breathing in the cool mountain air, surveying the limitless blue sky above, we might feel “aware” of our surroundings. We exist — fully — in that moment.

But if we then reflect upon our awareness — if give some thought to the seven-mile journey it took for us to ascend the mountain, the supplies we needed to pack, the plans we needed to make in the weeks leading up to the trip — we might also feel (perhaps) proud of what we’ve accomplished.

The “in the moment” feeling of expansiveness is awareness. The “awareness of our awareness” — the feeling of pride — is consciousness.

What is the distinction? Awareness is fixed — there is a singular “origin” point from which one might be aware. Consciousness, however, is the act of picking a different origin point from which one can observe one’s surroundings.

Awareness is the view from the Self. Consciousness is the view of the Self. To “become aware” is simply to open one’s eyes. To “become conscious” is to choose to observe that scene from another’s eyes, another perspective.

For some reason, humans seem to handle consciousness in the dimension of space quite well. We can sit on the couch looking at the armchair across the room and it is not at all difficult to imagine how the room might look were we sitting in that chair instead. We can imagine lying on the floor looking up, or being a fly on the ceiling looking down.

Changing our perspectives — our origin points from which to observe — comes quite naturally when it comes to the spatial dimensions. And because this is so natural, it’s easy for us to be conscious of our surroundings and yet (for many of us) to lack awareness. We often become absent-minded professors, observing the world from every vantage point but the one our bodies inhabit.

The situation seems to be reversed when we try to do the same in the dimension of time. When it comes to time, we always observe the universe from “now,” a singular origin point we label the present. We have awareness in the temporal dimension — we can see the sunlight streaming through the window right now — but we seem to struggle when it comes to becoming conscious in this dimension. That is, we find it difficult to shift our origin point. How did that sunlight look three days ago? What will that sunlight look like in two-hundred years?

We sometimes can vaguely imagine how our ancestors might have lived, but to “bring that memory to life” we rely on spatial artifacts, like photos, stories, or antiques. We convert our temporal awareness into spatial awareness so that we can become spatially conscious of it. In other words, we don’t really know how to become conscious in time so we make the transformation in order to become conscious in space.

For Billy Pilgrim to “become unstuck in time” doesn’t mean “things just happen out of order.” It means he is aware of his awareness — he is conscious not only in the spatial dimensions but in the temporal ones too. He has become conscious of time in the sense that he is aware there are multiple temporal origin points from which he may observe. He can, in fact, “see” the sunlight both now, and three days ago, and in two hundred years. Unlike the rest of us who are still “stuck in time” and can only imagine that sunlight existing “now” or not existing, he is literally aware of that sunlight from multiple origin points throughout the temporal dimension. It’s not that the sunlight exists “only now” and then disappears. It’s that there are multiple temporal vantage points from which to observe it.

Why should it be that it’s so much easier for us to shift our perspectives in space than in time?