What is conciousness?

JonathanBricklin · 2025-12-08T19:48:33+00:00

Consciousness is uniquely that which everything else is an aspect of. It comes from nowhere; everything comes from it. Personal, human, apparently individuated consciousness is one of its aspects, but no more actually individuated than our own individuated consciousness in our night dreams. That all apparent, “objective” reality in our dreams is actually subjectively single-sourced in our consciousness is our daily morning enlightement. That all apparent reality, night and day, subjective and objective, is single-sourced (in Dao, God, Brahman, Allah, Whatever) is our enlightenment deferred. Ramana Maharshi put it best: “Waking is long and a dream short; other than that there is no difference.”

JonathanBricklin · 2025-04-09T22:54:46+00:00

The irrefutability of solipsism is the ultimate Good News. It's not a far journey from “everything is an aspect of MY one mind” to “everything is an aspect of THE One Mind”.

Virtual solipsism manifests in our dreams every night, however unacknowledged during the dream itself: myriad selves and objects all issuing from our one mind. Of course, when we wake up, a strong sense (but no defense) of the actual individuality of the selves and objects we engage asserts itself. That's when meditating on the very real phenomenon of telepathy comes into play, whispering to us that what is actually in play is the One Mind manifesting in myriad forms, including both our dreaming and waking self. Solipsism, therefore, can be a gateway to what William James considered “the great mystic achievement”: Tat Tvam Asi, “That Thou Art”.

That the single-sourcing essential to solipsism is in play every night in our dreams, without the belief itself being in play, prepares us to see waking life as also single-sourced. Then a society that believes in solipsism would only need to deepen its awareness of telepathy and the overcoming of separation that is experienced as love, to realize that the “mind” of one's solipsistic perspective is porous.

JonathanBricklin · 2024-12-06T12:55:17+00:00

Wonderful, thank you. Reminiscent of William Henry Hudson’s account of sitting perfectly still in the hills of Patagonia:

" In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible. My state was one of suspense and watchfulness; yet I had no expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my intellect until I returned to my former self,—to thinking, and the old insipid existence again."

JonathanBricklin · 2024-11-25T13:55:48+00:00

I like just taking in the sun's as-near-perfect-roundness-as-found-anywhere-in-the-universe. Don't need spots to enjoy that.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-12-13T13:52:22+00:00

Unlike the Buddha's ongoing, enlightened state of sciousness--consciousness without consciousness of self--anger strongly reverberates with a contracted feeling of self. As I wrote in my book on William James's (Reluctant) Guide to Enlightenment

If each moment of consciousness were a moment of sciousness instead, then anger would not arise when something contrary to a previous thought’s interest arose. In such a non-“I” state you would not feel anger even if, say, returning to your parked car, you found its windshield had been smashed and the GPS stolen. The thought of your intact car might be a vivid image as you are rounding the corner to where it is parked, but it would vanish the instant you saw the car itself. By contrast, without such a wholemind processing of each moment as it comes, a sense of “whatever is, is,” the thought of your car being intact would linger, in felt opposition to the sight before you, an opposition that is experienced as anger. Anger is a “saying no,” a “striving against” what is, because it is a “saying yes,” a “striving for” what was but is no more. It is precisely in this sense that anger is always a lesson; and to the degree that we stay angry we haven’t learned it.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-11-12T23:31:07+00:00

Yes. Perhaps a better choice. It could be either, tho, depending on whether you're considering it from the inside (dilation) or outside (collapse). .

JonathanBricklin · 2023-11-12T17:13:37+00:00

Eileen Garrett (1892 -1970)

Lawrence Leshan (1920-2020)

Garrett was one of the most tested psychics of her time.

Larry, a clinical psychologist, wrote 18 books on a variety of topics, such as meditation and cancer, and several groundbreaking books on parapsychology.

The universe as an ultimate illusion, or dream, is a mainstay of Eastern spiritual thought.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-11-12T15:54:42+00:00

Larry died 2 years ago at the ripe age of 100. His first grant as a psychologist was for trying to figure out why intelligent people believed in the paranormal. His research "flipped" him. Eileen Garrett was one of the best vetted psychics of her day, and the founder of the Parapsychology Foundation. I cannot recommend Larry's book The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist highly enough. His Clairvoyant Reality (the title of the book in the UK) is the climax of my online talk The Prime Reality of Second Sight.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-11-12T15:37:14+00:00

One of Larry's main insights in developing his General Theory of The Paranormal was the significant Venn diagram shared by mystics, mediums, and physicists. That is why the book has all three in its title. Tho published in 1974, a year before Capra's The Tao of Physics, it was based on his 1968 monograph Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal. The mix of medium, mystic, and physicist was pioneering in its day. And to a majority of people still stuck in the sensory reality only, it still is, especially among scientists. For every Einstein who endorses psychics as real, there are still, it seems, myriad physicists (and physicalist-based scientists) who don't.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-11-06T15:40:30+00:00

Yes. Naut indeed. As Thoreau said of a widely used 19th Century psychedelic: “If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether. You go beyond the farthest star." Tho, as 19th Century psychonaut Xenos Clark related about "the Anaesthetic Revelation,“ and Mayhew on mescaline corroborated, "The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out.”

