Metamorphoses of the Spirit: Transfiguring our Thinking (Part II)

[Adur Alkain]

So, my point is not that we can experience nothingness, but that we can know it is there. We can know that nothingness or absolute emptiness is the ground and source of all experience, not by directly experiencing the nothingness, but by experiencing how our awareness dissolves into nothingness, and how it arises out of it.

I'm going to post a video below, where A. H. Almaas discusses this very point with Rupert Spira.

I do not agree with that. We can never experience the actual event of awareness "dissolving" into nothingness, because if we would experience such event, the awareness would still be there to experience it. Awareness can not experience the actual event of its own "dissolution". So there is no way to experientially prove that such state of "awareness dissolved into nothingness" actually exist. It is only your unprovable assumption/hypothesis/belief (religious or philosophical).

Philosophically your position can be classified as neutral monism, because you are claiming that the ontological ground of reality is "nothingness" where, in its "pure" form, there is yet no awareness, consciousness or existence, and the awareness and all forms and aspects of reality "emerge" from this nothingness. This is exactly neutral monism, which if fine, such ontology does exist and there are philosophers subscribed to it. One of the main problems of this ontology is the same "hard problem of consciousness" that materialism has to struggle with: how something fundamentally non-conscious (such as "nothingness" or "matter") can make conscious experience possible?

Eugene,

are you saying that you are always aware, even when you are in deep sleep? Have you never experienced the dissolution of your awareness (for example, under the influence of anaesthesia)? Like a gradual dimming of your consciousness, until everything "goes black"? I would think that everybody has had this experience. And sure, it is awareness that experiences its own dissolution. But then it's gone. I don't see this as any kind of assumption. It's just everyday common experience.

And by no means can you argue that my position is neutral monism. In my view, consciousness is more fundamental than matter. Matter is created by our perceptions. And I'm not even sure we can say that nothingness is more fundamental than awareness or consciousness. Only that, in our experience, these different dimensions appear in this order: discriminating consciousness is the most accessible, then comes pure undiscriminated awareness (only reachable in deep meditation or deep psychedelic states), and finally absolute nothingness (even harder to reach). But this doesn't necessarily mean that one dimension is more fundamental than the other. I don't see why there has to be a hierarchy among them.

A. H. Almaas describes five fundamental dimensions of reality or true nature: consciousness, awareness, nothingness, love and dynamism. All are equally fundamental, and experienced as such: as the ground of everything. (As you see, matter is not one of them.)

In any case, I see myself as an idealist.

[Eugene I]

Eugene,

are you saying that you are always aware, even when you are in deep sleep? Have you never experienced the dissolution of your awareness (for example, under the influence of anaesthesia)? Like a gradual dimming of your consciousness, until everything "goes black"? I would think that everybody has had this experience. And sure, it is awareness that experiences its own dissolution. But then it's gone. I don't see this as any kind of assumption. It's just everyday common experience.

And by no means can you argue that my position is neutral monism. In my view, consciousness is more fundamental than matter. Matter is created by our perceptions. And I'm not even sure we can say that nothingness is more fundamental than awareness or consciousness. Only that, in our experience, these different dimensions appear in this order: discriminating consciousness is the most accessible, then comes pure undiscriminated awareness (only reachable in deep meditation or deep psychedelic states), and finally absolute nothingness (even harder to reach). But this doesn't necessarily mean that one dimension is more fundamental than the other. I don't see why there has to be a hierarchy among them.

A. H. Almaas describes five fundamental dimensions of reality or true nature: consciousness, awareness, nothingness, love and dynamism. All are equally fundamental, and experienced as such: as the ground of everything. (As you see, matter is not one of them.)

In any case, I see myself as an idealist.

You can not know for certain if the awareness dissolves under anaesthesia. The fact that you have no memory of your deep sleep states or anaesthesia does not mean that there was no awareness, it simply means that they were not "recorded" in your memory. It is impossible to actually prove that there is no awareness in the deep sleep.

