Thread: The Illusion of Consciousness, Identity, Choice and Control

I'm a little confused by all of this, so let's just get that out of the way before these questions come rolling (cos they may sound silly).

Are you saying that our actions are predetermined within the perametrs of our everyday surroundings based on our DNA? That bike analogy, for example. What if it's your first time considering to ride that bike? What if I wake up tomorrow and decided to sky dive. And you have people that alter their lives drastically on the bat of an eyelid. These acts would fall outside of this parameter, right? Those of us who make serious changes to our lives have suddenly decided to break away from a long-term pattern, so how do they fit into all of this? They'd effectively be breaking away from the hive.

This ego, this sense of self is an illusion? So when I say that I'm ok, I'm really covering a general ground for the many aspects of myself within the brain? You mention The Watcher, the Perceiver etc, do they also have associated egos? I mean, whose to say that The Obersever of your mind is the true observer?

So in your opinion, we have no sense of self? Is the idea of self in the first place what you're talking about?

It's late, I'm asking a lot of questions and I am honestly quite baffled by this. (Or am I? Maybe he is? Who's running this thing!!)

Anthene's Theory of Everything posted on the previous page would answer those questions better than I can, and I may only confuse you more.

When a fish swims off course from the school, the other fish have a choice to follow it or not. In the same way, when we get a random impulse to say... slap you in the face, we have to choose, as a colony whether or not to follow through with the impulse. Usually we decide not to, sometimes we go with it.

Self is not an illusion, the illusion is that you are one single, individual self. The watcher is the part of us that receives all the information our judger processes to make decisions. When the watcher receives the information, the judger must react to it. However, the watcher does not have to react to it because that's the judger's job. The watcher can watch the judger react to it without detracting its own job of watching. This, unfortunately, requires one give up a certain sense of control. The ego is what I call this clinging to control by judging what the watcher receives rather than allowing what is observed to stand apart from what one thinks about what they observe.

So like when you observe, you think about it. You label it. And then as far as your watcher can see, the object has become what the judger thinks about it. What I am advocating is to allow the information being observed to remain apart from what the judger thinks about them.

Except there is cases where the part of you that judges is a better watcher than the watcher is. For example, if you see an optical illusion your awareness has failed to accurately identify something as it really is. Only your higher brain functions has any chance of accurately realizing what it is. Which goes to another thing, if something is say camouflage and hidden, passively being aware of the area is extremely unlikely to give you the ability to see it. It often requires your conscious mind to actively search for it before you can see it. Which goes to the last point, often to succeed at what you are doing you need to consciously direct you awareness to specific tasks, such as when you want to read a book and learn something from it.

Lets face it, the watcher is stupid. The critical higher brain functions is where the business gets done. The only way you know what something is, is because that part of your brain assigned labels to things, and only that part of the brain is able to noticed new things that don't fit in the normal labels. You need them to work together, otherwise the watcher is totally incapable of doing its job. The watcher is the part of you that sees a shadow and thinks its the boogie man, and only the conscious judge inside of you goes, "No it isn't its a shadow." You got to tell the watcher what it sees because it's to stupid to actually know what it sees.

Its actually possible for you to see an illusion and know its an illusion and know what is really there and no matter how much you know it, your stupid awareness will still say its seeing something you know damn well you are not seeing.

You're still assigning judgment to the watcher, and you're also assuming the judger stops working just by allowing what is perceived to stand apart from what is judged. You don't stop being able to read a book by allowing the words to continue to exist beyond how the judger interprets them. The judger can interpret the words while the watcher continues to see them. The judgers remains completely functional, everything simply gains more than its labels when you allow things to be perceived free of judgment. It's not even to say free of judgment as though the judgment no longer exists so much as free to be more than just the judgment. Free not to be chained down by the judgment. The judgment becomes a side-note to perception rather than the beginning and end of it.

So when the watcher see's the shadow without the judger, it doesn't think anything. It watches. Before you can really argue against what I am trying to say, you're first going to have to understand what the watcher is, and the moment you apply labels to it like "stupid" or pretend to know how it will react so something is the moment you reveal you have no clue what you are talking about. The judger decides the shadow is a boogeyman, and then the judger decides it's just a shadow. These are two different judgments, and the more rational one wins because we have an over-all dissonance reducing judger which decides to side with one judgment or the other. But the watcher doesn't make any judgments at all, everything simply exists. And getting in touch with this pure perception also does not ruin the judger's ability to make sense out of and apply willpower to search for specific things or anything else you mentioned.

