Consciousness is all there is

[Ed Konderla]

I have basically scanned all of these comments and am left to ponder, "Are all of these words really necessary?" Do people that think like this actually go out armed with all of these words to face their day? Beat me up, I can take it. This isn't my first rodeo.

[Eugene I]

I have basically scanned all of these comments and am left to ponder, "Are all of these words really necessary?" Do people that think like this actually go out armed with all of these words to face their day? Beat me up, I can take it. This isn't my first rodeo.

The words are secondary, what matter is our perception and default interpretation of the world. Most of our troubles as humans stem from that. But the words can communicate a different perception and possibly induce a change of it in whoever is open to such change.

[Starbuck]

This is the actual experience ... there is only ever emptiness dancing ... a poetic metaphor for the 'activity' of consciousness ... aka 'ideation.'

Yes, there is such experience, no question about that. But what do we do then with an actual experience of "emptiness at rest and not dancing"? It disproves the claim that "there is only ever emptiness dancing". Not to say that "emptiness not dancing" is any "better" then "emptiness dancing" in any way, but just as a matter of fact... Emptiness can exist without dancing, but dancing can not exist without emptiness. Emptiness loves to dance and to experience it, and this is great! Yet, if emptiness forgets its empty nature and starts thinking that it is only dancing that ever exists, then it gets into a distorted perception of itself.

Would you say that 'emptiness not dancing' was the highest concentrated realisation of the Buddha during his pre-enlightment experiments? He could not 'stay' there because, as you say, emptiness loves to dance, and having not attained realisation, he could only return to a distorted perception AKA suffering? Without phenomena he could not note the 3 characteristics. That's my understanding.

[Cleric K]

Eugene, we need to synchronize the terminology. What you imply with 'consciousness creates ideas' makes sense if we replace the word 'ideas' with 'thoughts'. Ideas, in their deep spiritual sense, are not 'things' that consciousness creates and snatches within itself as some objects. This is what you imply with your example of empty consciousness - that ideas appear within consciousness and that's why they are secondary. But this doesn't correspond to what is called 'idea' in the deep sense. What is being created in the empty consciousness are thoughts that reflect ideas. We never perceive the idea itself as some object. We only perceive the perceptions (thought-forms or otherwise) which incarnate and partially reflect the idea. The idea is the meaningful essence of consciousness. It's not something that we can separate in any way from consciousness. This essence exists even in empty consciousness. In that mystical state we have a single all encompassing perception, as large as the universe - the emptiness - and a single idea which is the essential (ideal) meaning of the experience - also as large as the universe. Then if we think about that experience, we condense a thought-form that partially reflects this universal idea as a concept. The latter is what you consider to be the created idea and this is why misunderstanding arises. You simply need to broaden your understanding of what the term 'idea' points to. There's actually nothing difficult in this, assuming you already have no problem to use the concept of 'consciousness' to point at that primordial state. In my opinion you would resist to do that only if you insist to keep thinking as separate as possible from the empty state. In other words: both the empty and the intellectual state experience ideal content (meaning) but you insist that the meaning that is experienced in the empty state is of a different nature than the ideas we can think of with thought-forms (which admittedly incarnate the vastness of the idea only in a limited way). I'm not saying that singular thoughts grasp the totality of ideas but insisting that in the empty state we are dealing with some completely different category of meaning (of different 'substance' than the ideas which thinking grasps) is completely unjustified. It creates artificially an unreconcilable precipice between the ideal content of the mystical state and the ideal content which thoughts can reflect. If the ideal content were of such an orthogonal character how would it be possible to think about the mystical state? The latter would exist in a completely inaccessible world from the perspective of thinking.

