What is Enlightenment?

 Update to the on going process.

Gaining more respect for Daniel Dennett altho cannot comment on all the details of Consciousness Explained as I read it along time ago and only once. The title is completely misleading for my purposes as "explaining" is not the currency of human existence. "Explaining" would actually just be one of the narratives of a decentralised brain, and who cares for that.

However his attack on the Cartesian Theatre is spot on from an Enlightenment perspective.

The problem with Unenlightened existence is that it seems like the whole world is unfolding for some being. That is the essence of ignorance and unenlightenment.

By contrast Enlightened existence is just the unfolding of the world.

It's been observed in this blog that there are problems everywhere with the Unenlightened view. One of the most striking is the belief that the world exists as it appears and then we experience it. This is particular apparent in the unenlightened experience of sight.

Consider how the unenlightened, looking into the night sky, see the star Alpha-Centauri in the constellation of Centaurus. After a bit of schooling and thinking about light travelling in straight lines and eyes being sensitive to light and light-years etc, they conclude that light is produced by the star then travel for 4 years across space to their eyes on Earth and then they see it. So this is factually correct but how do we overlay this story with what we see in the night sky? Well the problem is that the star we see in the night sky is after the light has travelled across space. What we are looking at is the star as it appeared 4 years ago. But to understand exactly how we are unenlightened, we need to realise that what we see in the night sky is the result of having already seen it. We know that before we see something it is "invisible." So anything "visible" has already been seen. The light has already entered out eyes. So standing under the heavens looking at a star "far away" the light to make that out, must have already entered our eyes. So it is wrong to think of light leaving that far away star and entering our eyes. That apparently "far away" star over there twinkling in the sky has actually already been seen, and the light has already entered our eyes over here. There is nothing left to do, no more light needs to travel and no more seeing is needed. Its all done right now in the Present.

So we can pick up Daniel Dennett again and see that the whole "time" of consciousness is messed up. What we think is a sequence of events has actually already happened. This throws us immediately into appreciating "Present Moment." Looking at the star in the heavens, that twinkling point of brilliant light, there is no before and after there is just the experience of twinkling star. This is the starting point. Time starts with this experience and flows back and forward. We can start thinking about this experience to "explain" it in Dennett terms, and we will understand that the light actually set off 4 years ago, so we trace back in time. And we can imagine standing on the star and seeing the light heading off towards Earth to make contact with us in 4 years time looking forward into the future. But all the rewinding the tape, and fast forwarding is not "real" its narratives built around the experience of the twinkling light in the sky.

If we think time is real, then we can start applying "time" to the processes at work as we think about 4 years of light travel. We can't see that, we can only thinking about it, and we can watch those thoughts happening. They take time themselves. we can't step outside the process and occupy a timeless spot from which to measure time. It's always relative, and we start getting into Einstein. Where Big Bang is wrong is there is no Time Zero. It's odd that it's taken until the 21st Century and the James Webb Telescope for Physics to start to accept this. One thing people may not appreciate is that in Big Bang theory everywhere is Space Zero. The universe started at the end of your finger and also at the distant stars. Its inflationary so at one time all places were the same... at least in Big Bag Theory. But what we are appreciating (very) slowly is this was not Time Zero. There is no Absolute anything and so no start from which to measure. The only Absolute is Present, everything comes from this. This is why we say the universe is 13.7 billion years old, we are looking backwards from the Present! Present is the Zero.

Anyway back to Enlightenment. As we gradually expand our appreciation of what is Present we eventually start to realise that everything is just Present and there is nothing else. Nothing hiding in the Past, nothing hiding in the Future, and most definitely nothing hiding in the Present. That should feel quite destabilising if you understand it. There is no where to hide yourself, because there is no yourself to hide.

Back to Dennett. The world is not happening "for you." It is just happening. "You" have already seen and thought everything that is Present. "You" is already done in the process, so you can discard "yourself" and just take the Present.

Now I made a bad mistake as a teenager over this. The obvious next step is to think that the "self" must therefore be "outside" the world. Perhaps like the Computer that is doing a simulation of the world. You hear people talking about the brain as though somehow the "world simulation" was inside it. I used to point into the sky when asked where I was. At least I realised that what I "thought" was me, this "body", "sensations" and "thoughts" was just the manifestation of a self that has already happened. But I was still looking to put it some place else other than Now.

But I was a baby trying to run before I could crawl. You cannot think or manifest your way out of the box. When you are holding onto a deep idea of a solid self it will follow you everywhere even into deep realisation about the world. Many people's mundane experience of God is tainted by carrying themselves into the Holy Space. Jews have one thing right: God is fearful. You do not dare have the temerity to even think about taking yourself into the company of God. You are not worthy! I had the arrogance to take myself into deep realisation about the world. You can go nowhere if you use yourself as the vehicle. God will laugh at your vanity! The Greeks were right about this. Hubris and disaster awaits anyone who wishes to profit from or claim any Divine gifts for themself.

Many Buddhists would probably frown at my mashing up of Theology with Buddhism but once we see it ALL as just narrative it does not matter. Expedient means!

So there is no "time" in Reality. Everything is NOW. Not even a split second ago, or in the future. NOW and NOW only. If you "think" its not, then you are not Present and have drifted into thinking "about" something. Thinking is always done NOW, but within thoughts we can be anytime. This is why we must tell stories of the Past. A story is told Today, and the Past can only exist in stories and thoughts. If you ever think anything is not right NOW then it must be inside a story.

