Absolute consciousness: are we aware of it?

 The final part of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi’s teaching at Avot 2:1 reads like this:

הִסְתַּכֵּל בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, וְאֵין אַתָּה בָא לִידֵי עֲבֵרָה, דַּע מַה לְּמַֽעְלָה מִמָּךְ, עַֽיִן רוֹאָה וְאֹֽזֶן שׁוֹמַֽעַת, וְכָל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ בְּסֵֽפֶר נִכְתָּבִים

In English: “Focus on three things, and you will not come into the grip of sin. Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a listening ear, and that all your actions are inscribed in a book”.

Avot Today has often discussed different aspects of this guidance, which is open to many interpretations. The Dee Pirkei Avot Project recently used it as a springboard for the following question:

“How do you think our lives might change if we lived with absolute consciousness that our every thought, word, and action impacts the entirety of creation in a profound way?”

In other words, if the mishnah is inviting us to be continually aware of God’s supervision of our lives, because everything we do and say has an impact that God judges, what would happen if we were to do so?

I wonder whether such a thing as “absolute consciousness” even exists. God has created humankind with the ability to do more than one thing at a time. We call it multitasking, a grand label that can apply to something as trivial as chewing gum and listening to the radio while driving a car. We can perform serial tasks of this nature easily and usually succeed when we do so—but can we say that we are simultaneously absolutely conscious of all three, even if we exclude awareness of the profound impact that each of our thoughts, words and actions from the equation? And how often does the car reach its destination without us being able to recall quite how it got there?

For the sincere and practising Jew, the principle of שִׁוִּ֬יתִי יְהֹוָ֣ה לְנֶגְדִּ֣י תָמִ֑יד (“I have place God before me constantly”: Tehillim 16:8) is a sort of gold standard to which we ideally all aspire. In practice, it is impossible to maintain an absolute awareness of God’s presence at all times—and if one tries to add up the number of times a day in which one thinks of God at all on a busy day, the total can be embarrassingly small. I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to try to add to that awareness a further level of consciousness as to the impact of everything I say and do. And is the level of absolute consciousness as described in the quote above in any sense compatible with the daily task of living one's life?

Awareness of our impact on every facet of the world God created is however a useful tool both for our assessment of how we have performed over the past year and how we should strategise our plans for making the best of the year to come. Our awareness, like our knowledge, is at best imperfect and framed within the context of our own personal limitations. Even so, we must make the best what we have.

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