Hi Ham, Platt, Will marksmith'' and All: marksmith wrote to Platt: Where I get stuck is where does personal consciousness come in? At some point, it seems to me that this Consciousness gets divided up. This may be called an illusion by some, but it's one hell of an illusion!
Andre: This is something I cannot let go at the moment so I thought I'd share some of stuff I am reading at present. I have mentioned the book before and this is from Reanney. Some of you may think this is a load of bull...maybe. I am really interested in how, if at all, this has a place in the MoQ (otherwise I am barking up the wrong tree...but a bloody interesting tree it is). I'll introduce it with a statement from David Bohm: 'We may well now ask whether the close analogy between quantum processes and our inner experiences and thought processes is mere coincidence...the remarkable point-by-point analogy between thought processes and quantum processes would suggest that a hypothesis relating these two may well turn out to be fruitful'. Reanney continues: 'I am saying what Krishnamurti said, that consciousness is its content. Just that..[but] all the available evidence seems to suggest that consciousness is a direct function of the electrical circuitry of a living brain. But is this true? Let us work through this. Your normal waking consciousness is characterised by several key elements: - a sense of self- the feeling that you are the 'centre of your world' - a sense of linear time- the feeling that time passes by in regular sequences - a sense of separateness- a feeling that you are a discrete atom of consciousness - a fear of death Why has your consciousness taken on these qualities? Because your brain has evolved to maximise your chances of survival in a risky world. The tools of human awareness-your senses- have been trained by natural selection to focus on the 'here' in space and the 'how' in time, that is, to keep your mind concentrated on just those features of the environment that most affect your survival prospects. Your window of reality is a narrow sensory band that screens out most aspects of the world around you. Your brain is an extraordinarily effective filter whose prime function is not to expand your consciousness, but, in a very real sense, to contract it. This has happened because a biological danger can only be avoided by biological action, which means realising a particular quantum possibility through the collapse of its associated wave function. So the brain has evolved a two-fold role: (1) to sense the quantum ripples around it and (2) to trigger the collapse of the selected wave functions of ripples in its immediate environment in both space and time. What else is your waking consciousness but the picture you create of your immediate surrounds?....What your brain is filtering out is the vast input of quantum waves from the universe around you and, on the basis of past experience, picking those most relevant to where you are and when you are. But here is the point of my suggestion that these quantum waves have the essential character of thoughts. In effect, what I am saying is that the whole quantum cosmos around you is consciousness- is latent consciousness in a universal sense- but that your brain restricts its 'field of awareness' only to what is important to you. Which is what biology has trained it to do. Your brain is not the seat of your consciousness...rather it is the 'guarding censor that, from the wider spectrum af awareness, selects only what impacts most strongly on your biological well-being...its central message is...that deep consciousness, ongoing awareness, does not depend on the brain for its existence. (pp 66-67). As Pirsig suggests in Lila, the search for meaning is a relatively recent fad. To which I add: 'While sustaining biological and social patterns Kill all intellectual patterns Kill them completely And then follow Dynamic Quality And morality will be served (Lila p406). The ongoing aesthetic continuum, the uncollapsed quantum waves, the 'mu' state, before the quality event collapses the waves into particles trapping them into time and space. Thus creating the inorganic, organic, social and intellectual 'levels and melding them into the here and now'' of our existence based on analogies upon analogies of our own personal history. By killing the intellectual patterns,(sense quietness, mental quietness value quietness) the waves can be experienced...Thou art That...the songlines (as the Australian Aborigine would say) of the uni-verse to which Lila dances. 'He stood on a mound of sand (!) beside some juniper bushes and said 'Ahhhh! He threw out his arms. Free! No idols, no Lila, no Rigel, no New York, no more America even. Just free! He looked up in the sky and whirled. Ahhh, that felt good! He hadn't whirled like that for years. Since he was four. He whirled again. The sky, the ocean, the hook, the bay, spun round and round him. He felt like a Whirling Dervish'(ibid p 415) Am I now a new age dud? For what it is worth Andre 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/
