Philosophemes on Consciousness

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 on its own freedom.

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

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.

Note 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.

The subtle body (or first-person experience of the body known from the inside) is an oasis were we can find a different mode of consciousness.

True philosophy cannot be academic philosophy, because it imposes and assumes an exterior 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 orientation and insight capable of leading to personal transformation. Western philosophy is often just a shell.

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 power if unseen, but weaken under the sunlight of clearly conscious watchfulness, turned inward, casting 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, considered in its entirety, in a balanced way radiating, as it were, out from the innermost center, so that there is attained a balance of the inner and the outer and the exterior sphere is re-integrated into the 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. Watchfulness and its sphere must regain the usurped throne, wherein sits the original producer, controller of all thought. 

If the self is an illusion, a fuzzy concept, a false concept - how can there be a theory of self ? Can there be a theory of illusions or of false, vague, fuzzy, ill-defined inconsistent, mutable concepts ? How does Hume explain - according to his theory - a fake impression which cannot be traced genetically to a complex of sense impressions or feelings ? Few modern western philosophers (for the ancients it is a different matter) have attempted a theory of illusion. Schopenhauer's theory of the negation of the will is noteworthy, a real attempt at a theory of the illusion of self (and finite individuality).

Logic is an attempt at the psychoanalysis of language. Language acts in different ways and at different levels on the mind, ways and levels beyond the most immediate abstract level.

There is so much more to be said about 'meaning' (beyond both surface representation and mere social dynamics). Wittgenstein took a wrong a theory of meaning and replaced it with an even worse one. The deeper levels of meaning and action are related to a kind of rhythm and music in language (both metaphorically and non-metaphorically). Hence the importance and irreplaceability of direct reading, hearing, recitation of certain kinds of texts.

There is a lot to be said about the heart and how it relates to spiritual development and in particular to consciousness, to the breath, to impression and illusion of 'self' , to Schopenhauer's negation of the will, to the irradiant contemplations, the little known significance of 'poverty', 'simplicity' and a certain spiritual act related to unification and anagogic intent, certainly found in Plotinus and of course in the Yoga and Vedanta.

It is not a question of replacing the false sophistry with a single true philosophy. Rather true philosophy must mean a collection of possible perspectives (darshanas) with an anagogic dimension - as well as powerful rebuttals of false philosophies. Thus different vectors can point at the same center, but there are also vectors which categorically do not point at this center. While there are false philosophies such as Wittgenstein, Ryle, Dennett, Parfit, Rorty and Brandom there are a plurality of truth-pointing perspectives.

Truth is relational: one formal system representing another divides sentences into provably true, provable false, neither provable or not provable but anagogic and self-referential (true in a higher plane) and neither provable nor not provable but not anagogic or self-referential. Two systems can be mutually inconsistent and yet metaconsistent in the sense of there being a canonical higher-level encompassing system which integrates them both at a higher level.

Know the texture, the symptoms of the mind, if the defilements are there. To inspect objectively, in an unfiltered way, the totality of one's consciousness, but to inspect diagnostically, reviewing the symptoms. Thus we must look, inspect, distantly, objectively, in a neutral way, but in order to interpret, diagnose, reveal symptoms.

Introspection must be total, all-encompassing, neutral, balanced and include the body-sensation (pressure, temperature), proprio-perception, the breath, feeling just as much as thought, the fields of sense-perception, inner speach, imagination etc. Find the center, progressively deeper layers, turn inwards. But also act, transfigure, integrate, calm, expunge the mind.

There are models of consciousness inspired by physics: consciousness a self-subsisting field spread out across space-time as well as beyond space-time. The body represents a kind of fragmentation and limitation of this field (a Faraday cage). Like a receiver and transmitter. The limited and trapped consciousness must energize and expand and regain its unity with the total field of consciousness. These kinds of models that objectify consciousness are problematic. Also not all merging of ordinary consciousness into another enveloping 'larger' consciousness is necessarily good (i.e. consider collectivism and cults) or represents a higher state of enlightenment and freedom. The contrary could well be the case. What is of interest is consciousness in and for itself, the consciousness of consciousness which is absolute and free. Consciousness by folding in on itself finds the secret to unfolding itself and thus attains freedom.

There can be no science or philosophy of consciousness yet (only that of the products or reflections that pass through consciousness, logical and linguistic and other artistic-semiotic artifacts) - because we to do not possess immediately any proper means or language to analyze it or to express things about it. The only thing that can be given is a practical guide to gradually develop the sight required to see and know what should be seen and known. Regarding consciousness, language is practical, methodological, never purely scientific or philosophical. That must come much later. Consciousness must transform itself first in order to become an object unto itself and to be able to talk about itself. Consciousness is not so much a given as that which may and should come to be.