So the Enlightened let go of anything that is not RIGHT NOW. There is no place or time in Reality for anything else. Everything is already completely filled by the Present. They do no believe or hold on to anything "Hidden".

If we bring our attention to our unenlightened experience we should be able to discern at some level a whole realm that is more of less cordoned off in which "we" live. It is really unclear where it is. Pretty sure a large chunk of it is "behind" us where we cannot see. That seems like a nice hidden area. And then some bits in the Past and the Future where are memories and dreams are stored. Its a really messy realm with leaves or desert sands being blown around so we can't quite pin it down. Perhaps today we are overwhelmed with hope and expectations of the future, perhaps on another day the wind blows the sands and uncovered deep emotional memories of the Past that were "hidden" yesterday and are now revealed. Into all this we imagine roughly we must be hidden somewhere. There's a mouse in the room, not quite sure where but I'm sure it in here somewhere. (Interestingly and need look up but there are strong connections in Sanskrit between the words for mouse, thief and mouse stopper, and enlightened. So having a mouse like self scurrying around in our minds is like having a thief around who steals our Present).   

But the Enlightened sees this shifting sands and swirling around NOW. We must wait for what is revealed, and we must wait for it to be hidden again. We are not in the sands, and we are not revealed or hidden. The revealing and the hiding has already happened like the star being seen in the sky. There is no time or room for us to sneak into these things. They hit us before we even knew they were coming. How can we now get inside them if we are not already there? That is always "after production" work we try to back date things to try and sneak our self into the narrative. "Oh that person getting the birthday cake was me." But we need think cos obviously we are not that person as we are NOW and the person in the memory is not NOW. Its all after post-production work we do, but we do all of it NOW.

In summary the Enlightened do not waste time trying to get "into" every story about the Past or hope for the Future. They just accept what is PRESENT and don't waste a second looking for hidden things they believe are there, like themself. NOW is what is is. End of.

It is not that Enlightened suddenly do not think, or have feeling, or memories or anything. They do all this. But they don't waste time trying to squeeze them self into it all in post production. They are already in it by being PRESENT! After all the star and the world has already been seen, what is left for me to do? Always Nothing, so why bother?

===

Addendum to above.

So we appear to have a conflict. The above argues that there is no time to experience. It has already happened in order to manifest. You can't see or sense things before you have seen or sensed them. So when we see a distant object, actually we have already seen it, and the idea it is "distant" is added as part of the processing.

I should add here this makes some think consciousness seem like an "epiphenomenon." If all the processing has already happened before we see it then what is the point of consciousness. But this idea stems from Cartesian Theatre. If we think "I" am sitting at the heart of the process and my brain is processing everything in order to give "me" a final report or consciousness of events then indeed we might ask why do I need to know? But once we realise that even the idea of "handing the report to myself" is itself already processed, that itself is part of the film then we realise that seeing is just seeing and consciousness is just consciousness. It is not "for" anyone, it is just itself. The process of seeing looks like having a world around us; That IS seeing. No one inside that world to see it again.

So there is no time inside experience, it is happening NOW.

Yet Daniel Dennett spends a fair amount of time in the book explaining that in the lab the brain does not have a central time. There is no "final" point of processing. It is an asynchronous system like a modern computer with interrupts and delayed processing all happening concurrently. Study subjects when asked to press buttons and speak when they think things are happening may well send electrical signal to the fingers before any brain processing associated with speech lights up. This makes sense as the nerves to the finger muscles are a long way away and take time, so we have evolved to send those our first. But it means what the brain is doing does not correlate with our experience. What we think of as one conscious event is associated with multiple events occurring at different times.

This is seen most extremely in patients who have had their corpus callosum cut, as was done to stop certain types of epilepsy. This separates the left and right parts of the brain. This now means there are two distinct people and consciousnesses. The left hemisphere handles right vision, left hearing, left body movements and speech, and the right hemisphere handles the other sides. So it means you can ask a patient to respond to things and determine which part of the brain is communicating. There really are two people unaware of each other.

This rather suggests with a connected Corpus Callosum there are still "two people" but they are intercommunicating. It makes it impossible to hold the idea that there is no one "person" centralised in the brain. Dennett explains this centralised "person" as a "virtual machine" being simulated on the parallel system of the brain.

This is all great stuff. So where is Present Moment? Does this not look like the "centralised person" and synchronous brain? No. "Present Moment" is not a tick of a clock. It does not suggest that everything is concurrent in a physical time. It simply means that what is, is what is. The emergence of things is what they are. It is supposed to shift attention from external measures like physical time and linguistic categories of  thoughts and words towards the phenomena themselves. They do the talking, and only them. It may indeed be that the emergence of awareness of a sound comes after we send signals to our fingers to press a button, but this does not matter. The mind is a complex place, no one says otherwise. All we need to do is allow it be what it is. That is all Present Moment is. When a sound emerges we just let it emerge. That emergence IS Present Moment. whether the guy in the lab tell us afterwards that this was a very complex bit pf processing that took so many milliseconds to happen after the actual sound does not matter. The point is just the emergence of what emerges. The rest is just thoughts that will emerge later on.