For anyone, having a personal appreciation of their own experience of consciousness seems important, and perhaps it can be a very simple thing. I will take my best shot at it here.
There are some possibly unnecessary but useful distinctions that we can make for the purpose of describing consciousness. Once we see through the potentials, limitations and consequences that we believe to exist, then the distinctions become transparent. There are a few words that I will use to discuss consciousness; others could be used instead, or as well, but these are common.
The words I will use, including the ones already used to get this far are: Phenomena, Perception and Consciousness. Each of them has particular “meanings” that are significant to their use here. A brief glossary follows:
Phenomena: Anything and everything we may refer to as a part of our experience, all the way up to those things we may completely make up or imagine.
Perception: The processes of the human entity (biological, and any other processes that may exist) that result in the recognition or experience of Phenomena.
Consciousness: The word itself provokes endless speculation and misunderstanding that I will not likely resolve by anything I have to say about it. But it is, at the very least, “the experience of experiencing.” We know consciousness by being conscious.
Freedom from hopes and fears
When we try to say something about consciousness by using the various symbolic systems (language, logic and mathematics), there is a sort of circularity or infinite regress that develops and cannot be escaped.
We are able to know the difference between being conscious and being unconscious due to our remembered experiences of waking up from deep, dreamless sleep, and having no recollection of any cognitive activity—except for that which we remember as a prior experience, contrasted with the present period of wakefulness.
So, we can say from this perspective that there are “Phenomena,” there is “Perception” of Phenomena and we call this process “Consciousness.” These processes, when happening, seem to happen simultaneously and synchronously. As soon as consciousness becomes conscious, it must become conscious of something; thus, it is the necessary basis of our dualistic experience of our world of phenomena, the self and the other.
The benefit of seeing consciousness in this simple way is that it allows for a workable perspective on consciousness without metaphysical speculation, which can be endless.
When we rest in consciousness, without the speculative interpretation, there is a clarity of being that allows us to respond to our experience, rather than react to it. It does not eliminate the difficulty of being human, but reveals a freedom from its hopes and fears, as well as the ability to live as a beneficiary of life, rather than being a victim of it or needing to be a master of it.
«RELATED READ» MIND AND CONSCIOUSNESS: Understanding the mind triangle created by the conscious, subconscious and superconscious mind»
image 1 Pixabay
