Epilogue

Can there be consciousness without knowledge or knowledge without consciousness ?

Does not all knowledge involve self-knowledge and the positing and definition of a self-subject ? All knowing involves a knowing of the knowing process itself. 

What can be known ?  What should be known ? What is the highest knowledge and what is the highest knowledge about ? 

What is ignorance ? An ambiguous term. It can mean erroneous thought or lack of the right cognition regarding something. But it can also mean simply non-knowing, that is, a consciousness which is not in the act of knowing. The ordinary conscious act of knowing is a relation, a flowing out, an entanglement, a diremption, limitation or even corruption of consciousness - accompanied by a positing of a subject-self and the awareness of the knowing process itself (the reflection into self via negation of the positing). 

In another sense knowing is simply the state of any state of consciousness, a pure self-relatedness. Thus we have an absolute knowing which involves a  non-knowing in the common sense,  which is the fullness of the liberated mind that does not flow out relationally but has its self-positing in self-abrogation and self-reflection in its own freedom.

What is matter ? Does matter even make sense without change, field, force and energy ? The concept of matter has changed and is always incomplete and insufficient. 

Matter becomes more mathematical. Is not matter a regulative idea expressing the coherence, consistency and systemic integration of the universe, the procession of processes ? 

Matter is self-implicative. Later on in the second half of the 21st century we will learn as more about living matter as we did in the 20th century relative to the 19th.  In particular about the physics of the brain.

The highest knowledge is the effect of a self-referential, self-illuminating, self-enfolding (or self-unfolding) process of consciousness itself.

The knowledge of matter releases rather than reduces or limits.  Seeing the universe as and in the mind and the mind as and in the universe.  The right knowledge (detached, neutral) of the universe and the mind. 

One's scientific and philosophical work should be at one with one's process of mental cultivation and enlightenment.  Embrace science, engage with science scientifically. Science is process and method.

The world is a flow, the mind is a flow (Hume and Whitehead). Understand negation, negativity, essence and non-being. 

In life we can reach a state in which death has no foothold or meaning.

Intelligence, morality and social progress are one.  Arthur C. Clarke was not wrong, just about a century too early.

- know the structure and dynamics of the world to know the structure and dynamics of the mind

- time, transience, impermanence, constant self-negation and self-production, self-implication 

- returning to immediacy and beholding its compositeness. Immediacy is actually result, relativity (reflection),  mutual reference and dependence:  past and future, memory and expectation.

- supernova and field theory of karma - you reap what you sow, both for self and others. In the end your energy is released into the universe.  NDE are like dreams and reconstructed experience. Deeper activity still present.

But never forget - as is common-  about the possibility of direct action of consciousness on consciousness, of expunging, and not being a passive spectator only - it cannot obtain detachment and freedom without breaking the cage and traps. This is the meaning of activity in Hegel's logic of essence.

The subtle body (or first-person experience of the body known from the inside) is an oasis were we can find liberation from the past, from time, from memory, from an identity we are carved into. The body, the subtle body.

To avoid: the desire for external intimacy, which means dependence, weakness, ignorance.

A lower form of consciousness: that which seeks external contingent relational communion. 

No, strive for freedom beyond a self and identity which is imposed and which is no true self or identity.

A state in which a-thousand fold of all the fake allure once wanted is granted, a state which is an upward torrent with power and a future.

Make self-reflection,  the right transcendent distant awareness and overcoming of mind and body - and of the false self and ontology of hidden puppet-master time - the center of everything. 

True philosophy cannot be academic philosophy,  because it imposes and assumes an exterior false a priori standard and reification - a certain enculturation,   historization and socialization.  

This is what is so lacking in western philosophy, in Hume, the lack of the deep orientation and higher insight capable of leading to transfiguration and the growing of wings, to flight.  Western philosophy is often just a shell.

Language is part of the immediate data of consciousness.

Afferent vs. efferent nerves.    The mind an internal feedback,  a watermill,  thoughts function both as input and as output (an internal loop driven by the main current - reflected in neural anatomy).  A little like Barendregt's diagram.   Thus we can have afferents we do not want or want  afferents we don't have. We can be force to do efferents we do not want to do or want to do efferents we can't.  The watermill feedback structure is built through this continuous current, an eddy. The prison of the mind. 

Watchfulness must be centered on a turning inwards, not only looking on exterior spheres of common experience, but encroaching on and discovering and centering itself on previously hidden, inwards domains, the abode of forces that act behind the scenes, which wield great power if unseen, but weaken under the sunlight of clearly conscious watchfulness, turned inward, shining a steady light wherein they are caught, found out.  Ordinary consciousness is a kind of exteriorization and out-flow of itself, a self-nescience, self-passivity and self-marginalization.

Parallel to watchfulness progressively consolidating itself inwards we must also develop the practice of considering the total sphere of experience, of consciousness, as a whole, as an all-enveloping universe considered in its entirety, in a balanced way radiating, as it were, out from the innermost center, so that there is attained a perfect balance of the inner and the outer and the exterior sphere is re-integrated into the impassive unity of the center. 

Thought is a product, a proliferation, the leaves, the buds, the result of inner forces, energies, organizations and productions - all stemming from a central source and power station. Watchfulness and its sphere of power must regain the usurped throne, wherein sits the original producer, controller of all thought.  

But there is something very important missing. The theory of the self. In (modern) western philosophy it surfaces in various cryptic forms, as an abstract condition for knowledge, as part of free moral agency, a something that puzzled Hume. It  seems that only Hegel (following to a certain extent Fichte and Kant) and specially Schopenhauer (in his theory of the 'negation of the will' which is really about the positing- limitation and negation of the self,  its procession (fall) and reversion (liberation)   offered a more profound and through treatment (not found since Plotinus) of what we called 'the mystery of the self'.