Morning Joe,
----- Original Message ----- <snip> mel said: Sleep is not oblivion, but the things about which, there is consciousness are not the same as those in the 'wakeing' state. Joe replied: One of the first rules in the study of esoteric literature as proposed by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky it to ³remember yourself²! A further argument is that if you don¹t remember yourself, you are fast asleep to what you are experiencing. Is this the point you are making about sleep not being oblivion? mel: I don't traffic in esoterica, but I take their comment to be a klugey way of speaking of mindfulness. My comment was not aimed at that, but rather at the attributes of consciousness while sleeping, which is not slumber-unto-oblivion. Sleeping people, like sleeping animal respond to physical stimulus, but often do not remember the incidents, but none the less they scratch, slap at bugs, nudge animals or people away from them, adjust blankets, turn towards or away from light or noise, sit up, look around, speak, ask/answer questions. They only think they sleep peacefully. But all night long different brain centers 'light up' and then settle down again. Some of the responses are from internal sources. -------------------------------------------------------------- mel said: What is disengaged is most of the creating of memory, so most of what passes is not remembered. Consciousness is always consciousness of... and when the 'of' consists of difference too small to matter, then we blithely forget it and move on. What we choose to not remember is as if it never existed. It did, but not for the illusion of 'I'. Joe replied: You are saying when asleep I cannot create new memory since I am an illusion. Some dreams I remember. An analogy to sleep would apply to the non-creating of memory in the so-called waking state. Can I be conscious of what I don¹t remember? Are most of my activities done in a state akin to sleep? Merely a mechanical repetition of what I had been aware of at a different time? I accept a conscious/mechanical metaphysical description for my activities. Am I only mechanically aware of what I do during the day, so that it can be said that my activities are those of a sleep-walker? I am impressed! mel I did not say you cannot create memory, but that most of 'what' awareness is stirred about is not something important enough to bother to remember. Dreams are something different and while I am not an expert, one source of dream is from the building of memories that happens when yesterday's experience moves from short to long term memory. As memory is associational, one often 'glimpses' the 'memory tree' of associations that will come to hold the new memory. When the building of memory coincides with a stirring of the logic centers of the brain, the result is the instinctual response to try and create a serial narrative of the experience. It is just the nonsensical picture of the creative instinct, for lack of a better term. On the other hand there are dreams of entirely different kinds that seem to be massive alignments of some kind of 'pattern recognition' that get way wierd...the prophetic, the sudden answer to a long standing question, etc. Can you be conscious of what you don't remember? Sure. There is lots of "process awareness" that encompasses routine tasks that you can perform deliberately, but again are mostly below notice for the purpose of memory. Driving, using the bathroom, taking a shower, etc. Probably you are thinking about something else rather than being mindful of those acts. The 'density of attention' we put on a given experience or activity can become a deliberate creation of vividness or strength of memory. These two previous paragraphs contain the extremes of mindfulness versus 'runaway' mind and the vividness of out 'impression' of consciousness is diferent. A runaway mind, distracting us, gives a low static quality of perception; boring repetition. Open, still, full attention is where flashes of the unfolding of dynamic reality is liklier to be seen and 'wow moments' unfold without your effort. Life gets rich. (It is kind of like: there are as many 'species' of consciousness as there are things to be conscious of...) ----------------------------------------------- mel said: Memory and the formation of memory give us the texture and character in our lives, our sense of 'who we are' and the knowledge we've processed, but memory is just another matter for consciousness to be conscious about. Joe replied: I lose track of you, when you say ³but memory is just another matter for consciousness to be conscious about.²?????? For me consciousness is DQ in the social order. mel: Our 'holy' condition of self-consciousness, which has led so many thinkers to sing the praises of humanity, is simply a matter of our turning our consciousness onto memory itself. We are able to construct a narrative of order, where we enforce a structure of time, solid relations of cause and effect, precious shades of meaning and celebrations of being. All of this within the mind, the combination of consciousness, experience and immediate memory. Consciousness itself arises before the social, it is biologicaly an emergence. As to whether it, as reactivity, is something we can project or actually account for in the physical, I do not know, yet. ----------------------------- as I said earlier... Try it on for a while, play with it, and see if it makes 'operational' sense. thanks--mel Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
