The Fact of Death

Yes, you aren't your thoughts. What are you? What is it that is aware of thought?lfen

I'm an individual. An "I am". And I wouldn't have been able to describe what it is that sits above my thoughts had it not been for the fact that another individual moved in and sat above me (as I do above my thoughts) and said "I am too"

An adult atheist is one who holds an intellectual position. I don't expect describing Satan to make so much as a dent in an adult atheists intellectual position. Give me a little credit JM.But while we're at it intellectually. It makes little sense for a being whose aim it is to terminally decieve us to pop out from under the bed and shoot his wad early by shouting "Peekaboo!" at us.Give him a little credit too!

Ian,Of course.I'm going to toss in some links that you or someone else might find interesting. I was initially very excited on reading Bernadette Roberts first book because I recognized that she was a contemporary American who had known almost nothing about Buddhism and was describing the Awakening the Buddha went through in modern language. She was and remains a Christian so that made her thought more accessible to Westerners who if they aren't Christian themselves are at least much more familiar with that structure.BERNADETTE ROBERTS
Bernadette Roberts and the Experience of No-Self
Bernadette Roberts Interview - SpiritualTeachers.orgBear in mind that I myself am not a follower of any tradition. The image that just came to me is that in one hand I hold a rope that is woven of the conceptual approaches of science and in the other hand I hold a rope that is woven of the insights of the non dual traditions and I'm tugging on them bringing them closer together to see if they will fit. It's an awkward metaphor but nothing better has come to me.lfen

I would prefer if you would put things in your own words Lfen. Its not that I object to links but this issue is tricky enough without having to wade through the likes of this: ...if you catch my drift. What I see is somebody struggling to find equilibrium. Where it all makes sense. My own life history can be pictured as me, the ball bearing, trying to roll himself up the side of a bowl to reach the summit of it. Hobbies, sex, drugs, career, danger - all paths taken in an attempt to summit. But invariably I'd run out of steam and roll back down to the bottom.A question. If tying the strands together is your aim. Why do you exclude a potential strand? The dual strand. God/you > separate. Surely it is no less to be struggled with than any other.If one includes all strands then one might tie a knot that will endure.This message has been edited by iano, 08-May-2006 05:25 PM

The links are there as I said for interest. I intend that what I write stands on it own. I can't think of the technical or latin term at the moment for that sort of further reading thing but I will continue to include links from time to time. I'm working out things along my own line. Links are just references and additional readings should anyone care to investigate some of the sources I refer to. Should I read that as "God divided by you is greater than separate"? Doesn't make sense but not sure what you meant to say with that. I would say that I'm just walking my path, wathcing it develope, and for whatever reason it doesn't emphasize dualism.lfen

Okay. No offence intended re: links.So where are we so far? My recollection presents the following highlights. If I'm off track then maybe you could edit what you think I'm off we can take stock. If there is something I've forgotten it could be added. Maybe this highlight list could be used as a reference and be added to/modified as we progress.General conclusions arrived at:We're looking at things with the view of arriving at a nondual inclusive result?...We aren't really out with what the mind is. Your definition: ..might need some further discussion. Is the mind the 'whole lot' or an action exclusive of consciousness + thoughts/memories/fantasies (which we might group as one 'thing'). Or is the mind something else in your opinion?...We've established the 'I' is not our thoughts, emotions, physical presence. 'I' sits above that? Maybe we could use i instead of 'I' for brevity?...We haven't figured out I think, how to describe what the i actually is. We are aware of it, but our awareness seems to stem from the i itself. i is self-aware thus....i, individual, (self) consciousness: seem to be synonymous....The end we are looking to arrive at is where the i awakens. What this entails or how it is achieved hasn't been discussed much. But its result would be (without knowing what this means necessarily)

quote:

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the individual wakes up and comes to see that it is not the individual but the source of the individual

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..provided i and conciousness and individual are indeed synonymous...That about it so far, Ifen?IanThis message has been edited by iano, 09-May-2006 12:54 AM

For me anyway, English often makes using the word "mind" ambiguous. Most of the time I think of the problem as "consciousness". They are both slippery concepts and I really have yet to discover how to unslippery them.I'll just try this and we can see if it's useful although I see some problems with it already, but how about mind is the brain function? I'll say for now all of the brain function but that is mostly to save myself the work of trying to partition brain function. Consciousness then is that most intimate mystery of how we know that we are aware.Now there is a possibility that someday it can be shown that brain function or some subset of brain function is responsible for consciousness. There certainly seem to be strong correlate but at present that is about all I can think of.I'm just home from work and due to allegies or somethng my eyes are tired and itchy and this one step seems enough for now.lfen

