dharma dan on consciousness

An Eternal Now

23 Oct 12, 07:33

http://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/3635659

By Daniel M. Ingram -

Try this:

While there is any experience of any kind, there always appears to be a quality of cognizance, or so it seems.

In this way, you could say that every time there is experience, there is this sense of presence, or consciousness, or awareness, or whatever, but notice how this statement is essentially saying that whenever there is experience, there is experience, or, in the same way, it is like saying that every time there are sensations there are sensations.

If we view the world one way, the way in which it appears that some sensations cognize other sensations, then it seems that there is a separate cognizance, or consciousness, or awareness, or experiencer, or watcher, or whatever.

When we see those sensations all more clearly, or more properly they just get more clear themselves somehow, the thing flips around, and now there seem to be only sensations themselves with no knower, no experiencer, no awareness, no attention that is different from those bare sensations themselves.

In the first mode, as every time there is experience there seems to be an experiencer, then it appears that there is something permanently there that is experiencing, cognizing, perceiving, conscious of, etc.

In the second mode, it still has some quality that is essentially the same, but the difference is that it seems to be intrinsic in sensations, or is just the sensations, by the very nature of sensations seeming to have been sensed, but in reality they are more fundamentally just themselves than that, with no sensor or knower at all, and yet, whenever there is the sense world obviously there is the sense world, and this gives a sense of this aspect of things being perpetual in some way, though more properly it is a redundancy to say this, an extra thing not needed at this point at all.

Daniel

Jui

23 Oct 12, 07:54

Nicely expressed. Thanks for sharing :)

Pegembara

24 Oct 12, 22:39

Experiencer and experiences arise together. Without an experience how can there be an experiencer. Without experiencing(verb), there is no experiences(noun) and experiencer(noun).

Ergo- without seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking there is no one seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking.

In seeing just the seen, in hearing just the heard, in cognising just the cognised, there is no you in connection with that.

geis

25 Oct 12, 12:47

Nice!