hedgehog consciousness

Hedgehog consciousness is a separative consciousness. In theistic terms, hedgehog consciousness seeks God out there, a deity to be worshiped, feared, begged, persuaded.

Hedgehog consciousness requires that the cosmos be populated with characters, each with a persona (mask), each with a persona-l interest in the persona of the hedgehog. If that personal interest is not felt, the hedgehog becomes depressed, remorseful, rebellious, and propitiatory. Thus, hedgehog consciousness feels its separative self to be the center of the universe (similar to the pride of Lucifer with his thunderous "I will" sit on God's throne). When called on this, it either admits it or collapses into a pride-wounded denial.

Hedgehog consciousness is tricky. It will agree with everything written above, denouncing all hedgehogs everywhere, and go on being a hedgehog, proclaiming itself to be enlightened and perhaps even starting The Church of the Eternal Hedgehog.

In non-theistic terms, hedgehog consciousness sets up a membrane, however thin, between "self" and "all else." Hedgehog consciousness insists upon an identity, wrapping itself in a cocoon of self-description. Hedgehog consciousness regards itself as identical to its I.D.

(In a small protest against having to show my I.D., I once carried a signed note from my mother saying that I am who I say I am. When I produced it, it was never enough.)

From one point of view, hedgehog consciousness is amusing. From another, it is a painful dwelling place. One Zen master called a student who was fully stuck in such consciousness a "poor hole-dwelling devil." Nothing funny about being that.