What is Consciousness?
The word consciousness derives from the Latin conscius, “to know with”. This is similar to the word science, which is also derived from the same root scire, “to know”. Although we cannot know anything without consciousness, in the breadth of all our sciences we have no
definition for what consciousness is. Consciousness and science are connected at the root, but you'd never know it by how far they apart they've grown. We cannot know if we've really progressed without knowing how far we've come.
Is there anything that you're completely aware of? Reality is unlike our experience – we can only perceive our interpretations. We cannot see, hear, touch, taste, feel, or even think beyond our perspective. For us, our perspective is all that is, but is not yet enough to perceive reality.
The day that we give up the notion of truth is the day that we learn to work within the illusion to find out, instead, what truly works for us.
We think of a consciousness that can be aware of something – but even illusions laugh at such thoughts. The term conveniently hides the reality that we cannot be aware of something directly. Consciousness is all about relationships. If you look at your hand you are not seeing your hand for what it is. Although the illusion seems like reality it is the only way to perceive we've ever known, and so it becomes our reality by default. What the hand is really like is irrelevant, and likely does not exist without an interpretation of it. It doesn't mater how something sees itself, either, as that is also an interpretation. If you see yourself as tall and bear-like and someone else does not, it doesn't mean that they aren't seeing you for who you are. Perspective cannot be shared. Even as you look in the mirror you are interpreting the electrical signals coming from your retina as they were in the past; we cannot even share perspective with ourselves because the moment we do it becomes another perspective. If you could perceive the signals directly you'd still be perceiving an interpretation.
True reality cannot be perceived directly. Truth has no perspective. Illusions are more important than reality because they allow relationships to exist, whereas absolute reality does not. What is important is that which we can use. The illusions “create” consciousness simply by relating to each other, making up the geometry of perspective we call reality.
Consciousness, by itself, does not exist. We can only know of other – it is impossible to know of your self on a 1:1 relationship. Such would be beyond perspective because there is nothing else with which to compare. So we make up “other” in our body, our thoughts, our beliefs, our actions, other people and things, and events and activity all over the Earth, round infinity and back again.64
Watching a film, the illusion of motion is very convincing. We are so engaged in the drama we forget that we are watching individual frames rather than something lively. The magic happens in the relationships between the frames to give us a picture of reality. We, too, will find consciousness not in the frames of existence but between those illusions.
What do you consider your "self"? If it is your body, then what do you do with a part of your self when you clip your nails or cut your hair? If it is only the living part of your body that you consider your self, where does your self go when you lose weight? If it is your mind, do you gain more self as you get older and wiser, or perhaps lose part of your self if you can't
64 That is to say that we can represent infinity and interpret something to be infinite, but infinity itself does not exist. The universe is no more infinite than finite, as there really is no “other” other than something that cannot be wholly interpreted and so seems to go on forever in our natural interpretations.
remember something? Where is your self when you are dreaming – in the dream? If consciousness is "awareness of my own being", what does it mean to be aware of another being? Are you independently aware of your being, or are you just using one part of your
“self” to sense another part? If you are more than your brains, could you be aware of what remains if your brains were shut of completely? There is no one point that we can say, “This is my self” because there is nothing to point at. We are wanting to point between the frames but end up focusing on the frames themselves for the answers because we can see them.
The notion of self must, paradoxically, include other things. There is no self without what we don't consider our self to be. In order to be we must relate, as we cannot be by ourselves. We must be in relation to something else that is (or isn't), as we cannot be conscious by ourselves, only in relationship with something else. In order to think or feel, we must relate to what we are thinking and feeling. By thinking, we open a dialogue with something we do not yet sense our self to be. By feeling, our emotions flow to where they were not but a few moments ago. In order for consciousness to be, it must be conscious of it being something else. In our brains are mirror neurons which fire the same way if you do something as they would if you see someone else doing the same thing.65 That we may be conscious, we must forget that we are there already, but still remember how to get there.
This brings us back to the root of consciousness, the Latin term for, “to know with”. We are conscious when we know with something else, forming a relationship. But, as what forms conscious relationships is a variable, consciousness is relative. We are “conscious” by relating to one thing more and another thing less. As an example, the more aware we are of dreams the less aware we are of waking reality. And the subconscious mind is not aware of the name of what you had for breakfast, but you are.
The Consistency of Conscious Being
Let's imagine that you are having conversations with two people siting in two separate rooms. The subject of the conversations is clouds. The two people you are speaking with are exactly the same except in one way: one person knows what clouds and its related concepts are, and the other person does not.
When you talk to the person that knows what clouds are, they are able to relate to the representation (“clouds”) as well as other concepts in the conversation such as beauty, form, lightness, and flufiness. They know why a cloud can be white and airy or grey and heavy.
