Intro to an independent study on consciousness.
After deciding I was going to be the enlightened soul to define the origin of life on earth, which I maintain I am correct about, although not because I am not plagued by a thousand insecurities, although seeing Diana Ross in my Facebook feed leant itself to my courage for today, she said she had some insecurities too, and I'm pretty confident about her, I sent a letter to my physics instructor, er, this man who wrote this fabulous and easy to follow book, Physics and Ancient Faith. He sent me a quick rejection letter that incuded a clue to my fault, I hadn't entertained the idea of consciousness.
I have since been sifting through all kinds of information. I have read bible accounts of interactions with God with his faithful, read article after article by the contributor who has become my new favorite journalist, found TV programs on YouTube to instruct me further into the fundamentals of atomic particle physics, or quantum physics, which, although I'd read some in brief passages as it pertained to the greater idea of the existence of the God-creator in my teacher's book, did not inform so much that I do not consider myself bereft of knowledge on the subject of physics, especially quantum physics. But what was truly surprising this morning is that throughout this whole, I don't know, 25 years of delving into the deeper things of life, I have not once been captivated by the idea of consciousness. I feel more adept at quantum physics than consciousness.
To begin, let us at least acknowledge that like many things that are without a solid to examine with hand and eye, consciousness is elusive to the solidity of science. We can even pun that. Solidity=science. Next, it is a matter of the metaphysical disciplines, and theological disciplines, which have been all but done away with by the solidity of science in reference to what is concrete and factual, but not entirely because ugly ideas about consciousness like to rear up and demand themselves credit for being.
These are the facts to begin with.
The idea of looking into consciousness was going to be headed in the direction of the many unverified accounts of Facebook junkies, like myself, who talk to strangers in meme posts. "Say, friend (on existential platform) what you know about consciousness?" But as luck would have it, the voracious Marginalien Popova had covered that in a post and then linked it to an almost 101 article written on the subject of panpsychism. Very lucky indeed, the article spawned a lot of thought. I will start off with the following that occurred to me as I put red blue and pink hair dye on my gray roots only a few minutes ago. A trick to get good coverage. I was standing in the mirror and I was having a bad thought, you know, something I wasn't going to write in this post here, and it occurred to me, first that Aristotle had said that it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without believing it, of course, standing there it was "to be able to hold two thoughts without accepting the one as right", we will let that honor itself, but anyway, then it occurred to me that I had learned things like this, common knowledge to a Popova, probably, and many who have an education, but to the layman it is both meaningless, unauthored and with little to no value. In this, I was able to assume that there are differing areas of awareness based on the individual's involvement in things. We are more aware of things the more we know. This was an intriguing thought to me, especially with the spooky aspects of physics. Let us bring this learning together soon. (the more you know)
My story
The following story I am going to try to condense but the experience is absolutely essential to the entire argument, especially as it is fundamental to the conventional values of our current age. I hate the word age, this age is a baby! And this convention, as I am an amputee, hurts as I see others running along so nicely.
At the age of 18 I suffered what must have been a nervous breakdown. I am now 43. Unitl I was 25 I stayed in what I would call a deep depression. At 25, like clock work, I sort of rolled out of bed feeling pretty much like your average person, although I was not. Because you see, as a result of my nervous breakdown I stayed in what can only be called a partial consciousness ever since the incident when I was 18. This might seem like an impossibility; most people think of being conscious as the opposite of being asleep. For me, then, being half conscious, you would expect that I was always yawing a lot or very tired and unable to keep attentive. This is true and it is not. I do have a harder time than most people remaining focused. I do lack a certain amount of conscious awareness, like if the picture on the TV screen were darkened, or better yet veiled, and often other people who I know will become frustrated with my limited, enormously annoying attention span, I am very well aware of what a difference their world view is like. But, I am now gifted with the ability to extract the important info from a whole lot of lip service.
