Now that the intent of this newsletter and direction has been fleshed out some, let’s get down to metaphysical foundations. But first a disclaimer. What is presented here is a Stable Model and my own Ontology. All models are an interpretation of what is happening and are subject to be refined under new experience, insight, and understanding. What makes this model stable is that its description is durable under repeated cross-reference with our own experience, and has Intersubjective Verifiability. But stability does not mean the model is free from bias. I will delve more into stable feedback loops of biased interpretation in a future article.
Consciousness Is Primary
Let’s break this down and ground it in our Direct Experience.
(1) There is an experience occurring.
This article is arising in your experience either through the visual sense domain (you are seeing it) or the auditory sense domain (you are hearing it) or through the touch domain (you are feeling it in braille).
(2) When sensation falls away, experiencing remains.
On the visual domain, close your eyes. The content of the visual domain goes away, but the visual domain itself remains. If you put your attention on the visual domain with your eyes closed, you can still see phenomena. Maybe there is a red tint because the light out in the world is bright and it is shining through your eye lids. Maybe you can see static and waves moving through the static. Slowly open your eyes and close your eyes a few times to really tune into what changes and what remains present despite the changing content of the visual field.
The same exercise can be done with the auditory domain. Turn off all the sources of noise. Get foam ear plugs and put them in, if you need to. No matter how much you cut out the external noise, the domain of auditory experience remains.
Bring together all the domains of sensation that contribute to your experience, and we can call that big-C Consciousness. The mind, our emotions, our psyche, spirit and soul, our various physical senses, they are all either content-of or regions-of-sensation within Consciousness.
Continuity Is Identity
For the most part there is continuity within our experience. Change happens, but from moment to moment the rate of change is small enough that we can preserve the sense of identity for most things. When you bite into an apple, one moment it is whole, you hear a crunch, then munching, you feel your mouth chewing, and visually you see an apple that looks the same as before but with a chunk missing. We say it is the same apple because there was continuity within our experience of the apple. The bulk of the apple experience remained the same while a small part of it changed.
What does discontinuity look like? If you are walking and don’t see the rock sticking out of the ground and you stub your foot on the rock, that creates a discontinuity. You were expecting your foot to move forward without resistance, but the resistance kicked your foot back unexpectedly. A more drastic discontinuity occurs when you are knocked unconscious without expecting it and you awaken at a later moment in time. What is happening in your next experience is very different from what you were expecting at the end of your previous experience.
Consciousness Is Continuous
We should all be familiar with the big-C Consciousness, it is fundamental to who we are. Much of the time, however, we are focused on specific content within our experience and not on the enduring presence of the experience itself. But what does it mean to say that Consciousness is Primary?
(3) It is impossible to experience the absence of experience.
Let’s explore the term unconscious a little bit. There are two related senses of the word we should look at. One sense is when we say we are unconscious of something, what we mean is that it was not present in the foreground of our experience. Our attention was not on it. For example I can be unconscious of the activity of picking my nose in public. If someone points it out to me and I review my memory, I can find that I was in fact doing it. The other sense of unconscious is the idea of the experience itself not being there. We can be knocked unconscious or we can be in dreamless sleep. Here, all the content of consciousness goes away and it feels AS IF Consciousness itself has popped out of existence.
This last sense of unconsciousness, the feeling as though Consciousness itself has popped out of existence, poses an interesting paradox. If Consciousness truly has ceased, what is left to know that it did cease? Was that ceasing itself also an experience within Consciousness? If so, then did Consciousness remain to have that experience? And if it did, what was it that popped out of existence? It’s a bit of a mystery and paradox, one that can only be investigated by watching the whole process happen as it is happening. Perhaps there is a clue in our discussion of discontinuity. Is it related to a sense of losing track of what to expect in the next moment and then that expectation popping back in as we wake up? Is the experience of the falling away of Consciousness simply a deactivation of Active Expectation? The truth of what is happening is found in the experience of the happening itself.
What is Primary?
Let’s dig into what Primary means in this context. The assertion “Consciousness is Primary” is part of an ongoing dialogue as to the fundamental nature of reality. Is the Physical Universe more fundamental and Consciousness is a by-product of the brain? Or is Consciousness more fundamental than the Physical Universe? Or are they intertwined the way electromagnetism is a marriage of electric and magnetic forces? Disposition on this matter is heavily influenced by people’s biases. And these biases are related to how we cope with the discontinuity we experience and believe in.