[Eugene I]

Cleric, the "broadening" you are suggesting leads to clear Platonism that I do not accept as a truth (although I'm still open to it as a possibility). You are saying that an idea "itself" is never being fully perceived/experienced by conscious experience (of thinking), but we only experience thoughts as reflections of it. This simply means that there are such aspects of consciousness - ideas - that can not be directly and fully experienced by consciousness as they are. In a way, it is just another Kantian divide, because now the "ideas" become "things in itself" that can never be experienced as they are, but only reflected by our experiences of thinking. With all my respect to Plato I do not subscribe to such view. In "my" anti-Platonic view it is thinking (as an innate ability of consciousness to manipulate meanings) that actually creates ideas. We can think of these ideas as pure potentialities prior to the events of them being conceived by thoughts, but they never actually come into existence until they are created and experienced by thinking. And experiencing of these ideas by thinking is all there is to these ideas, there are no more "aspects" to these ideas that are not accessible by thinking. Yet, the ideas do exist as collective and shared meanings, whether in the collective unconscious, or shared among multiple individual minds, and that is why we often have an impression that we "reach to them", "discover" them or "access" them instead of just "thinking them out" or "inventing" them.

[Ratatoskr]

Body maintains consistency without neither awareness nor consciousness being present during dreamless sleep. It still might be argued that it's "all in the mind" but neither awareness nor consciousness (no experience) is necessary for such ideation (of body) to occur.

[Eugene I]

Body maintains consistency without neither awareness nor consciousness being present during dreamless sleep. It still might be argued that it's "all in the mind" but neither awareness nor consciousness (no experience) is necessary for such ideation (of body) to occur.

- Ideations of the body are created by the MAL and not require our individual awareness to experience them. But they are actualized as our experiences of the body when our individual awareness is actively perceiving such ideations (through the Markov's blanket).
- How do you know that the awareness is absent in a dreamless sleep? To prove to yourself that the state of the absence of awareness exists, you need to actually experience the absence of awareness, which is obviously impossible. Therefore, the idea that the awareness can ever be absent is a non-provable hypothesis. I actually experienced the lucid dreamless sleep where there was literally nothing at all, but the awareness was still present.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Yes, there is such experience, no question about that. But what do we do then with an actual experience of "emptiness at rest and not dancing"? It disproves the claim that "there is only ever emptiness dancing". Not to say that "emptiness not dancing" is any "better" then "emptiness dancing" in any way, but just as a matter of fact... Emptiness can exist without dancing, but dancing can not exist without emptiness.

Chuck out the Heart Sutra then?

[Ratatoskr]

- Ideations of the body are created by the MAL and not require our individual awareness to experience them. But they are actualized as our experiences of the body when our individual awareness is actively perceiving such ideations (through the Markov's blanket).
- How do you know that the awareness is absent in a dreamless sleep? To prove to yourself that the state of the absence of awareness exists, you need to actually experience the absence of awareness, which is obviously impossible. Therefore, the idea that the awareness can ever be absent is a non-provable hypothesis. I actually experienced the lucid dreamless sleep where there was literally nothing at all, but the awareness was still present.

Ideations emerge in the MAL, I agree. However, I don't see any evidence for Awareness being necessary for Ideations to emerge. The only necessity of Awareness is for the generation of Experience.

How do I prove the absence of Awareness ? I think that the question should be how do you prove the presence of the MAL's Awareness during dreamless sleep ? The most logical conclusion is that MAL doesn't need Consciousness to generate Ideations and that Consciousness is necessary only for the generation of Experience.

[Eugene I]

Chuck out the Heart Sutra then?

The Heart Sutra, by the way, is not a Buddhist Gospel, it was only composed in about 7-th century in China and then spread and became popular. Literally interpreting "conscious is no other than forms" actually contradicts the original Buddha's teaching and practices in the Pali Canon of the meditative experience of formless states (called jhanas, as a practical way to experience and discover consciousness absent of any forms). At that time the Pali Canon and the original teachings and practices of the early Buddhist schools were unknown to young Chinese Buddhism (the Theravadian tradition preserving the original Buddha's teachings never spread to China). IMO the Heart Sutra is a weak and a bit confusing poetic exposition of emptiness, and the original "Phena Sutta" taught by Buddha himself is much better and clearer one. Buddhism by the way is a conglomerate of schools that often contradict each other (just like in any other spiritual tradition), there is no such thing as "consistent Buddhism teaching" (other than the original Buddha's teaching written in the Pali Canon).