Inquiry, I’m rather exasperated that it needs to be pointed out to you that the brains of ordinary human beings are remarkably similar. Unless there is some particular form of damage, smelling, tasting, seeing, touching and hearing are similar to all human brains.
I feel you have made ‘conditioning’ into an ideological straitjacket, a belief system, a tenet of your worldview, and seek to interpret everything through its lens.
However, although K talked about the power of conditioning and the prevalence of thought, he also talked about the fundamental importance of awareness and attention. You seem to deny this or dismiss this, justifying your close-mindedness with the mantra that we are all conditioned.
If I might point out, this thread is concerned with the topic of awareness.
Not very much Douglas. I can follow you when you say we are “naturally aware”, and “awareness occurs naturally”, but after that I don’t know what you are trying to say.
I’m not talking about - and this thread is not inquiring into - “wisdom/transformation/learning/freedom”. The topic is awareness.
Surely as someone who has been influenced by Zen Buddhism you have some kind of interest in this topic? Obviously there is a great diversity of teaching in Chan and Zen, but from the little I know about it the importance of awareness and attention is clearly emphasised.
I do indeed. I am trying to engage with the topic, and your no-nonsense guidelines, as best I can.
(and failing miserably it seems - I’ll just follow along for the moment)
Another aspect of awareness that hasn’t yet been explicitly touched on (as far as I recall) is that it takes place in, or is in fact synonymous with, the present moment.
That is, there is no awareness outside the present moment - it exists neither in the past or the future, but only in what is taking place this second.
One might ask, as a thought experiment, can awareness can be found outside of the present moment? But I don’t think it can.
It is at that moment, the next meeting with the person, that ‘intelligence’ may or may not kick in. If it does, the suffering inherent in the cycle reveals itself, and appropriate action may happen, i.e. letting the memory and the reaction to it simply rise and fall, come and go. If it doesn’t, the cycle repeats blindly.
So, just to catch up on where we are (or where I am) on this topic of awareness.
So far we have touched on, without necessarily going into great detail, some of the following aspects:
Awareness as ‘bare attention’: this being the simple, choiceless noticing of objects, thoughts, feelings and sensations; and that all perceptual experience arises in attentional space.
Awareness as taking place in the present moment: meaning that all awareness is present moment awareness. There is no future or past awareness.
Awareness as non-conceptual: it can be aware of concepts, but is not itself made of concepts. It is the space in which concepts (or thoughts) arise.
Awareness as vital, salient, living: that is it has a ‘feeling tone’, a quality of presence, of being ’something it is like’ to be what it is.
A couple of further aspects I’m interested in looking at:
Awareness as a perpetual flow of immediate experience: the content of awareness is continual change, a flowing movement.
And what is the relationship of awareness to space? Is there a definite boundary edge to awareness?
Is it possible that the space of awareness (or attention) has no boundary at all (aside from what we create through our thinking and identification with thought)?
Makes sense. Is experience ‘the content of’ awareness? Can awareness be said to have content, or is it simply the phenomenological space in which experience happens?
There are a million things that happen in front of you every day, only some of them leave a mark, why? You might be absorbed into an experience and are unaware, so that absorption leaves a mark. Like two people who are angry and loud. They are unaware of anything else at that moment. They are absorbed in that experience and this absorption which is verbal leaves a mark. Awareness however does not leave any mark so it is difficult to talk about it later but in the moment itself if there is awareness you can talk about it directly
Although we say that moments seem to flow - sometimes we seem to get stuck in particular subjective/mind moments - we get stuck in some experience - when maybe the world has continued to flow?
If we take the phrase ‘phenomenological space’ to be synonymous with the ‘field of awareness’ or ‘attentional space’, then we can say that experience arises, happens, in that space.
I don’t know what distinction you are wanting to make between that space “having content”, and experience arising or happening “in” that space?
Doesn’t this boil down to how we use these particular words?
For sure, there can be experiences of which we are not ‘consciously’ aware. But I do not take awareness to be limited to ‘conscious’ awareness. As you say, there are also unconscious or covert forms of awareness.
But I think one can reasonably say that sans awareness of any kind (whether conscious, peripheral or covert) the word “experience” has no meaning.
Are we asking whether its possible for the 1st person center to be absent? - whether awareness is somehow separate from me - outside subject and object?
Yes. K sometimes used the word ‘experiencing’ to mean this continual moment by moment flow; and distinguished this from ‘experience’, which is the congealing or breaking up of that flow.
Maybe it is more accurate to say that the present moment is itself a continual flow.