Certainty

it just occurred to me as I scanned my bulk mail folder looking for important emails about how do I know that I am concentrating enough to pick them out. We know that were I daydreaming I could easily scan over a name, and actually its amazing that I can just look over the list - without any particular expectation and wow magically I can notice a name of interest - how do I know that I am in the right frame of mind to do that?

Maybe its a feeling I have which proves this fact. A feeling of "paying attention". How about "I just know".

Then I played devils advocate with an imaginery "scientist" who would want phenomenal proof. How I would argue does he know that he is paying attention to his experiments? He would say that he has the phenomenal knowledge of the experiment itself to assure him that he is not sleeping or not paying attention.

But I would argue further, how do you know that you are paying attention to the "evidence" that you are paying attention?

At the end of the day we just "know" directly whether we are paying attention and what the state of our mind is. Being a mind is the same as knowing a mind!

It is not a case of viewer and "the viewed", but rather viewer is "the viewed".

Its strange in a world of proof and ecvidence to speak of self-evident truths, things we know in themselves directly, but these things must be possible else we would never be able to reach across the divide from ourselves and the world we wish to know.

Of course once the divide is bridged once it is no longer so great. What is the difference between viewer and viewed anyway? that has not been imagined itself.

- Another bit of writing in the long list that begins on the home-page and spills out in all directions to some sense that the world is self evident and existence and truth are already here. That working, building and constructing truth is at root a myth.