As I said earlier, I had an experience of a lucid deep dreamless sleep where there was literally nothingness with no discriminative consciousness or perception. I entered it from a lucid dream state. The dreams stopped, the discriminative consciousness and perception of any thoughts stopped, but I was able to remember that state when I woke up. After that I realized that the awareness in dreamless sleep actually does not stop, it's just that the state is erased from memory. We similarly have most of our dreams erased from memory.

But again philosophically speaking, if you believe that there exists a state of "pure nothingness" with no awareness (experiencing), then it is just not idealism anymore. Bernardo explained in his first dialogue with John Vervaeke how (in idealism) everything in the world are only experiences (acts of awareness of forms), even though many of those experiences happen in sub-consciousness and are not reported to cognitive levels of consciousness.

Check out this:

[Soul_of_Shu]

Adur ... A.H. is surely a fine teacher in many respects, but in the first exchange with Rupert you shared, on the specific point regarding his apparent knowing of the absence of awareness, I can find no resonance. As mentioned, in the old MS forum I've gone into some detail on a few occasions as to why this is the case, so I'm not inclined to get into it again here. I have also since watched the subsequent exchange a year later, and while Rupert's premise that awareness is never absent remains unchanged, A.H. in this instance doesn't challenge that premise, and indeed he seems to be in resonance with it. So I'll leave it at that, since that was my only point of contention with the original exchange, and felt much affinity otherwise.

[Adur Alkain]

Adur ... A.H. is surely a fine teacher in many respects, but in the first exchange with Rupert you shared, on the specific point regarding his apparent knowing of the absence of awareness, I can find no resonance. As mentioned, in the old MS forum I've gone into some detail on a few occasions as to why this is the case, so I'm not inclined to get into it again here. I have also since watched the subsequent exchange a year later, and while Rupert's premise that awareness is never absent remains unchanged, A.H. in this instance doesn't challenge that premise, and indeed he seems to be in resonance with it. So I'll leave it at that, since that was my only point of contention with the original exchange, and felt much affinity otherwise.

Sounds good to me. Thank you!

[Adur Alkain]

Adur,
We should distinguish the act of remembering things which summons up content within the soul, and the actual integrative process of memory which is the basis of the "I"-experience. Think of it in this way: there's something of your everyday self that was present in the empty state. It's true that there are no thoughts, images, remembrances, etc. in the empty state but there's still duration of experience. An essential part of the "I" is going through the experience and building up the memory organism (this buildup is duration). If that was not the case you would never be able to remember the experience or know that you have went through it. Actually we go through that experience every night in deep sleep but we're not conscious of it. That's why we have only dim memory that we have spent time in deep sleep. We don't remember the terror of the void but still we can tell that time has passed. This shows that there was at least small amount of consciousness present, enough to integrate the duration of the experience into memory. If we didn't have that, the moment we fall asleep (assuming no dreams) we would feel as if we immediately wake up as if no time has passed, even if we've been sleeping for days.

Cleric,

I feel the experience of absolute nothingness (which I've only reached in deep psychedelic states) is similar but not identical to that of deep sleep. Like I said in my reply to Eugene, it's not really an experience. I expressed myself inaccurately. When we encounter the absolute nothingness there is no experience. It's the cessation of all experience.

Following A.H. Almaas, I think it's possible to distinguish between pure awareness and discriminating consciousness. Awareness has to do with experiencing, consciousness has to do with knowing. So, when we know that we've been in deep sleep (or that we've reached the absolute nothingness at the core of existence), there is definitely a knowing, but not necessarily an experience or a memory of an experience. We just know. This direct knowing doesn't require any sort of meta-cognition. It doesn't require experience either.

I discussed this direct knowing with Bernardo, in the old "Metaphysical Speculations" forum. He doesn't agree, for him there is only awareness (or experience), which is fundamental, and meta-cognition, which isn't (it is the product of dissociated minds). According to Almaas, awareness-experience and consciousness-knowing are equally fundamental. I believe he is right, and I find this has many deep implications. My own version of idealism is quite different from Bernardo's for this very reason.

I found the rest of your post very interesting and intriguing, but there's nothing I can say about any of it at this point.

