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diff --git a/content/entry/the-eternal-here-and-now.md b/content/entry/the-eternal-here-and-now.md index bb71a80..b34c66b 100644 --- a/content/entry/the-eternal-here-and-now.md +++ b/content/entry/the-eternal-here-and-now.md @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ By now I think I've exhausted my allowance of strange sounding questions directe The Darth Vader of responses to this is "So what? What does it matter?". It can be really hard to show someone why this matters if they don't already see significance. There could be practical benefits to this kind of realization but the primary one is no longer being confused about what you are any more, and no longer suffering for it. People in the midst of this realization sometimes have a peculiar way of phrasing things. Instead of saying "I'm happy", they say "There is happiness" as in "Happiness is present in consciousness". You are never really happy, but there is happiness sometimes. Our usual way of talking is with subject-object form. But the sensation of being a subject in relation to a separate, external world of objects is itself a sensation appearing in consciousness. "There is a sensation of I". As a side note, none of this entails that it's not useful or important to have a sense of personal identity. A sense of identity is socially necessary. The contrapositive of that is that in order to lose your sense of "I", it's useful to undergo social isolation as many monks do. # Am I just an Observer? -You might wonder after reading all this if you're just some passive observer to this flow of experience. I've written at length about this before, but it's certain that [you don't have free will](/2020/06/19/free-will-is-incoherent-part-1). It's possible through meditation and other means to notice this firsthand. While it's possible to feel either way about it, that you are doing things or that things are happening to you, we know neuroanatomically that the feeling of being the author of your actions, that you are doing things, has to be an illusion. There's nowhere for the author to be hiding. There are only actions. And in that sense [you aren't ultimately responsible for your actions](/2020/08/22/free-will-is-incoherent-part-2), at least not in a way that justifies punishment for the sake of it. It's just because of the way language is that we have to talk about a "do-er" and an "action" as if you could ever really separate the two. +You might wonder after reading all this if you're just some passive observer to this flow of experience. I've written at length about this before, but it's certain that [you don't have free will](/2020/06/19/free-will-is-incoherent-part-1/). It's possible through meditation and other means to notice this firsthand. While it's possible to feel either way about it, that you are doing things or that things are happening to you, we know neuroanatomically that the feeling of being the author of your actions, that you are doing things, has to be an illusion. There's nowhere for the author to be hiding. There are only actions. And in that sense [you aren't ultimately responsible for your actions](/2020/08/22/free-will-is-incoherent-part-2/), at least not in a way that justifies punishment for the sake of it. It's just because of the way language is that we have to talk about a "do-er" and an "action" as if you could ever really separate the two. There's no satisfying way I can answer the question directly because the question assumes it makes sense to talk about an observer separately from that which is being observed. My suggestion is that dualistic distinctions about the subjective nature of reality are arbitrary. In subjective reality, there is only a "happening". Consciousness is just the word we use for the space that we imagine the happening taking place in. We imagine that experiences must occur in some place at some time, so we call that place consciousness. The phrase "consciousness and its contents" shouldn't be understood to indicate dualism I think. It's just a way of talking. "Consciousness and its contents" gets across the idea that experience is ever-changing. Everything is transitory because the contents are always changing. And the phrase "a happening" standing on its own better communicates the idea that experience is non-dual, that there is no experiencer in addition to the experience. |