As I walked onto the carpet at Buddhist House (BuHo), a warmth came over me. A figure wearing black yoga pants and a skintone sweater floated up to the door. Addison Hoffman ’15, a philosophy major and the host of the night’s meeting, peeked through her glasses and smiled.
“I’m glad you made it,” she said.
It was 10:10 p.m. on a Wednesday, and the Consciousness Club was sitting in a circle in a room with a fireplace. Hoffman discovered the club last year when it was in need of a leader; as she attended more meetings and saw its lack of direction, it became her baby. When Shivan Bhavnani ’14, the previous organizer, left to go abroad, Hoffman helped nurture the club, welcoming enlightenment-seekers into the open arms of BuHo.
Bhavnani, a senior majoring in English and economics, is the lifeblood of the club. At this gathering, he perched on his knees in a relaxed yet alert state and gently guided the conversation. His eyes were wide and inquisitive.
As a freshman, Bhavnani found solace in the Consciousness Club.
“I love how [it] is a kind of a forum for people… a place to bounce ideas off of one another,” Bhavnani said.
Ever since a ninth grade teacher showed him the basics of meditation, Bhavnani has been pursuing Buddhism and investigating the idea of consciousness. As the conversation moved along, I caught his eureka-moment smile out of the corner of my eye.
The Consciousness Club began in 2007, two years before Bhavnani’s freshman year. It was quite ‘New-Age’ back then, with talk of spirit animals well within the framework of a standard conversation. Old meetings used to have a bit more structure, while these days the group lets the overall mood dictate the discussions or activities for that day. Lucid dreams, states of consciousness, and human nature are pillars of the discussion.
Around 11:45, the meeting seemed to lull. A conversation on lucid dreaming had just concluded and a laptop was being passed around with the group’s mailing list. Yet despite the tired feeling in the room, Bhavnani and Hoffman both seemed to perk up after a certain realization. They proudly announced that they have earned the funding to take the group to a Sensory Deprivation Tank, in which participants lie in a sound-proof, light-free, tepid tank and fall into a deep meditation, ideally losing their senses of self.
Bhavnani dreams of hosting, in addition to this excursion, an open mic, or a sort of introspective show and tell, for the Consciousness Club.
Members of the club see it as a formalization of a phenomenon that unfolds organically all the time: friends gathering to open up to one another in candid conversation. The same ideas that run through the Consciousness Club are in the air when students engage in late-night dorm room conversations at 3 a.m., when lovers share honest pillow talk, or when philosophy students put their hands to their chins.
“I don’t think we’re any more philosophical than the rest of campus,” Hoffman said.
The club is merely one set of people who delve deeper into consciousness, only they happen to meet at 10 p.m. every Wednesday at Buddhist House. Yet there are many unofficial consciousness clubs at Wesleyan, tucked away in hidden corners of our campus, asking questions that can’t help but arise, like steam from a cup of tea.