Let us look at the discontinuity of temporary unconsciousness (sleep) and the belief that a permanent unconsciousness (death) is possible.
When we awaken from sleep and sensory content returns to consciousness, we see that the world has changed without our direct experience of it. There is enough detail that overlaps between the world prior to sleep and post waking that we can use the expectation of a certain rate of change, for example one night of time passing, to bridge continuity between the different experiences. Our life experience with sleeping and waking normalizes us to expect certain things to change and other things to remain the same. The narrative of an external world existing and evolving independently of our experience is highly adaptive and creates a mental continuity to bridge the experiential discontinuity of content when entering a state of empty Consciousness.
While we have direct experience with sleep, the idea that we will die and enter into a permanent state of unconsciousness is just a belief. We have no direct experience of this, and we will never have direct experience of this. What we do have direct experience of is the following:
the state of our body contributes to the content we experience in our senses,
our body is going through an aging process just like we see with other bodies,
other bodies go through cycles of birth and death,
in the death of other bodies the vibrancy of character and quality of life we experienced while they were alive is absent.
We take this evidence and extrapolate the idea of a permanent state of all experience ceasing within our own Consciousness when our body dies. But this cannot be directly experienced. It is purely a belief that experiencing and Consciousness itself ends permanently.
Belief Is Secondary
We believe that we will die because we experience what we call the death of others. We believe others have a subjective experience and a Consciousness, just like ourselves. We believe their experience and their Consciousness has ended when their body dies. This belief that we will die has a significant impact on us while we are alive. But is it a true belief? (We will go more deeply into the idea of true belief in a following article.)
(4) All belief and conception happens within our conscious experience.
I’ve drawn a distinction between belief and experience a few times in this article. Can we have experience without belief about it? My answer is yes. Some might argue that experience requires belief. To this I return to the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Belief is in the domain of language and the raw experience is so rich in content that to describe it all and hold beliefs in mind about every aspect of it would be impossible. The domain of experience goes beyond what the mind can believe and conceive about it. Experience includes belief and can be present without belief. Beliefs on the other hand cannot be present or exist without the realm of experience.
When babes are born, they look upon the world without models, without language, without conception and without belief. All of this is learned and absorbed through life experience, accumulated over time as the mind develops. Language is learned, culture is learned, and the child learns to orient themselves with respect to the content of their experience. Before we learned of society, of science and mathematics, before we learned of religion and spirituality, we were conscious and having an experience unmitigated by belief and concept. Consciousness came first.
We learn about the physical world through associating language to direct experience. The names of things are learned by pointing to them in the experience and assigning symbols to represent them. The purpose of a dictionary isn’t to define words with other words, but to give enough description in the definition to evoke the image or memory of an experience that carries the meaning of the word being defined. We ground the meaning of language in our direct experience. Consciousness is more fundamental than concepts and belief.
Consciousness Is Primary.
How To Apply This Principle
This article so far has been a conceptual argument to move away from conception and return to a mode of feeling the phenomenology of consciousness and allow that to inform us and guide us as we navigate the world. Phenomenology… It is one of those high philosophical words that simply means to feel into how the structure of our experience is organized instead of thinking and reasoning about it.
Let us imagine we are attending a live orchestral performance from one of the world’s most revered orchestras. Yes, the intellectual understanding of the processes and skill needed for hundreds of people playing instruments in synch with each other can heighten the awe, wonder, and appreciation of the event in our experience. But it is the visceral experience of our ears, our bodies, our emotions, and our consciousness fully resonating with the performance that gives us its poignancy.
Consciousness is Primary, but we easily get distracted in our focus on reasoning about the symbols and categories. While we can have soil sensors and almanacs that inform us of how our plants and trees should fair during the seasons, there is also available to us the direct experience of the vitality of the plants and trees as they are growing. When you switch your attention from conceptual reasoning to feeling into the direct experience, everything comes alive. The richness and suchness of life occurring in the present moment is waiting for us to simply turn our attention to it.
When we allow the experience of life fully into our awareness and deeply feel into it, I call it Communing. If we view our consciousness as a house, everything we perceive within our consciousness is a guest in our house. Our conscious experience in every moment is an opportunity to ask: How do we want to relate to what is visiting us in the present moment? What kind of host shall we be? What and who do we allow ourselves to vulnerably commune with, sharing in the mutual exchange of essence at the core of our beings?
Communing is the gateway to our Soul.