Consciousness
Consciousness is an interesting thing. The only way to study it is through self reflection, meditation and awareness.
Stanislav Grof does interesting work on this subject.
There is no end to consciousness and no end goal.
Goals are things that can keep the experiencer engaged in the experience and are creations to add spice to reality and existence.
You can have any goal you want. It all is an experience.
See nature as a harmonic arrangement of particles - music in a cosmic symphony. The composer of that symphony is the eternal spirit - the observer, the traveler, the very spark of existence.
When we open our eyes and see the world, we don't see it directly, light is photons but what we experience is photons being converted to electrons, sent to our visual cortex(the back of our brain), millions of tiny individual signals get processed into one large cohesive picture which gets sent to the front of our brain where we perceive it.. just like all our sense.
When we open our eyes and see the world, we don't see it directly, light is photons but what we experience is photons being converted to electrons, sent to our visual cortex(the back of our brain), millions of tiny individual signals get processed into one large cohesive picture which gets sent to the front of our brain where we perceive it.. just like all our sense.
So our brain takes all these signals, which are just conversion/replications of what we assume is a real reality outside ourselves... and then it uses it to simulate the experience we have of reality... our brain has a model of what reality is suppose to be like and our sensory information fills that in on the fly. But we don't have to use sensory information, we can imagine sensory information and when we dream we can see and smell and touch just like in real life... but our brain is just making it up
I think we only perceive a limited amount of information that our brain processes, we experience only the "conscious" decision making part of our brain, we aren't privy to most of whats going on in our brain... except in rare cases like when we take psychedelic drugs... Its known that Shrooms/LSD cause parts of the brain that normally don't speak to one another to do so, information leaks out and is experienced by other parts of the brain that normally never happens.
So to me we live in a simulation our subconscious creates, normally we don't get to peak behind the curtain, but sometimes we get glimpses of other worlds and realities, entities... but to me it makes sense that these are aspects of the larger mind, the subconscious, that are normally separate.
Consciousness is unaffected by psychs. Your body/mind can be under the influence of all kinds of substances, yet consciousness simply sits back, unaltered, watching and experiencing.
Our sense of meaning is a subjective experience (like emotions or thoughts). There isn't anything (at least not that I have found) that is objectively meaningful. Even if your gut instinct is telling you that X is the most important thing there is, that's just a subjective experience.
Without hope, the human being simply ceases to function. And there is nothing that robs of us of hope quicker than the realization that one day everything will end. So I see religion/spirituality as being an adaptive mechanism to our development of self-awareness. We've become 'too aware' for our own good, so to speak, and as a result we've invented stories which ease that anxiety.
There are two ways of looking at things: from the outside, and from the inside. But these are two sides of the same coin.
Consciousness is simply the experience of being. It doesn't need to accompany an experience of identity, agency, memory, attention, or many other subsets of experience. Those are all just kinds of experiences. None of them are experience per se, ie. consciousness.
Consciousness is intrinsic and necessarily exists prior to or at least in perfect concert with the natural material world. There is no logically coherent philosophical defence of epiphenomenalism. I experience, therefore I am. The grounds for defending the existence of experience are far less shaky than the ground for defending the existence of an experienceless physical reality. Dualism grasps at further straws.
What it means to live a conscious life? - My thoughts on compassion and living a conscious life.