[Eugene I]

I feel the experience of absolute nothingness (which I've only reached in deep psychedelic states) is similar but not identical to that of deep sleep. Like I said in my reply to Eugene, it's not really an experience. I expressed myself inaccurately. When we encounter the absolute nothingness there is no experience. It's the cessation of all experience.

When you feel or experience nothingness, there is still feeling, knowledge (awareness) or some kind of experience of nothingness, no matter how subtle it may be. There is no way you can know, feel or experience the ultimate nothingness, because in such ultimate nothingness there would be no knowledge, feeling, experience or awareness. You can definitely asymptotically approach nothingness by reducing your level of feeling, thinking and perceptional activity, but that does not mean that the ultimate nothingness actually exists. Therefore, the existence of ultimate nothingness is unprovable, it is only your mind-made belief. It can be an unconscious mind-made belief, something your psyche wants to believe in, so that your unconscious manifests a "feeling" of that something it wants to believe in. The belief in the existence of nothingness is similar to the belief in the existence of matter - it is a belief in the existence of something that can never be directly experienced and experientially proven.

I discussed this direct knowing with Bernardo, in the old "Metaphysical Speculations" forum. He doesn't agree, for him there is only awareness (or experience), which is fundamental, and meta-cognition, which isn't (it is the product of dissociated minds). According to Almaas, awareness-experience and consciousness-knowing are equally fundamental. I believe he is right, and I find this has many deep implications. My own version of idealism is quite different from Bernardo's for this very reason.

If some property can appear and completely disappear, then (by philosophical definition) it is not fundamental, it is "emergent". For example, temperature is an emergent property, because in the vacuum there is no temperature whatsoever. If you claim that awareness can appear and disappear, then that means that awareness is an emergent property. Chalmers in his formulation of "hard problem of consciousness" pointed that awareness cannot be an emergent property, and any metaphysics claiming that awareness is an emergent property faces the "hard problem", which is unresolvable (as Chalmers proved). So, Almaas philosophy sounds very nice, but it is philosophically problematic and inconsistent.

[Adur Alkain]

You can not know for certain if the awareness dissolves under anaesthesia. The fact that you have no memory of your deep sleep states or anaesthesia does not mean that there was no awareness, it simply means that they were not "recorded" in your memory. It is impossible to actually prove that there is no awareness in the deep sleep.

As I said earlier, I had an experience of a lucid deep dreamless sleep where there was literally nothingness with no discriminative consciousness or perception. I entered it from a lucid dream state. The dreams stopped, the discriminative consciousness and perception of any thoughts stopped, but I was able to remember that state when I woke up. After that I realized that the awareness in dreamless sleep actually does not stop, it's just that the state is erased from memory. We similarly have most of our dreams erased from memory.

But again philosophically speaking, if you believe that there exists a state of "pure nothingness" with no awareness (experiencing), then it is just not idealism anymore. Bernardo explained in his first dialogue with John Vervaeke how (in idealism) everything in the world are only experiences (acts of awareness of forms), even though many of those experiences happen in sub-consciousness and are not reported to cognitive levels of consciousness.

Check out this:

Thanks for the video, Eugene! It doesn't really work for me, but it helps me see where the difference between Rupert's and Hameed's approaches lie. Rupert doesn't distinguish between experiencing and knowing. He ascribes many different dimensions and qualities (awareness, knowing, being, a sense of I, etc.) to one same ground. It's true that there is one and the same ground to all these dimensions, including nothingness. The difference is that Hameed makes subtle distinctions between those dimensions, and Rupert doesn't.

So, what Rupert usually calls "awareness", Hameed would call "true nature". Awareness is one of the fundamental dimensions of true nature, but true nature can manifest itself in the absence of awareness. As absolute nothingness, for example. It is a rare thing, but it is possible.