This idea is extremely simple. the judger can decide what something is, but the watcher can continue to see it as something beyond what the judger decided about it. Get it? The moment you believe the watcher is applying its own judgment is the moment you are no longer talking about the watcher.

What I am saying is that the watcher can see something that is fundamentally not there. Such as an optical illusion that makes green appear yellow. Even if you are consciously aware that the color is actually green, and despite green light hitting the eye, you still see yellow. You are physically seeing something that isn't there. It isn't the judge, because the judge knows what the color actually is. Its the watcher that is physically incapable of seeing the actual color and reporting the correct color to the rest of your brain.

If that is still the judge then going by your definition the judge is your conscious mind, your unconscious mind, and the automatic processes that perceives patterns in objects. In sense the judge is everything that makes you, you.

The watcher does not see green or yellow. These are labels the judger applies to color. The watcher simply see's the color without defining whether it's yellow or green. The definition of which color is seen belongs to the judger. When we see optical illusions, we see them because they help our survival. That's also the reason we see right-side up rather than upside-down. Our brains change all sorts of things about what we see in order to help us survive. The "watcher" is not what's changing what we see, it's simply receiving the information to be judged by the judger so a decision can be made.

If you were to perhaps attempt to allow the world to exist apart from how you filter it with judgment, you would understand instantly what I'm talking about. There is a space where all things can be perceived without being twisted by judgment. Sure, they're still twisted by the brain for survival purposes, but the watcher doesn't none of the twisting, it is not located in any specific part of the body, nor in any specific thought. The watcher is required for people dealing with anxiety because the judger feels anxiety and decides it must justify the anxiety with a cause, so it thinks up a cause which cause the person to feel even more anxious, and the downward spiral occurs. The watcher can notice anxiety, and all other occurrences in the body, without thinking they need to be justified with a cause, without thinking they need to be judged.

So judge, by all means, but anchor everything "you" are in the watcher, not the judger. Anchor everything in the pure awareness of yourself rather than in the judgments you have about what you're aware of. The judgments help you turn writing into words in order to read a book, but the watcher can watch this happening without beginning and ending the symbols at the mind's reaction to those symbols.

I know exactly what you are talking about, since everyone does it all the time. People don't think about the vast majority of things that they see at any given time, and place no judgement on it. There is only a small number of interesting things at any given time that we really focus on and judge to any level at all. I am just curious what you think the watcher is.

It sounds to me as if you are labeling nearly the entire brain as one aspect and then minor nerve signals as the watcher. If the part of the brain that deciphers random information and puts it into patterns so we can actually see the world around us, is not a part of the watcher then the watcher is nothing. Its the brief signal going from the eye to the brain that has yet to been organized into an actual picture.

So my point is that the watcher is just an illusion, it doesn't exist and the concept is rather pointless. We already go through life seeing the vast majority of stuff without putting any judgement on it what so ever, and so creating a new concept to reflect it seems silly. The watcher is an utterly useless concept.

It's not even the nerves signals between the eye and the brain. It's nothing specific, but it's the whole thing. The watcher does not merely take in what we see, but also what we think and feel. It takes it all in. The only difference between the watcher and the judger is that the judger is the reaction while the watcher observes the reaction. To tap into the watcher all you must do is realize there's a part of you that is not your body, nor your thoughts, nor your feelings, nor your reactions nor judgments. There's a part that simply watches all of this. There is a part of you that is created out of what you believe and disbelieve, what you identify with an don't; then there's a part of you that doesn't believe nor disbelieve and doesn't identify. There's a part of you which remains completely untouched by everything you think you are. This is pure awareness.

Have you considered the fact that this watcher may also be a function of the brain? What you are essentially describing is the stereotypically right hemsiphere way of observing the world without making language based value judgements. There is a good ted talk by a woman describing the sensation of having a stroke in her left brain which leaves her only able to observe the world around her without being able to comprehend anything.

Yes I saw that TED talk, but no I do not believe it's limited to one part of the brain. This is especially necessary to mention when talking to Alric who appears to be trying to compartmentalize the whole concept. The watcher is everything it is capable of observing, nothing it is capable of judging. We are still capable of simply observing the left brain. Thinking that it is the right brain observing the judgments of the left brain breeds all sorts of misconceptions.

