Ron said:The large self is Quality, the small self is the subjective observer in an objective universe, the large self IS the universe, aware.
"He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one's dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even "he" disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it. And the Quality, the areté he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest." In Lila, enlightenment is described as fully realizing the undivided nature of reality, realizing that THOU art THAT. Notice in the quote above he sees that his whole consciousness has been a dream AND he identifies this consciousness with the mythos. The whole mythos has been a dream. And "he" disappears, except as part of that same dream. I think the definition of self that is a collection of static patterns from all four levels has to be understood as this small self, the one that's part of the mythos, part of the dream. And yet this is the reality we live in. It's not unreal so much as it is limited. Alan Watts uses the "spotlight" as an analogy for our normal conscious awareness. It's good at picking out some small area of interest and illuminating that spot, but of course then everything else remains in the dark. And if I may push this analogy further, it's not like enlightenment floods an infinite number of spots all at once, thereby granting the enlightened one a Ph.D. in every discipline. It's more like letting your eyes adjust to the scene without any spotlight at all. It's a different kind of consciousness. It's a little harder to square Jung with this idea but his is still an interesting way to think about the small self and Big self. In a nutshell, he thought that the whole evolutionary history of the universe was in the collective unconscious. He took it all the way down. Our human history, our animal, fish and plant pasts and even the physical universe. In the same way that the instructions for the entire organism are contained in every cell of that organism, the whole history of the species is contained in each organism. This doesn't come in the form of molecule chains of course. He's talking about the Psyche, the whole mind, both the conscious and unconscious aspects. His is an almost literal version of THOU art THAT. I don't even know the source of one of my favorite conceptions. It's usually thought that consciousness is a product of biological complexity, that it emerged as one of life's abilities. In this picture, human self-consciousness is the peak of achievement. But it's also a bit of a lonely freak show. Our science looks out at an unconscious material universe and it doesn't look back. It's not really so stark as that, but you get the picture One of my favorite ideas turns this on its head. It says that consciousness is an inherent feature of all reality and that our senses and brain just bend and focus this consciousness in a particular way, a constricted, narrow way. This picture of consciousness as completely ubiquitous goes with all these other ways of thinking about the small self-Big self thing, more or less. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has a new way to see what's up with your friends. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/WhatsNew?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_WhatsNew1_052009 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/