If I had been there with Rupert I would have had to answer "yes" to the question "Have you ever experienced a break in the continuity of knowing?" During psychedelic trips (my main source of this kind of unusual experiences) I have experienced a complete breakdown of knowing. I had sensations (colours, sounds, movement, etc.), but I didn't know what I was experiencing. I can now describe the experience as colours sounds, etc., but that is my knowing (my consciousness) looking back and making sense of that experience. At the moment, there was an absolute disorientation, and absence of knowing. I didn't know who I was, what was going on. I didn't remember that I was on mushrooms. I didn't remember I was a human being. There wasn't even a sense of an I. Only undiscriminated sensations. I didn't know they were sensations. They simply were there, in awareness.

Of course, you don't need to believe this experience is possible. Like Rupert said, trust your own experience. But even if I had never experienced that break in the continuity of knowing, I don't think I would be convinced by his conclusion. Even if I didn't remember experiencing a cessation of awareness, or a cessation of consciousness, that wouldn't force me to conclude that awareness and consciousness must be always there, even in deep sleep.

Actually, if you think about it, you will see that if we identify awareness (experiencing) and consciousness (knowing) as the same thing, like Rupert does, then there is no way of knowing if there is a state (deep sleep, nothingness,cessation, whatever we want to call it) of absence of that awareness-consciousness, or not. If we take that position, we need to remain agnostic.

The advantage of making that very subtle distinction between awareness (experiencing) and consciousness (knowing), like Hameed does, is that it enables us to understand how we can know that there is such a thing as a state of deep sleep, or a state of nothingness, of cessation of experience. We know there is deep sleep or nothingness not because we remain aware during deep sleep or nothingness, or because we make a logical deduction. We just know it. We know it directly.

Crucially, during the transition from awareness into nothingness, it is the knowing consciousness that recognizes: "Oh, this is my awareness dissolving". And when awareness arises again, the knowing consciousness says (knows): "This is my awareness rising anew from the depths of that infinite nothingness, the source of everything..." This is my experience.

You can suppose that awareness doesn't stop during deep sleep but memory of it is erased afterwards, like happens with dreams. It makes sense, and it sounds reasonable, but it is only a logical deduction, a hypothesis you are making. There is no way you can confirm that hypothesis. But like Rupert says in that video, "allow your questioning to take you on a journey until you reach real satisfaction in yourself". If that idea, that awareness never stops but memory of it gets erased sometimes, leaves you completely satisfied, then that's that!

I'm not so sure that Bernardo's version of idealism is the only one which deserves the name. Even Kant considered himself an idealist. In my view, the physical world exists only in consciousness. Most people would call that idealism. But I'm not particularly attached to the word ("ideas" don't play a fundamental role in my view), and would happily call it something else. Cosmopsychism, or whatever. I don't really care much about names.

[Eugene I]

If I had been there with Rupert I would have had to answer "yes" to the question "Have you ever experienced a break in the continuity of knowing?" During psychedelic trips (my main source of this kind of unusual experiences) I have experienced a complete breakdown of knowing. I had sensations (colours, sounds, movement, etc.), but I didn't know what I was experiencing. I can now describe the experience as colours sounds, etc., but that is my knowing (my consciousness) looking back and making sense of that experience. At the moment, there was an absolute disorientation, and absence of knowing. I didn't know who I was, what was going on. I didn't remember that I was on mushrooms. I didn't remember I was a human being. There wasn't even a sense of an I. Only undiscriminated sensations. I didn't know they were sensations. They simply were there, in awareness.

See, these misunderstandings are mostly terminological. That you call "knowing" is a discriminative knowing which "reports" what is experienced. What Rupert calls "knowing" (interchangeably with "awareness") is the fact of a "experienced" or "known" presence of something, or "witnessing" of something. Even though you didn't "know" anything at that psychedelic moment, the sounds, colors etc. were still "present" and "witnessed" in the space of your experience, but it was in a state of the halted discriminative knowing. This state was still "witnessed". As I said before, I went even further and had an experience of lucid dreamless sleep were that was nothin at all, no understanding, no images or perceptions, just blank and complete void, yet this state was still "witnessed" and because of that I was able to recall and analyze that state when I woke up. So, this "witnessing", even if it may happen in an absence of discriminative knowing, is what Rupert calls "awareness".

