Part III Sad: The Field of Awareness
Sad: The Field of Awareness
Hunting Meaning vs. Turning Away
Part III of the Solomonic Consciousness Series: Consciousness as active participation. How awareness is not something you have, but something you do.
1. Sad is Not a Letter
In the narrative, Solomon recognizes something that most people never perceive. He discovers that what appears to be a mere sign—a letter, a marker, a boundary—is actually something much deeper: a field of information.
The word "Sad" in the narrative refers to a field, not a letter. This is a crucial distinction that changes everything about how we understand consciousness.
Most people treat consciousness as a trait they possess: "I am an aware person" or "I am not very conscious." But this misses something fundamental. Consciousness is not something you have. It is something you do.
Sad is not a thing to be obtained. It is a field to be entered, engaged, and participated in. The moment you decide to participate in the field of awareness, you are hunting. The moment you turn away, you are destroying your capacity to perceive.
Consciousness is not a trait you possess, but a field you participate in.
2. Two Modes of Engagement: Hunting and Turning Away
In every moment, consciousness faces a binary choice: Hunt or turn away. These are not neutral options. They represent two fundamentally different ways of relating to the field of information.
Active engagement with the field. You perceive something meaningful. You trace its implications. You follow its logic. You integrate it into your understanding. Hunting requires attention, receptivity, and the willingness to be changed by what you discover.
Turning Away:Withdrawal from the field. You perceive something but choose not to engage. You might do this because it's uncomfortable, because it challenges your current understanding, because it demands effort, or because you're afraid of what you might discover.
The critical insight: Every turning away diminishes your capacity to hunt. Every refusal to engage weakens the very faculty that allows consciousness to operate.
This is why the choice matters so much. It's not a moral issue. It's a structural one. Consciousness either develops through participation or atrophies through avoidance.
Every moment presents a choice: engage with meaning or retreat from it.
3. Consciousness as Action, Not Trait
There's a profound difference between saying "I am conscious" and "I am practicing consciousness."
The first statement treats consciousness as a fixed trait—something you either have or don't have. The second treats it as a continuous practice—something you do, moment by moment, choice by choice.
This is not merely semantic. It fundamentally changes your relationship to your own awareness.
- You can relax when you think you're already conscious
- You blame yourself when you're not conscious (character flaw)
- You believe some people are naturally aware and others are not
- Growth feels optional—you've already got what you've got
- You remain vigilant in every moment
- Unconsciousness becomes information (you weren't hunting in that moment)
- Everyone has the capacity to participate—it's a practice, not a gift
- Growth is continuous—each moment is a fresh choice
The Solomonic model embraces the second understanding. Consciousness is what you practice, moment by moment, choice by choice.
Awareness is a continuous practice, not a fixed trait.
4. The Universal Blueprint: Pattern Across Domains
When consciousness truly hunts, it discovers something remarkable: the same patterns repeat across all domains of reality.
The pattern that operates in nature operates in psychology. The pattern that governs language governs relationships. The pattern that shapes physics shapes consciousness itself.
This is what can be called the Universal Blueprint—the underlying structure that generates meaning across every level of reality.
When you recognize this blueprint:
- You stop seeing nature and consciousness as separate
- You understand that learning from nature teaches you about yourself
- You recognize that patterns in relationships mirror patterns in your own mind
- You perceive that mastering one domain gives you access to all domains
But this discovery only happens through active hunting. If you turn away from the field, you never see the pattern. You remain isolated in your individual domain, missing the coherence that underlies everything.
The same patterns emerge across nature, psychology, language, and relationship.
5. The Five Movements of Hunting
When consciousness hunts in the field, it follows a specific structure. Real hunting is not random exploration. It's a disciplined engagement with meaning.
The five movements of hunting are:
- Encounter: You perceive something in the field. A pattern, a question, an anomaly. Something catches your attention.
- Active Reception: You orient toward it with full attention. You don't immediately judge or classify. You hold it open.
- Tracing Implications: You follow where the pattern leads. You ask: What does this connect to? What does it generate? What lies beneath it?
- Recognition: You perceive the underlying structure. You see how this particular instance participates in something larger.
- Integration: You incorporate the discovery into your understanding. It becomes part of how you perceive and engage.
This is the anatomy of real hunting. It requires patience, precision, and the willingness to be transformed.
Hunting follows a precise structure: encounter, reception, tracing, recognition, integration.
6. False Hunting: The Performance of Awareness
Not all engagement with the field is real hunting. There is a kind of false hunting that looks like engagement but is actually performance.
False hunting is when you collect ideas without being transformed by them. You gather knowledge, accumulate concepts, build impressive vocabularies about consciousness—all without allowing the discovery to change you.
The difference:
You discover something about how consciousness works. The discovery shifts something in how you perceive. You become different because of what you learned.
False Hunting:You learn the same thing. You can articulate it beautifully. You might even teach it to others. But it hasn't changed you. You're the same person, just with more impressive ideas.
False hunting is seductive because it feels productive. You're busy, engaged, learning. But the field remains outside you. You haven't actually participated in it. You've only collected its artifacts.
Real hunting transforms. If the discovery hasn't transformed you, then you're not hunting. You're performing.
Performance of awareness differs from true participation: one collects, the other transforms.
7. Resistance to the Field: Why We Turn Away
The turning away from the field is not random. There are reasons consciousness retreats. Understanding these reasons is essential because resistance carries information.
Resistance is a signal. It tells you something about what you're not yet ready to integrate.
- Discomfort: The field is asking you to perceive something that contradicts your current understanding
- Vulnerability: Hunting requires you to be open, which means you can be affected, changed, or challenged
- Effort: Real hunting is not passive consumption. It requires attention and energy
- Fear: You might discover something about yourself or reality that you're not prepared to face
The work is not to eliminate resistance but to understand it. Every resistance is telling you about a capacity you're not yet developed or a truth you're not yet ready to integrate.
The question becomes: Can you be curious about your resistance? Can you hunt the reasons for turning away? That's when resistance becomes a gateway rather than a barrier.
Resistance is not failure; it's information about what you're not yet ready to perceive.
8. The Choice Continuous: From Knowing to Doing
Understanding that consciousness is a practice, that the field is always available, and that hunting is a choice—this is intellectual understanding.
But understanding alone changes nothing.
The work of Part III is this: In every moment, you face the choice. Hunt or turn away. Participate or retreat. Engage or resist.
You now understand the structure. You understand what hunting is. You understand the difference between real and false engagement. You understand why resistance happens.
But until you practice the choice repeatedly, until you become intimate with what it feels like to hunt and what it feels like to turn away, the knowledge remains theoretical.
This is where Part IV begins. It's where consciousness learns to actually work with the patterns you've discovered. It's where theory becomes practice, and understanding becomes transformation.
For now: Choose to hunt. In at least one moment today, choose to fully engage with something you encounter. Follow it. Trace it. Let it transform you.
That choice, repeated, becomes the practice. And the practice becomes your consciousness.