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Awareness

Here! Hear!

posted by GEPRUITT on August 7, 2008 at 3:02 AM | link to this | reply

Re: hi Afrikan

Hi mysteria, I'm grateful for such a great compliment, but it is your own mind that open to itself and me and my words are not much more than a phantasm moving through your mind.

posted by AardigeAfrikaner on August 6, 2008 at 11:52 PM | link to this | reply

Re: sam444

We live it already

posted by AardigeAfrikaner on August 6, 2008 at 11:49 PM | link to this | reply

Re: Hmmmm

In my experience the answer to your first question is: Awareness has always been present, not necessarily as the awareness experienced as being part of a specific being but as itself and it therefore has never come from somewhere and is never going anywhere either. It is not Time, space, size dependant even though it can be experienced as such. Try to pinpoint your own awareness to a specific locality. There is also no more evidence for consciousness in you than there is for consciousness in bacteria. We simply have to take your word for it and bacteria can obviously not tell us anything. I agree that the "self" as that vague "thing" we believe to exist in as as our bodies (a mental construct more than anything else) will certainly dissolve at death. You may not believe this, but there is another mode of experience that is not dependant on this mentally and emotionally constructed "self" that is not dependant on the body. For you it will have to remain an assumption until you experience it firsthand, for me it is an experiential truth. It is actually imperative that you doubt it's existence so that you do not at some stage mistake mere notions about it for the "thing/experience" itself. This is why there is a Zen saying; "Great doubt, great awakening". NO amount of words and arguments can or should convince you of this. Only you can validate this for yourself in the same manner that only you can ultimately know there to be consciousness of the various phenomena in your own mind.

posted by AardigeAfrikaner on August 6, 2008 at 11:47 PM | link to this | reply

Re: OTA

You're always welcome and appreciated

posted by AardigeAfrikaner on August 6, 2008 at 11:34 PM | link to this | reply

hi Afrikan

You are very good at open the mind to the esoteric.

posted by mysteria on August 6, 2008 at 8:23 PM | link to this | reply

I like this tremendously: Fortunately we do not need anything that science or philosophy can offer us to come to grips with this core characteristic of Life. Right on! sam

posted by sam444 on August 6, 2008 at 7:53 AM | link to this | reply

Hmmmm

This seems to imply that the observer predates the material world, so where did the observer come from? Granted that philosophy and biology have some trouble getting a grip on consciousness, that doesn't change the contents of the body of evidence: life existed before humanity, simple life, like bacteria, show no evidence of consciousness, the human brain, deprived on sensory input, learns nothing, knows nothing, and does not observe even its own existence. If you stop the physical processes of the body, you have killed the self, and existence for that self has ceased, at least according to all human experience. So how does an assumption of a separate observer advance understanding of the human condition?

So far, you haven't convinced me, but I love reading your posts. Please keep it up.