Now, the question is: if we claim that the "ultimate nothingness" exists, can the state of such nothingness be witnessed? If yes, then this is not the "ultimate" nothingness anymore, at best it can be called "void". Technically "the ultimate nothingness" is where there would be no witnessing either. So my claim is that the existence of such ultimate nothingness with no witnessing is impossible to prove, because to be able to prove it experientially, you would need to witness it, but witnessing it will automatically make it to be not the "ultimate" nothingness, but only "nothingness witnessed".

Actually, if you think about it, you will see that if we identify awareness (experiencing) and consciousness (knowing) as the same thing, like Rupert does

No, he actually does not (neither do I), I think you misunderstand his terminology. But I admit that it is indeed confusing. I think we need to use a special term for the "witnessing awareness". Buddhists call it "the nature of mind"

[Eugene I]

Crucially, during the transition from awareness into nothingness, it is the knowing consciousness that recognizes: "Oh, this is my awareness dissolving". And when awareness arises again, the knowing consciousness says (knows): "This is my awareness rising anew from the depths of that infinite nothingness, the source of everything..." This is my experience.

You can suppose that awareness doesn't stop during deep sleep but memory of it is erased afterwards, like happens with dreams. It makes sense, and it sounds reasonable, but it is only a logical deduction, a hypothesis you are making. There is no way you can confirm that hypothesis. But like Rupert says in that video, "allow your questioning to take you on a journey until you reach real satisfaction in yourself". If that idea, that awareness never stops but memory of it gets erased sometimes, leaves you completely satisfied, then that's that!

I agree that it is a deduction, as well as the assumption that awareness disappears during the deep sleep is also a deduction. They are both equally unprovable. My preference is still Rupert's version, and the reason for that is philosophical, which I mentioned in my previous post: once you assume that awareness can appear and disappear, you make an inference that the awareness is an emergent property, and you immediately face the irresolvable "hard problem of consciousness".

I'm not so sure that Bernardo's version of idealism is the only one which deserves the name. Even Kant considered himself an idealist. In my view, the physical world exists only in consciousness. Most people would call that idealism. But I'm not particularly attached to the word ("ideas" don't play a fundamental role in my view), and would happily call it something else. Cosmopsychism, or whatever. I don't really care much about names.

Oh, BK's version is definitely not the only one, there is so many more. I'm also vaguely "Cosmopsychist" but I still adhere to the "witnessing Awareness" ("the nature of mind") being fundamental to Consciousness, with possibly other fundamental aspects too, such as Will, Thinking etc.

[Adur Alkain]

I feel the experience of absolute nothingness (which I've only reached in deep psychedelic states) is similar but not identical to that of deep sleep. Like I said in my reply to Eugene, it's not really an experience. I expressed myself inaccurately. When we encounter the absolute nothingness there is no experience. It's the cessation of all experience.

When you feel or experience nothingness, there is still feeling, knowledge (awareness) or some kind of experience of nothingness, no matter how subtle it may be. There is no way you can know, feel or experience the ultimate nothingness, because in such ultimate nothingness there would be no knowledge, feeling, experience or awareness. You can definitely asymptotically approach nothingness by reducing your level of feeling, thinking and perceptional activity, but that does not mean that the ultimate nothingness actually exists. Therefore, the existence of ultimate nothingness is unprovable, it is only your mind-made belief. It can be an unconscious mind-made belief, something your psyche wants to believe in, so that your unconscious manifests a "feeling" of that something it wants to believe in. The belief in the existence of nothingness is similar to the belief in the existence of matter - it is a belief in the existence of something that can never be directly experienced and experientially proven.

I discussed this direct knowing with Bernardo, in the old "Metaphysical Speculations" forum. He doesn't agree, for him there is only awareness (or experience), which is fundamental, and meta-cognition, which isn't (it is the product of dissociated minds). According to Almaas, awareness-experience and consciousness-knowing are equally fundamental. I believe he is right, and I find this has many deep implications. My own version of idealism is quite different from Bernardo's for this very reason.