Not so much an intellectual position, more an acknowledgement of what we all know deep down. That there are no gods or devils - just ourselves, sitting around a campfire, making up stories.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

You can see the same difficulty as me. What value words as a route to understanding what one is getting into before one decides to start into it? If the Buddha observed his "mind" then what was it that he was doing? Inexplicable it may well have to remain this side of actually venturing down that path. The element of Faith arise here. Trust in another (failing knowing any differently) man.Failing comprehension, one can carry out (the works element?) an experiment on the usual activity of their own 'minds' and subject it to some de/reconstruction and so result in it being in a different than when they started. In this case, the view one arrives at at the end can be as easily a product of the reconstructed mind as it is a description of the way things actually are. How could one hope to tell?This message has been edited by iano, 09-May-2006 10:45 AM

That seems to be an impossibility to me. Naturalistic man arriving at the knowledge that he is naturalistic man is arguing in a circle. "How do I know I am naturalistic man? Because deep down I know I am naturalistic man. But how do you know deep down that you are naturalistic man? Because I am deep down a naturalistic man - or at least I have no evidence to the contrary."Lack of evidence doesn't equate to knowing. Knowing is knowledge. And that requires you to have some evidence. Evidence that breaks you out of the circle of your reasoning.A man can be of the opinion that he is naturalistic. But he cannot know it.This message has been edited by iano, 09-May-2006 11:00 AM

We know when we're deceiving ourselves. We don't need external evidence for that.This message has been edited by JavaMan, 05-09-2006 07:08 AM

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Generally, the term 'consciousness' is used to describe all the brain activity you're conscious of (in contrast to all the unconscious brain activity). The term 'self-awareness' or 'self-consciousness' is used to describe that self-reflexive bit of consciousness that you and iano are discussing.I think the 'I' that you and iano have been discussing is not as paradoxical as it first appears. It is merely the function of your brain that allows you to focus and switch attention; just the same function that you use when reading a single line of text from a book, or attending to a ball racing towards you at 70mph. This function is separate from your memory or your individual thoughts, so when you are introspecting you can use it to examine them, just as you would examine something externally. But it is a mistake to think of this function as the essential 'you', for the following reasons:1. Everything you are conscious of in your mind is just a small part of what your brain and body are doing. You are observing just tips of icebergs when you self-consciously observe memories or thoughts;2. If you strip away memory, you strip away identity. Someone with advanced Alzheimer's is not essentially themselves, they have lost their identity;3. Similarly, if you strip away the ability to abstract and categorize things, you end up with more immediate experience of the distinctness of things, but we generally categorize this state as a form of autism, i.e. as a disabling condition, rather than something essential to being human.So that's my 10 euros worth. The observing self is just one function of the brain amongst many. In fact, in order to do things efficiently we often need to turn off this function to make sure it doesn't interfere. (This is what the notion of letting-go means to me).

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

True, it is possible for us to know we are (trying to) deceiving ourselves. But if we successfully deceive ourselves then, by definition, we will not know it.If you are saying we cannot successfully deceive ourselves then you are again arguing in a circle. "I know I cannot deceive myself. How do you know? Because I know I cannot!" Some evidence is necessary to break out of that circle too

'you are observing' is the nub of it. Me, as self aware, is doing this observation. Irrespective of how much I am observing of the ice-bergs, the ice-bergs aren't me. The brain might in that case be thought of as an orchestra. And any orchestra would do me. The essential is i, the sheet music and the conductor. An idea, but difficult if not impossible to investigate. The i can still sit there observing jumbled thoughts. The i may well cease to have a mode of expression. But it doesn't necessarily cease to exist. A baby doesn't have memories but that is not to say that it is not an i. i=identity/memories appears to be an arbitarily arrived at convention Again this points to a problem with looking purely at a crashed vehicle in which i travels. We can see the wreck but we can't look inside to see if the driver, i, is okay or not. It seems (Ifen and myself agreed in any case) that the i sits above and outside thoughts at times. i being able to observe thoughts implies a certain separation between them. Damage to one (evidence: autism/alzheimers) doesn't necessarily mean damage to another (how does one get evidence?)