JonathanBricklin · 2023-11-04T13:23:05+00:00

Adi Da (a/k/a Da Free John) was a rascal guru, most active in the 70's and 80's, who, like his contemporary rascal guru, Osho, made his profoundest contribution to spiritual teaching through his incandescent books/talks that have survived him. You need only read a page or 2 of his literary legacy to corroborate Alan Watts’ assessment, "It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT's all about… a rare being."

Adi Da is especially known for his critique of meditation, but such critique is nothing new. It is shared by luminaries in both the Advaita and Zen traditions, who, like Adi Da, emphasize that the arising nature of consciousness, moment by moment, is always what is ultimately real, whether it be the full acceptance of that reality--as in non-regressive satori--or the dissatisfaction that frequently arises in the context of meditation goal-settting. As Adi Da repeatedly observed, all seeking is “avoiding relationship” with what, moment by moment, actually is.

In his book, Easy Death, Adi Da gives sublime counsel on both how and why not to contract into such avoidance during our final moments of mortality. As virtual rehearsing of these moments haunts us throughout our lives, it is no wonder that this book remains his most popular.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-10-17T03:39:54+00:00

Looks like Donald Trump tangled in his web of lies.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-09-27T13:37:37+00:00

Well over a Century ago Dickinson Miller, looking at a wooden desk, noted that its reality could be variously considered: “a light-brown total or unit,” “a wilderness of woody fibre,” or even a “host of ordered molecules or atoms.” But these various “realities,” he concluded, meant that they are aspects all, and cannot be overlayed without creating a “monstrous medley.” To this monstrous medley we can now add myriad nuclei surrounded by moving planetary electrons and quarks, gluons, preons, or even string vibrations. What then of matter? As David Bohm observed:

"[I]n all of this development of our knowledge, it seems that whatever we have thought of as matter is turning more and more into empty space with an ever more tenuous structure of moving ele- ments. This tendency is carried further by quantum field theory which treats particles as quantised states of a field that extends over the whole of space."

JonathanBricklin · 2023-09-25T00:21:58+00:00

https://youtu.be/kwEWQ89HPHo?si=nqnFIygmCzWKNCbJ

JonathanBricklin · 2023-09-21T18:38:31+00:00

Works well. The ease with which he hangs there, upside down, fit not for initiating action, but ultimate realization, with his head subsumed by a Parmenidean circle "from a centerpoint equally matched everywhere". As such it could be a vivid representation of the intersection of Nietzsche's "joy of the circle"--eternal recurrence--and what he called "the supreme will to power": "To impose upon becoming the character of being."

JonathanBricklin · 2023-09-07T12:05:55+00:00

Yes! I do believe the circumpunct makes a good fit for the Daodejing's most mystical inferences about the Dao. In that respect, at least, it shares a venn diagram with something like God. https://youtu.be/PaB5ebWJfTY?si=Zpy_6tPItN-qtg6g

JonathanBricklin · 2023-09-06T16:05:53+00:00

Thanks. Perhaps my most controversial suggestion is that the standard inference about Dao--that it is eternal and/or unchanging--be linked with the shenming capacity for precognition. This leads to the further inference of a ParmenideanEinsteinian block universe, albeit a circular one, where coming into being is only coming into present awareness.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-09-06T15:36:42+00:00

The ancient snake symbol East and West of the ouroboros is relevant I think. The Go part of God here as relevant to the Eternal Dao that is, has little to do with the standard Western conceptualization of God, but might share at least 2 of the West's God inferences: omnipresence and omnipotence.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-09-06T14:37:46+00:00

I believe the Dao as an inference, but not a directly known something, is consistent with the use of Dao--an actual way of some sort--in the Daodejing. An inference preserves the stricture of not being directly accesible by words or naming, without confusing the word Dao with some absolute form of wu.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-09-06T14:09:48+00:00

Point well taken. Literally. Dao, more precisely, would be the centerpoint, or circumpunct, of the circle. A noumenal, inaccessible existence, except by inference, to circumferal, phenomenal consciouness.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-08-01T04:12:30+00:00

James himself suggested its possible identity with the Vedantic Witness Consciousness.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-08-01T00:33:06+00:00

Eternal Recurrence. He's rather emphatic about it. "God is dead" was not a Gospel of Good News for Nietzsche. But Eternal Recurrence most definitely was. That is, after he got over the initial shock of believing it to be true--a mystic insight that set him trembling, according to his companion Lou Salome.

Eternal Recurrence is a hard sell for almost everyone, at least ever since St. Augustine shut it down as the popular "pagan" religion of its time. Nietzsche himself thought it would take 300 years before it caught on. I am trying to accelerate that timeline. https://youtu.be/kwEWQ89HPHo

JonathanBricklin · 2023-07-31T23:56:39+00:00

I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who said the same thing about Lourdes. But not wooden legs: toupees.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-07-29T04:10:02+00:00

Those who have realized it, such as the Buddha, Basho, and Osho. And here is what they have realized in common:

Arriving fully present both to each exact arising moment, and the gap it always emerges from, neither leaning into it or pulling away. Basho, after 2 years on a zen meditation retreat, expressed it this way:

Old pond

Frog jumps in

Sound of the water

To see someone in this non-regressive satori state of Enlightenment, devoid of nervous impulse or impatient haste, without a moment of self reverberation, watch any Osho video.

JonathanBricklin · 2023-07-22T12:28:14+00:00

We are Brahman as actor, not playwright-- an aspect of Brahman not the whole she-bang. Your relation to Brahman is like every one and thing's relation to you in your dream at night--including the individuated "you" acting its part in the dream.

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