For years it was very sad and troubling to me. But as I have become accustomed to it, I am less likely to be upset by it, as say, a perfectly normal person would feel if they had to see out of my eyes. I will tell you all the details. I was living with my then boyfriend or maybe by then he was my husband, it happened so quickly. I was 18, smoking weed, and living in his room drawing pictures in a great art journal and contemplating things like what psychics are looking at when they gaze into crystal balls. I still have a loose paper with this idea I'd come up with sketched out, something about the way the light bounces around inside it, nothing really to do with psychic phenomenon. But as with a lot of things I was sure I'd found the answer!
One day while my husband and I were watching a movie, I called up my brother, perhaps my ex was asleep. My brother suffers from the disease schizophrenia, and it was new to us both around this time. We were always very close up until then but because of the disease we started to grow apart. It was sort of overwhelming to me. During the call, my brother sort of started to give me a rundown of some things he had decided about me, things that sounded just like my life. Unfortunately, these things literally scared me near to death. I thought he had been given information about me from the devil! I remember that the immediate reaction kept me up all night. Then afterward, I had the sensation that all the nerves in my body were sending off signals like a constant electric shock, a terrible feeling that was abated by a call to a doctor and Paxil prescription. I wish now I had stayed on the drug for longer than calming the initial shock.
After this incident, except for one very brief moment in a movie theater bathroom when we went to see Titanic, I have been in what I can only call a partial consciousness. To give you an indication, I very clearly remember years later talking to a fellow student at my university who while speaking with her I made the internal note that I was not in the same world with her, that I could see outside to where all these things were happening but could not be fully engaged because I was sort of locked in this place inside my mind. I wrote about that around that same time, something about how I wondered if this was why some serial killers had no objections to killing because perhaps, like me, they could not relate to other people because they too had been locked inside of their heads. I'm not a killer, but I can relate. Lol, just kidding. But seriously, in this state the outside world is unreal.
Now that it has been many, many years later, I have become completely adjusted to this. I can feel sadness and grief in memory at how hard the transition was for me from feeling like I had lost a part of my existence to then forgetting that this is what the normal, average person's life experience is like. But aside from this grief in my remembering, I am totally unaware of the difference anymore. I think like I do, and live inside my mind as I do, and the awareness that I have is totally substantial. To other people, I am sure, it would be impossible to bear. It is like if when you are feeling the wind it must enter into the chamber of thinking and be read like a book. It is no less beautiful, but surreal. The light from the sun is like a painting and not utter brightness, a burst of cold air is contemplated rather than felt like a shock. The sun is beautiful, the air is cold, I tell these things to myself somehow.
For years because my brother had this debilitating disease and because I had my own as well, I spent much of my time thought correcting. I remember this terrible problem with pity, I had to retrace every improper thought and recover it and retract the bad parts and make the thought right. This was HORRIBLE for a person with a creative mind, and emotionally exhausting. But somehow, by about 25, I started to come around, and I felt at home again inside myself and stopped bothering to be perfect.
Now, as this is my life experience, you would think a person like me would have been all up in this consciousness by now. But no, this is an Eastern philosophy, and I am totally Catholic. My lack of awareness, or lack of full conscious awareness, has made me more in tune with the intellectual capacity which I bear. Instead of being the girl I was, who was like David Bowie in 5 years, "It was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor" I was now Jimmy Eat World's "Try anything you can", which was never beyond my reach. Lovely how that worked out. It gives me an idea of what we are working with here.
So consciousness. The hardest word I've ever had to spell. It cannot be all fresh air and sunshine. It cannot be all sublime views and wonder, wonder! Because no matter how I feel that I am in a daze, I am completely conscious, capable and functioning. I can paint, write, hold interesting conversations, make good judgement calls, perform outstanding acts of ingenuity on the fly as a customer service or salesperson, be charming, perform on film, sing, dance. I come across as a completely normal person. Incidentally, this too used to creep me out, because I thought about killers you know. I am in essence in the physical world completely whole. This which once was true, isn't.
What is consciousness then? Is it being awake? Is it a feeling? Is it the things which I was beginning to turn it into? The physics and the correlation between physical and conceptual reality? Is it the ability to contain knowledge and to grow that knowledge into a monstrous knowing in tune with and in oneness with the entire universe?!!! These are the things I want to look at in these coming posts. In the meantime, I have a lot of notes to go over.
Notes:
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