For example if I were to think, "I'm angry" from the judger perspective, that means that I am angry. Whatever me is, is the reaction. When considering the emotion from the perspective of the watcher, it's more like "There is anger." It's there, part of me is reacting to it, but the thing that is truly me remains unaffected, able to observe my judger's reaction to it.

I honestly don't know if the untouched gestalt can be limited to one side of the brain. The judger is also a sort of gestalt, because it is the culmination of every single reaction, emotional and mental.

I see the left and right side of the brain like particles and waves, categories and scales or clocks and clouds. I see the watcher as beyond both, remaining completely unaffected by either and able to observe either side without preference for one or the other. The state of the watcher is not a state that see's the divine connection between everything, or a state which sees the world categorically and conceptually. It sees with equanimity. That means every is what it is, and not what the judger thinks of it. The judger is not limited to the language centers of the left brain, though our incessant need to turn everything into a symbol is definitely a major block in our happiness, the judger is also the emotional reaction to the world. This is where Alric had his misstep. He thought the watcher I referred to was the emotional reaction, and so he said the watcher was the thing that thought a shadow was the boogeyman. That is the first reaction to a surprising shadow, or to following to closely with whatever part of us remains wary of danger by trying to find danger in everything we can't easily identify. The watcher remains beyond that, beyond any type of reaction. It remains unaffected by the tribulations and processes of the mind and body.

This may seem like an illusionary concept, after all if it's not an object, it's not real, right? But if you position what you consider "you" in this perspective, you realize the transitory objects are all illusionary, the only thing that remains is the stage they sit upon.

It seems like the only reason you are denying that "the watcher" is part of the brain is because you personally identify your self with it and don't want to think that your self is located in some specific part of your brain. Is it possible that the watcher is not actually your self? The watcher that you seem to be describing seems to me to be only the brain's capacity to gather data, what most people without psychology education label the subconscious, and what is stereotypically associated with the right brain, although it is not so cut and dry as that. Could a person feel a sense of self without this capacity? What about people whose memory has been damaged by trauma (like in the movie memento)? They are able to judge sensory input as it comes in, but they may not even experience this 'watching' of the data at all. If so, do they have a self?

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

It seems like the only reason you are denying that "the watcher" is part of the brain is because you personally identify your self with it and don't want to think that your self is located in some specific part of your brain. Is it possible that the watcher is not actually your self? The watcher that you seem to be describing seems to me to be only the brain's capacity to gather data, what most people without psychology education label the subconscious, and what is stereotypically associated with the right brain, although it is not so cut and dry as that. Could a person feel a sense of self without this capacity? What about people whose memory has been damaged by trauma (like in the movie memento)? They are able to judge sensory input as it comes in, but they may not even experience this 'watching' of the data at all. If so, do they have a self?

The watcher is not merely the observation of data, it is the self free of identity. This includes the subconscious, but it includes the cognitive mind as well. It cannot be a single part of the brain because that would exclude parts of the brain it remains aware of. When that woman had the stroke and she lost her ability to see the world through the left brain perspective, she was not necessarily being space conscious so much as just cloud-conscious which is the style of unfiltered perception the right brain has. She was simply in touch with the right-brain's perception. The watcher is not in contrast to the left brain's perspective. It's simply the part of us which remains unaffected by the left brain's analysis.

If you take a piece of your awareness and shift it upon pure-awareness, space, silence or whatever, then you can understand what I'm referring to. There is a piece of us which is not tied down by our reactions, even our unconscious reactions. They all sit within the space. We are the space. We are also what sits within the space.

As I mentioned earlier, the left and right brain to me are like particles and waves, categories and scales or clocks and clouds. The right brain sees the waves or the clouds, the watcher see's both the right brain's perception and the left brain's conceptions. It isn't pure awareness in the sense that it takes everything in unfiltered. It's pure awareness in the sense that it takes in both the unfiltered and the filters, and sees beyond both.

The way your arguments are built on more and more elaborate analogies makes me feel like you do not even fully understand what it is you are talking about. Space conscious? Cloud-conscious? A quick search doesn't produce any readily available examples of what schools of thought these terms might be coming from. Are you making this all up as you go along? It seems like a lot of what you are describing here is loosely based on some eastern philosophical concepts but there is nothing really concrete to relate to. What is pure awareness, and how does one shift their awareness onto it? Is it possible to separate awareness into discreet pieces like some kind of physical substance? Is awareness diluted somehow? Is the purity of awareness a measurable thing? Isn't just talking about all of this being done by the judger that you describe and if so, isn't it really not a very good way to communicate something that you claim is beyond the judger's capacity to understand and therefore talk about? Aren't all these invented concepts just more illusions built on top of what you seem to think is beyond illusion?

