Waking up at 2am

A loud bang awoke me at 2am. I think something must have been slipping of its own accord and finally fallen to ground because I had some warning that things were changing in my dream.

What was interesting this time however was that rather than be drawn by the sound my mind was drawn by the emergence of consciousness itself. This was an exact but much more direct version of the realisation I had stepping onto a train in 1990. The “mind” must be greater than consciousness because consciousness is brought to a situation on some cue. In other words the sound made me conscious of what was going on, rather than me being conscious of the sound.

This simple interpretation of a common experience leads one to the realisation that consciousness is itself caused! It is created, conditional and impermanent! Now what is the mind that lies “behind” and conditions consciousness?

Consciousness is also often linked with the concept of self. How can we have a self if we are simply responding to external influences? The notion of “self” seems to arise because “consciousness” of things gives a concrete “existence” not to things as much as a perception of things. We are not conscious of things as they are, but rather a version of those things which is unique to a perspective. For the experimenter consciousness seems to be placed after sensory processing has occurred, while to the patient we are inside consciousness and the object beyond the outside of consciousness. This is why different people are conscious of the same things in different ways and what science tries to eliminate from experiment. From this we become progressively more aware of a particular way of seeing things and this enforces the view of a self.

My waking up experience this morning however poses a problem (just as in 1990). It seems that “my” consciousness is the product of a larger mind that I was previously unaware of! In 1990 I interpreted this as meaning that consciousness was epiphenomenological (the name I discovered later in philosophy classes). So does this mean that there is a higher self which I am not conscious of? I believed so – this led rapidly to the view that there was a noumenol world “outside” the phenomenol world of consciousness and that “truth” was unknowable. One problem with this is that while the form of this world was unknowable it seemed that the structure of “things” was preserved so that although I wasn’t seeing a real apple, there was never-the-less a real apple causing my sensation. Science could discover this. But I put no weight on science because without the conscious world to “colour” the outline drawings of science there were meaningless.

I’m kind of aware today that I’ve no real answer to this view. I thought this was all done and dusted. I agree with Dennett’s analysis of the Cartesian theatre and played that through my mind this morning – that the self is not some person sitting inside the mind looking out of the window of consciousness. Consciousness Dennett notes has no central thread or place to it: it coalesces from separate bits often in the wrong order (compared with objective time measurement of stimuli). Buddha argued a lot of this a long time before Dennett in the Shurangama sutra – the argument about the mind being inside the head or outside (the conclusion being that the mind is Nowhere).

A huge problem to note is the mixing of the words “Mind” and “Consciousness”. It seems that my waking experience definitely separates them and suggests that my “mind” became “aware” of the emergence of “consciousness” of the sound – so that there is an awareness which is non-conditional and unconscious that can be even “watching” for sounds in the outside world while I sleep and be aroused to consciousness. Whether that consciousness is a function of that “mind” (or Brain as it is often associated) or a separate entity I can’t comment.

What is apparent is that this is tiptoeing very close to the abyss of self-reference and infinite loops. If the mind which gives rise to consciousness is the same as the consciousness itself then we can be aware of ourself in a proper way and this leads to an infinite regress of being aware of the thing which is aware of the thing … like the mirrors in my previous post on “my muse” (a metaphor not literal !!).

I abhor such things and think they don’t exist. That is the essence of the SRH that true-self-reference cannot exist the subject of the next post…