Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness “is the most mysterious aspect of our lives”; philosophers “have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.”
I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.
The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour. (Richard Feynman’s remark about quantum theory — “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” — seems as true as ever.) Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff. This point, which is at first extremely startling, was well put by Bertrand Russell in the 1950s in his essay “Mind and Matter”: “We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events,” he wrote, “except when these are mental events that we directly experience.” In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff.
(--from, Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter, by Galen Strawson, In New York Times) http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html
It is the sound of morning. Birds at edge of mountain. Sleeping dog growling in dream. Unmoving stillness of this room first day after submitting grades and becoming free to read again unrestrained.
The very physicality of civil twilight floating over dooryard as squirrel thoughts wake toward newly filled seed feeders near yew bush.
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, one of the great Tibetan Dzogchen masters of the last century, spoke frequently of recognizing the nature of mind—its empty, aware nature, free of any clinging to anything—for short moments many times. This can become a framework for understanding our own practice of letting go of craving: short moments, many times. As we do this, we learn to recognize and increasingly trust this place of ease.
Although there are different methods, vocabularies, and even metaphysical descriptions for the nature of ultimate freedom among the various Buddhist traditions, there is one common understanding of what frees the mind: liberation through non-clinging. This phrase is found throughout the Pali discourses and also in many of the teachings of the great Tibetan lamas and Chinese and Japanese Zen masters.
Patrul Rinpoche, a 19th-century wandering Dzogchen master of eastern Tibet, was much beloved by the ordinary Tibetans and known as “the enlightened vagabond.” He had some useful words about nonclinging in a teaching called “Advice from Me to Myself”:
Listen up, old bad-karma Patrul,
You dweller-in-distraction.
For ages now you’ve been
Beguiled, entranced, and fooled by appearances.
Are you aware of that? Are you?
Right this very instant, when you’re
Under the spell of mistaken perception
You’ve got to watch out.
Don’t let yourself get carried away by this fake
and empty life.
Your mind is spinning around
About carrying out a lot of useless projects:
It’s a waste! Give it up!
Thinking about the hundred plans you want
to accomplish,
With never enough time to finish them,
Just weighs down your mind.
You’re completely distracted
By all these projects, which never come to an end,
But keep spreading out more, like ripples in water.
Don’t be a fool: for once, just sit tight. . . .
If you let go of everything—
Everything, everything—
That’s the real point!
(- from, The End of Suffering, by Joseph Goldstein)
Consciousness, I imagine, is love's fate. Not either/or, but cohesive undifferentiation. Love is fate; fate is love. No evil intent. No manipulative overseer. The human mind without storytelling, rather, as untold experience not yet gathered into grammatical boxes.
People wonder what Christ or Buddha is. They wonder who God or their parents might really be. We wonder how the next insight might completely change our understanding of the very existence of morning, chickadee, and squirrel.
Or why we feel invited, no, compelled, to prayer within, mystical cohesion, mere affirmation and gratefulness.
The mythic sensibility of material sunlight whispering possibilities of spiritual inseparability one with another.
Morning.