If some property can appear and completely disappear, then (by philosophical definition) it is not fundamental, it is "emergent". For example, temperature is an emergent property, because in the vacuum there is no temperature whatsoever. If you claim that awareness can appear and disappear, then that means that awareness is an emergent property. Chalmers in his formulation of "hard problem of consciousness" pointed that awareness cannot be an emergent property, and any metaphysics claiming that awareness is an emergent property faces the "hard problem", which is unresolvable (as Chalmers proved). So, Almaas philosophy sounds very nice, but it is philosophically problematic and inconsistent.

Hello again Eugene,
I posted my answer to your previous post right before I saw this.

I think I answered your first objection on my previous reply. It's funny, because I use a similar (or identical) argument, the one you use to say it's impossible to prove the existence of absolute nothingness, to say it's impossible to prove that awareness is always present and never ceases. So, using that same reasoning, you will have to admit that the belief in the continuity of awareness is similar to the belief in the existence of matter. Whether awareness is continuous or not, any break in that continuity cannot be experienced, by definition. So, it's a circular reasoning.

On the other hand, if you recognize that there is a knowing (consciousness) independent from experience (awareness), it is possible to directly know the existence of something (like absolute nothingness) that exists outside awareness. This is not a logical argument. It is a description of the actual act of knowing. I know there is absolute nothingness, the infinite void. You don't know it. That's fine. We won't change this situation by using logic.

Your second objection only makes sense from the perspective of the "limited mind" (like Rupert calls it). I mean, it only makes sense if you believe that time is fundamental. Only if you take time to be fundamental will you believe that something needs to be there at all points in time to be fundamental.
From the perspective of true nature (or from the perspective of M@L, if you prefer), time is irrelevant. Things may appear and disappear in time. It doesn't change their fundamental nature.

I never said that awareness is an emergent property. There is no emergence. Almaas calls these dimensions (awareness, conciousness, nothingness) the "boundless dimensions". They are eternal and infinite, unbounded by time and space. You can't say that one is prior or more fundamental than the others. Again, only for the limited mind is it necessary to think that one thing has to come before or after another thing. When we talk about the eternal now, there are no "befores" and "afters".

I understand that in some schools of Buddhism it is said that the universe is destroyed and created every single moment. All things are annihilated at every moment, and the next instant they arise again, out of nothing. I believe this is a different way of expressing the sense of nothingness as a fundamental, absolute dimension.

I love these conversations because they make me look deeper into these questions. Today I've been reflecting about Rupert's final remarks in that video you showed me, saying that since we've never experienced our own beginning, we can't assume that we ever began, and therefore we can conclude that we are eternal, and will never die. There is some truth in this, I'm sure, but I also think there is a "fear of the void" lurking underneath the apparently impeccable logic. I'm sure it must be comforting to think that there is no void, no death, and that awareness will go on forever, eternally. But I wonder if it really works. Does the belief that awareness is eternal and never ceases cure the fear of death? I imagine it helps, but I don't expect it to dissolve that fear completely. Because underneath that belief in eternal awareness the fear of nothingness, which is our deepest fear, remains.

I invite you to make this thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that awaraness can cease. That there can be total nothingness, total cessation. If that is possible even for an instant, it must be possible also for an eternity. I find this thought simply terrifying... So I was thinking about this, imagining the end of the universe and an eternity of nothingness, with no awareness, no consciousness, just an absolute void... (This is the bleak perspective most materialists have about the universe, by the way: the "death of the universe".) But then I realized the horror of that thought comes from adding the dimension of time to something that is fundamentally timeless, eternal. I realized that this Nothingness is not in the future, nor in the past. It is right here, in the eternal now. That's when I remembered that old Buddhist notion of the universe being annihilated and created anew at every instant. From this perspective, the Absolute Nothingness is no longer terrifying. It is our true home. It is what we are. Our true nature. In exactly the same way that awareness (and/or consciousness) is our home, our true nature, what we are.

This, for me, is the real cure for our fear of death: to embrace the Nothingness as our Mother (in ancient mythologies, this dimension is represented by the Dark Goddess, the Goddess of the Eternal Night, the Goddess of Chaos).

Anyway. I'm not sure any of this will make any sense to you. But for me it's very meaningful. Thank you for the "food for thought"!