Space-consciousness is a term I borrowed from Eckhart Tolle. It's very easy to hold the attention on two things at once, especially if one of those things is pure-awareness. Pure-awareness cannot be described because it's awareness, and everything to describe it would be something it is aware of, rather than awareness itself. Can you try, momentarily, to tap into awareness of awareness?

Pure-awareness cannot be described because it's awareness, and everything to describe it would be something it is aware of, rather than awareness itself.

You sound religious, to me.

"Whatever is taken to be a self will cause suffering". In fact, the permanent happiness of a self is impossible.

The illusion of the 'self' can be removed.

One of those wrongly formed questions is"who am I?". (...) The question alrrady implies thay you are someone. It already implies an answer. It is not open enough.

Instead, one needs to rephrase the question (...) to "What do I take myself to be?"

or

What do I assume this thing called 'I' is?"

Such questions dig very deep into one's delusion.

Only then can one start to really look at what it is that one takes oneself to be.

As I have repeated since the beginning of this thread, pure-awareness can be readily experienced. It requires absolutely no faith, no possession of some sort of truth and no implications what so ever. It only requires that you become aware of experience free of those things. Religion would get in the way because religion would tell you that you know what the beyond is while becoming aware of awareness is much like getting in touch with the unknown.

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

As I have repeated since the beginning of this thread, pure-awareness can be readily experienced. It requires absolutely no faith, no possession of some sort of truth and no implications what so ever. It only requires that you become aware of experience free of those things. Religion would get in the way because religion would tell you that you know what the beyond is while becoming aware of awareness is much like getting in touch with the unknown.

Om

I dont belong to any religion. I dont attend any meetings or take any courses. I am into sinchronicity and NO I am not and I have NEVER been into Jung or any therapy.

I am into " Light, fun friendly Sinchronicity dream games".

This requires paticipation cos it takes two to tango.

This amazing entanglement of dreams and the outerworld is the only thing that excites or interests me here on Dreamviews or anywhere for that matter.

Yes!

Its proceses have something to do with Athene's Theory of Everything and the topic of this (your thread):

'The Illusion of Consciousness,Identity, Choice and Control.'

We can talk til we'er blue in the face or we can just DO it. We can just experience "It".

By looking at my avatar while dropping-off. The recording hipnagogs' remembered (non-lucid) dream snipets, hipnapops and songs that chime-into awareness after waking-up.

They will corrospond to something "yet to happen" here, where the mandala is ankored.

I was responding to greenhavoc. I'm not part of any religion either though I do attend two sanghas which are basically group meditations and discussions.

I was responding to xaqaria without enough sleep to aptly explain the concept, and it's a difficult concept to explain regardless because the moment you open your mouth, you begin to lie about what "you" are. It can be viewed as Eastern Philosophy but the purpose of this thread is to help people realize you don't need to invent in any particular philosophy in order to get a glimpse of the Self. It requires no belief system, it requires no sense of "this is right, and that is wrong" judgment. In fact such things interfere when one wishes to know the Self. It's not some abstract, transcendental or religious concept. It's the undercurrent. It's right there. One does not have to stop thinking, they don't have to seek it. It's already right there.

It only requires that you become aware of experience free of those things

There is no experience free of these things, though. You're trying to explain something that is void of explanation, something that just is without any proof. Am I to take your word that it exists because something is telling you it does? If I understand what you're saying, then you yourself are incapable of understanding it, but you know it's there, so you feel compelled to talk about it anyway. Every time we call you out of it, you become defensive, too. What you're trying to explain is God, Dei.

Hence:

Originally Posted by greenhavoc

You sound religious, to me.

Originally Posted by greenhavoc

There is no experience free of these things, though. You're trying to explain something that is void of explanation, something that just is without any proof. Am I to take your word that it exists because something is telling you it does? If I understand what you're saying, then you yourself are incapable of understanding it, but you know it's there, so you feel compelled to talk about it anyway. Every time we call you out of it, you become defensive, too. What you're trying to explain is God, Dei.

