A chairs Awareness

Stian Gudmundsen Høiland, modified 12 Years ago at 7/15/11 12:23 PM
Created 12 Years ago at 7/15/11 12:23 PM

A chairs Awareness

Posts: 296 Join Date: 9/5/10 Recent Posts
What is it that Awareness is aware of if not objects of senses?

When seemingly realized people explain that "they" can experience "non-local awareness" I understand this as an awareness that is not for the senses (thoughts included). My question is what's left?

I came to this question as I was inspired by a talk by Kenneth, "journalistic self-enquiry", to reflect on why it is that "those things", which are seemingly seperate from "my" body, are not felt as self. I realize that Awareness which is aware of my body-counsiousness (i.e. any consiousness of the physical body) doesn't need a localized body or entity to be aware through. And so it is that Awareness which flows through this body just as well flows through a chair this body might look at, and Awareness is aware of this chair, but not through the chairs senses as it has none. So what is it exactly that non-localized awareness "experiences"? Or maybe this is where my dualistic thinking fails to grasp the non-conceptual? There is no "experience" as it implies an experiencer? There is never "aware of", only Awareness?
thumbnail
Florian, modified 12 Years ago at 7/16/11 2:22 AM
Created 12 Years ago at 7/16/11 2:22 AM

RE: A chairs Awareness

Posts: 1028 Join Date: 4/28/09 Recent Posts
That used to be a big puzzler for me as well. I couldn't imagine how that would work.

Put bluntly, the sense that I'm standing before a huge panel of sensory input devices, watching my life through them, is gone. "I" am no longer standing before "my" life, rather, this is life, it is happening here, now. The senses do not make little plaster casts of objects out there, to be transported into my awareness and re-constructed in there somehow. The process of perception is not separate from what is perceived, nor does it bridge some sort of gap between a perceiver and perceived.

Put poetically: The perception of the chair is already part of the chair, not a picture in the mind, or a part of the mind. (Duncan Barford, only he had roses instead of chairs).

There is no new supernatural disembodied distributed awareness you somehow tap into, with self-aware chairs and so on. (That would be kind of cool, but it's not how it is). It's more like the opposite: with the self dropping out of the picture, nothing can claim awareness for its own, there's no special bit of experience that can own all the other bits by being awareness or by being aware of them, or pretending to be awareness, or all the other hackneyed stuff going on before, where awareness was mistaken to be a thing, to be had or owned or experienced or applied to other things.

It's actually pretty well put in the suttas, the phrase, "this is not me, this is not mine, this is not myself".

I'm afraid this wasn't very helpful, because the urge to imagine how this could be tend to be pretty stong - but if it was helpful, so much the better.

Cheers,
Florian