Consciousness: The Awareness Of Experience
Consciousness! It’s the ‘hard problem of science’, apparently. But science and scientists and everything else are within consciousness.
Consciousness is the awareness of experience, and what is the experience? It is the sense of being present, of being alive, of existence itself; and the love to be, the love to be something, this mystery, this complicated play of being a person in a world, appears in and as that present moment experience, that knowledge that says ‘I am’.
Can you see it? In the waking state, and in dream, can you see anything else?
If you take away the experience, awareness remains. If you take away awareness, there can be no experience. Experience requires the awareness of it, but awareness doesn’t require the experience. Within the experience, within the present moment, is the body and the mind and the world, and everything else that appears in and as this play. It is that which is being known, the experience, the immersive first-person experience of being a person in a world. It is the experience appearing in and as the present moment, and you are not that, you are not the experience – you are the awareness of it. But for now, you are consciousness only – the knowledge that says ‘I am’, the sense of presence, the present moment, in which the first-person play of life, the universe and everything appears – and when you fully realise that, in time you will find that you are not even consciousness – you are the knowing ‘I’ that you are, the underlying reality, pure awareness, the Absolute.
So keep seeing how things really are. Keep drumming this effortless view into the brain. You never cease to be the ‘I’ that you are and it is only the brain, the reality filter, the complex grey matter in the play, that says otherwise – so hey, sort it out, undo the effort. The brain – neuroplasticity! – is what you focus on with your campaign for change, with your wonderful goal of undoing the programming that says ‘I am this and that and I am separate from everything else’.