Hence:

God is a false title. There are other words, words which lack the sort of cruelty and judgment many associate with God which is why I prefer words like Space, Silence, Mystery or the Stage. That which is neither nothing nor not nothing.

It is true that if there is such thing as a soul, something at the very root of us which is connected with all things, which is unaffected by either sin or sorrow, eternal and completely perfect, then this is it. But it does not require you believe in a soul for you to be aware of awareness, itself. It requires absolutely no faith or belief in anything. You don't have to take my word for it at all. You don't need to believe any of the words I say, in fact I'm fucking lying with every word I speak in order to describe it. At worst. At best, I'm posting signs around it pointing at it but failing miserably to capture it.

But it's right there. I'm not claiming some holier than thou position where I walked through the fire and was purified or saved by some divine light or whatever bullshit born-agains talk about. I'm not some wise guru that spent many years meditating on a mountain top and chanting away my undignified ego. I'm not some obscure transcendentalist that found the city of triangles beyond space and time during a particularly interesting astral voyage or psychedelic trip. And the experience of this... space... requires no such initiation. It requires no prerequisite understanding. It's available right now, to everyone, instantly. Perhaps my attitude has been adjusted and trained well enough that I've learned how to let it be rather than seek it out. And perhaps the signposts that point to it often cause people to chase it which means they may as well point the opposite direction.

But you don't have to dissolve or give up the ego. You just have to realize that you are not what you think about things. You are not what you believe you are. You are not what you want, you are not your reactions. But just because you are not those things doesn't mean they don't exist. You can watch them without being them. The only thing you must give up is something you don't even have, anyways. Control. Of course all religions say give up control to God, be an instrument of God. But then God becomes this person, with his own qualities, living outside of you. God is not a person, God has no qualities, and most importantly, God is not separate from you. But to speak of how you are God is to reap a barrage of cryptic nonsense. Words mean nothing in this respect. The real you stands apart from the words.

Try this. Give yourself (the identity, the actor, the judger, the thinker, the feeler, the reactor) space from yourself, the watcher. Create space between the two, between your awareness and every object that awareness can attend to, including your thoughts, emotions and decisions. Create space between you and yourself. One of these you's is everything with a name, the other is everything without a name. If you think about it, you can name everything but that which has no name. That which has no name, that's pure-awareness. Nothing else can be, and pure-awareness can be nothing else. Every object which falls into awareness can be labeled, even if we can't place a specific label we can still distinguish between the peaks and troughs. There is only one thing which cannot be labeled, one thing which must require sign-posts to paint around it. That eye it all flows through, that stage it all sits on, the space surrounding it, the silence which always waits behind the noise.

Do not attempt to find the silence. Simply allow yourself to be aware that it's there.

The Illusion of Consciousness

Why is it that thoughts obsess the mind? Thoughts come in and we grab hold if them. We make them stay because of the illusion that they are important. (...) They are just thought, thats all. Just leave the thoughts alone. (...)

Therefore, give thinking no value. Give it no interest. Instead, give that value and interest much more to the silence. (...)

All truth, all insight, all wisdom, arises in the silence.

(...)

'The knower' is not the self.

Thr knower' is usually called consciousness (mind), which is what knows. That knowing is often seen to be the ultimate 'self'. (...)

It is possible to separate the 'knower from the known. (...)

Not seeing that causal sequence can very easily give rise to the illusion of a continuous 'knower'. This illusion of a continuous 'knower' is most often where people assume that there 'self' resides.

(...)

Consciousness is conditioned, it has causes, and it's not always going to be there. (...)

Once one knows what mind consciousness is (...) then one can actually notice (...) that whatever one sees is followed immediately by a different type of consciousness.

Different types of consciousness are rising and passing away, one after the other. (...) Once one sees that, then one can understand why there's an illusion of continuity in the experience of consciousness. (...)

A person who still thinks that they are consciousness (mind), the 'knower', might be able to let go of the body (...) (but) they haven't fully let go of (being).

This person has not yet eradicated (the craving to be,) which results from taking the 'knower' (consciousness) to be self.

From:

The Heart of Buddha's Teaching

By: Ajahn Brahmavamso

Published by : Inward Path (Penang. Malaysia) 2002.

Of course all religions say give up control to God

Do not attempt to find the silence. Simply allow yourself to be aware that it's there.

This two statements seem eerily similar to me.

Thanks for sharing, Omnis, I do enjoy your musings Though it's often a bit too advanced for me to offer a worthy response!