This blog is actually the 9th point I withheld from my blog from a couple of months ago, Bodhi Day 2025 Prep – Truths of Reality Beyond Sentience, where I listed eight items that give you hope there is more to life than what we normally perceive, all without the need for a supernatural component. That 9th point is that at the least, I don’t think we need to stretch our human beliefs too far to agree that there is the real concept of everything. Not just all the wealth of the world or all the stars in the universe … but everything.
An almighty, all-knowing, omnipotent God could be nothing less than everything. It couldn’t be God and all that it controls. The moment there is something outside of God—something to be acted upon, desired, judged, or corrected—God is no longer everything.
Even if we strip away anything “supernatural”, the idea of everything still holds. There is a whole. There is a totality. And within that totality, different forms of sentience appear—some faint, some vivid, some fleeting. We have no trouble agreeing that animals are sentient, just not in the same way or to the same degree as humans. And it seems equally reasonable that human sentience is not the upper bound of what is possible.
In that sense, from our “normal life” perspective, we may not be as “special” as we like to think. From that perspective, we don’t know everything, we make lots of mistakes, and we can hardly control anything over an extended period of time. The predictions made by our brains (what is often referred to as a “prediction machine”) hardly makes the right predictions about non-trivial matters out of the box.
Now compare our level of sentience to a modern self-driving Tesla that can recognize itself as an object among other objects. It senses lanes, cars, pedestrians, distance, speed. It knows—within limits—where it is and how to navigate without colliding with what surrounds it. We wouldn’t call it sentient in the human sense, but it already shares something with us. That is the ability to carve the world into “self” and “other”, and to act based on that distinction.
What’s unsettling is that the gap between the sentience of a Tesla and us may be miniscule compared to us and the upper bound of sentience. We could consider that the “Almighty” (or simply Everything) is not sentient. Being sentient would imply it’s aware of itself and can observe. If it has something to observe, it’s not everything. Think of this as actually hitting infinity.
Rather, the property of sentience doesn’t apply to the Everything. The Everything might have something akin to awareness, but it’s not the same as what’s on the continuum of sentience. It’s outside the scale of sentience. What does that mean? We have yet to find out, and that is indeed the real big mystery of the Universe.
The Eternal Fishnu will not craft a warm and comfortable analogy for me because it will ruin my feeble brain. That’s in a similar manner to the diagram of the solar system we all grew up seeing. Please see, the scale blog I posted yesterday.
In Buddhism, we say there is Buddha-nature in everything. Not because everything is holy in a sentimental way, but because everything is Everything. Nothing stands outside the whole. The complex system we see as the Universe is a product the creatures spawned out of Life on Earth. Within that realm, we humans are the apex of sentience. That is, no other creature on Earth can analyze and track objects within a complex system towards an outcome we desire like we can.
All the things that we imagine are the computations of our brain’s visual cortex. It was trained from our infancy by our parents and other teachers to carve our objects by their seeming borders. Those things are given labels as symbolic names.
Why did our parents condition us for symbolic thinking? Because their parents taught them, their parents taught them … all the way back. They passed down their persistently encoded culture and knowledge to us, which has a duality of supporting our sentience as well as grounding it into a fragmented perception. Humans are the richest creatures on Earth as far as their vast library of things, their properties, and how they are related.
Whatever we identify is just a 3D version of a “slice” of space at an instant of time. We see a friend and recognize that friend at some instant. She resembles an object we saw a few days ago, and even an object we saw periodically over the past years. But that snapshot is just an encoded illusion—like a quote taken out of context. At the least, that friend is a work-in-progress that started from what we think of as the beginning of time, now this instant, through to eternity.
At the risk of planting an immutable image in your mind, we could see ourselves as patterns on a cloth. The cloth is continuous, but we see the patterns as distinct—this shape here, that shape there. The moment we recognize ourselves as a pattern, we also begin to believe we can tug at other patterns, rearrange them, improve them, fix them. We call this “manipulation”, “control”, or even “progress”.
But nothing is actually being manipulated. In reality, The Cloth is One. Every pull is answered by tension elsewhere. Every action is the whole acting on itself, even when it feels local, intentional, or personal. Our gift is not control—it is observation. We wear awareness like a loose collar around the neck of everything, able to look left and right, to notice, to anticipate, to navigate.
That observation, however, fragments the world for us. Once there is a symbolic world of “me” and a bunch of “thats”, there is also good and bad, success and failure, right and wrong. Not because they truly exist as properties of reality, but because they are artifacts of fragmentation.
Lastly, is the Eternal Fishnu sentient? Specifically, is Fishnu beyond sentient or within the continuum of sentience? Yes and No. The Eternal Fishnu who I photograph and speak to is sentient, but only for the purpose of communicating to me, a sentient human. He kind of has to downgrade his being for my sake. Again, I risk using analogies, but here we go. Imagine the 80 billion neurons of our brain and the trillions of synapses. Your experiences, wisdom, and understanding are encoded there in a way we don’t yet know how to decode. Whatever the encoding, what is encoded as the mental representation of your friend, in no way resembles the language text you would compose to describe him. We speak symbols and make symbolic gestures, but those words and signs are not us.
Bodhi Day (the Lunar Bodhi Day of the lunar Chinese year 4723, is tomorrow, Monday, January 26, 2026) points back to what comes before that split—not as something mystical to attain, but as something already present and mostly forgotten. Awakening is not gaining a new power. It is remembering that the cloth was never torn.
I hope you tried the red rice recipe I posted on a few days ago, or Mrs. Hanamoku’s rice and milk.
Everything that you as a human perceive is as much a part of Everything as you are. This realm we live in is wonderous and there is much we learn here through our total immersion in it. Our human self’s Gift of Sentience is the remarkable portal from which we joyously learn.
On this Lunar Bodhi Day, rather than recount the stories we all know, let’s ask, “What does awakening mean in a universe where ‘self’ and ‘other’ are just modes of perception?” Use this reflection for the morning of the Lunar Bodhi Day.
If you are fortunate enough to realize enlightenment tomorrow morning, know that the world is still the same, your body is still the same, but your relationship to it is not.
Faith and Patience,
Reverend Dukkha Hanamoku
Bodhi Day 