Brahman and Idea

We can equate God with the sum collection of all self-awareness.

The trouble with imagining God as a personality working with physical reality is that in anthropomorphizing Him in that way, we trivialize Him. I have wondered about arguing that we are made in God’s image, and so we must resemble Him, but the resemblance must not be so strong as to include our weakness. No, we resemble God in our self-reflective consciousness.

God, therefore, looks out at us through every pair of human eyes we encounter. The owner of those eyes may or may not be aware of her own God consciousness, but she is conscious and she does have the capability to self-reflect, and so she carries God consciousness.

Sufis say that humanity is the lens through which God observes the world, a beautiful way to put it.

 For a long time I have been wondering, why would God need a lens? Why would God need the eyes of people?

The secret is that there is no reality. Reality is not real. We cannot prove that anything exists outside of our senses and so for all intents and purposes there is nothing outside our sensory sphere. Sure, physicists and mathematicians have proved that there are ten dimensions to reality, but those dimensions exist only as idea to them. And so, since we have no outside-of-senses reality to back them up, our sensory experiences are just as transparent, just as flimsy, convincing only because that is part of the construct.  

Would it be fair to say, then, that reality exists because God wishes it to exist? Yes, sort of, and yes, duh. An infinite consciousness is capable of conceiving infinitely many ideas, many of which (infinitely many) are capable of self-reflection and self-reference. Here, then, we have our multi-verse, hypothesized by quantum physics. I need to think about this more, but it seems right to suggest that a self-referent idea or program needs something to refer back to, something complicated enough to support self-reflection. Since to be truly self-reflective requires the capability of an infinite regress, that complicated structure must needs be very complicated. For such an idea to be so capable, it must appear to have some durability, and, hence we have reality with people in it. 

Note that this is all in the realm of idea. We think we are living a hard life, but we and everything "around" us is idea.

The Word was in the Beginning because self-reference has something of a linguistic nature, even if it is in the form of some sort of symbol.

As this is just the beginning of a train of thought that began for me today, I need time to flesh out some of the assumptions contained in my argument.

Surely others have thought the same thoughts as I express here, and the scriptures of many spiritual disciplines treat of the same concept. I just need to figure out the correlations. I am putting together some pieces I have not seen put together before.

For what it's worth, I picture idea springing from Brahman like plumes of snow blow from a great mountain, like the whorls of tiny cyclones spin away from a whistle. Not creating the snow, not making the sound, but its nature and their nature somehow the same.

I know, I know! I thought I was going to be posting my art on this blog and all I am posting is this dang philosophy!

So now you know. This is my internal world, all I really care about.

Decisions, Perceptions, Sensations

Who are you, really? I mean really, deep down?

When Scottish philosopher David Hume introspected in search of a self, he reported that all he found was a “bundle of perceptions.” He seemed to be disappointed, but I believe he was on to something; he was just looking in the wrong direction. Of course you are not going to be able to perceive the self, no matter how you try. The perceiver does not perceive itself, yet it can infer itself by acknowledging that it is none of these perceptions, and yet does perceive.

Should Descartes have said, “I perceive therefore I am”?

You are sitting in your car in a parking lot. A driver attempts to pull into the space next to you, but his car hits your car.

“Hey!” you yell to your friend next to you. “That guy ran right into me!”

But he didn’t. His car hit your car, but he did not hit you.

A kindergartner spills paint on your shoe. “Careful!” you warn. “You’re getting paint on me!”

But she is not—not on you anyway.

Are our possessions part of us? What does it mean to own something? My pencil is a pencil that is associated with me, to the extent that everyone involved agrees that I get to decide what happens to that pencil.

In the case of my body, I don’t need consensus. Just the facts about how persons and bodies work with each other make body ownership pretty clear. When a person is not the one to control her body, either a crime or a peculiar illness has occurred.

Let’s change point of view. If this is my body, then what am I? I am not the body. I am somehow in the body, carried by the body, running the body. Sensory messages come to me from my eyes, my ears, my skin—I am not my sense organs. I can feel hot or cold, happy or sad, comfortable or in pain, but I am not those sensations; I feel them. I am the one who perceives.

Here’s something spooky. If you do something, i.e. if your body performs some particular movement, can we say that you are not only the perceiver, you are also the agent? It certainly feels that way, but consider this experiment. People were wired up for brain activity and told to make a very sudden, spontaneous decision to push a button, with no premeditation. They thought they did, but the brain scan said otherwise. Their brains had made the decision for them well before they acted, well before they thought they were making their decision.

I used to be very good at slapping flies (still am, I guess). I would hover my hand over a fly and move as close as I could until she stopped washing her hands. Then I would enter a meditative state, relax my mind and arm, and try to send the fly the telepathic message that everything was just fine--when SLAP down would come my hand before she knew what hit her.

What a disappointment to learn that during that last second when I imagined I was meditating and not planning a slap, my brain was firing away in preparation!

Decision-making is a brain sensation. The awake part of us is riding around in a body that sensations tell us is our own, feeling pain, seeing blue, and getting the sense (believing) that we are making decisions and performing actions.

I am going to try to remember that about myself as often as I can all day today.

Or perhaps I should say: I observe the brain sensation that I have the intention of observing the mind remembering itself all day today.