The sun rises above a wide, deep
ocean. Facing the sun, we stand on the shore of a still darkened continent. In
the darkness behind us and below the horizon, the continent on which we stand
joins the ocean that we now confront. Our preconscious ancestors came from the
ocean and traversed the continent, their sight growing as the light increased.
We explore the ocean and continent, knowing little about either.
The sun: the growing light of
consciousness.
The ocean: the water of life; the objective universe that pre-existed our subjectivity.
The darkness behind us: preconscious organismic responses and unconscious mental processes without which we would not be conscious.
The ocean: the water of life; the objective universe that pre-existed our subjectivity.
The darkness behind us: preconscious organismic responses and unconscious mental processes without which we would not be conscious.
Statements about the "darkness",
the origins of consciousness, are experiential, evidenced or
traditional. Buddhist teaching is mainly experiential although it
receives the rebirth idea
from tradition, unless, of course, the line between experience and
tradition is
not drawn where I think it is. By contrast, the religious teaching in
which I was indoctrinated
was merely traditional and thus, I suggest, perpetuated the darkness.
People
continued not to understand how they had become conscious.
Did human
consciousness result from increasing organismic sensitivity to
environmental
alterations or from the infusion of souls into already conscious animal
bodies -
or indeed into mechanistically unconscious animal bodies, according to
Cartesianism? The idea of souls may be remotely derived from the
experience of
dreaming, thus from the experience of (apparently) leaving the body
temporarily
in sleep and permanently in death, but it is contradicted by later
evidence that
dreams result from sleeping brain activity. Buddhist meditation, direct
experience of psychological processes, generated a no soul teaching.
Some explorers sail the ocean. Others shine light into the darkness from which we emerged. Our ancestors originated from the environment that now confronts us. Eventually, those exploring in opposite directions will meet.
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