Consciousness gets tricky fast. We can dig deeper and deeper through layers of what we call consciousness, but what is its essence? Where is it located? No one knows, of course, but one theory is that our brains are not so much transmitters as receivers. That we’re not transmitting our own consciousness located somewhere in our minds as much as receiving our sense of consciousness from one, great universal consciousness. Like computers without hard drives pulling our programs and memory from the cloud, we’re all individual manifestations of the same consciousness playing through endless personalities and egos.

Is this true? I have no idea, but when Jesus says that he and the Father are one, he’s placing his identity in the cloud, disregarding any local identity. When he says he can do nothing on his own initiative, that his actions don’t flow from his own consciousness but that of the Father, he seems to have let go of himself as a separate entity, and in that surrender, realized his true identity. He says if we follow his lead, we can do what he has done, and when he says if we want to find our lives, our consciousness, we need to lose them, he is telling us how.

Not in staking out a separate self, but in surrender to the vastness of the spirit, love, consciousness in each concrete act of authentic connection, we become smaller, emptier, simpler—and our identity with all that is conscious becomes unmistakable.