They know all of this because they already have relationships with those concepts. Thus, this person has a conscious awareness of clouds and can follow the conversation with great ease.
However, when you talk to the person that does not know what clouds are, they are unable to follow you. They can only begin to relate to clouds by listening for concepts they can relate to, and then relating “clouds” to those.
Now imagine that the two people you have spoken to are actually the same person that can consciously decide when to remember and forget about all the cloud-related concepts.
As “consciousness” is all about relationships, we can be conscious of something by simply relating to it. The more we relate to something the more conscious of it we are.66 Further, we can relate to other beings that seem more like us, such as other people or certain kinds of animals, and we consider those to have consciousness, too. If you were able to relate to a
65 Reference: htps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0pwKzTRG5E
66 Though, again, this means that we are then less conscious of something else.
cloud by talking to it, you might even consider it also has consciousness. But what cannot relate? It is all consciousness. It is not possessed, however. One is only conscious via relationships – without some kind of relationship there is no consciousness or subconsciousness, or perception.
This is no diference between your conscious self and subconscious self; they are the same self, but seem diferent as it relates to concepts. Where the relationship between one thing and another is not relative (i.e., not clearly defined) to our waking consciousness we call it subconsciousness. The more we relate the deeper we can perceive. This is what makes the subconscious mind great. It forgets itself to form a relationship with what it has forgoten and uses the relationship to form paterns that propagate reality, allowing for a seemingly endless interpretation of all the geometry. Your perspective makes everything possible.
The Present is a Gif That You Never Got (but Hints at a Relationship That You Did) Our lives seem to revolve around the present moment. It seems like we're on the edge of something amazingly new and continuous, yet perfectly balanced between the known (our past) and the unknown (our future). It seems to be all we can be really consistently sure of, like an always-changing, active and perfect memory.
But, unfortunately, the present doesn't exist.
We know that when we look at the stars we are looking back in time billions of years, as it takes a really long time for their light to reach us. Light from our own Sun does not have too far to travel but is still around 8 minutes old. Although sound and light take time to travel we can still function as though they were instantaneous occurrences, as our brains don't seem to care for how old or new something is.
Looking at our own hand or listening to our own voice we are not seeing or hearing it as it is in the present, but as it was in the past. The diference is in nanoseconds, but it is still
significant enough that it isn't truly now.
These illusions work well enough that we can manage our lives without struggling with fundamental properties of physics as we walk down the street or pay our bills, but it also points out that we are not able to experience reality directly, only the workable illusion of reality. Also, the importance of relationships.
Light travels from our Sun at 671,000,000 miles per hour. Sound travels to your ears at 768 miles per hour. You can walk home at about 3 miles per hour. But a relationship is
instantaneous. The Sun has already formed a new relationship with everything around it before its light has had a chance to think about it. Your brains already have a relationship with a decision several seconds before you are aware.67 Gravity of the Sun knows where the Earth is going to be long before its light reaches us. The geometry of relationships does not care how we interpret spacetime, because space and time are just resistances in its geometry.
The question is, “What is relative?” If your 5th grade teacher's words regarding success are relative to you, it won't mater how long ago it was. Her words will resonate with you wherever you are, regardless of time. If you chiseled out a shoe and a chair from the same block of relationships, perhaps one shoe will not be as comfortable as the other when you're wearing it, or siting in the chair makes you feel like going for a walk.
67 Reference: htp://phys.org/news12723952619.html
Gravity of the Sun doesn't care about stars in other galaxies, as those relationships are
already folded into relationships of whatever is nearby. What is far is folded into what is near.
Everything doesn't need to be known, only the harmony of what is close needs to be sensed to extrapolate the totality of everything else. If Jupiter was somehow to disappear, the
“shock” of the unfolding relationships would push the Sun a litle, then pull it back as it organized the unfolded relationships into new folds. As people and things disappear from our lives we may also be shocked in such a way.
Your past and future are also folded like this. Past and future are simply experiences that aren't so relative to you. The resistance between the two we call the present, but even this cannot be touched. The present illustrates the universal illusion.
Is it time that allows us to perceive an apple as round, juicy, and red? These things are just our interpretation of the relationships behind the apple that allow us to see it that way. We are perceiving what is related and folding up the rest into the wide arms of potential. We are perceiving the same apple as a seedling, an apple tree, an unripe apple, a ripe apple, a half-eaten apple, and a roten apple – but all folded into the round, juicy, and red apple because that is the apple that is most relative to us.
It is not the speed of time that causes the “delay” of perspective, but our own swinging on the geometry, like monkey bars, as we sense the next closest bar to swing on. What we call the immediate past and future are the next bars backward and forward, but the present is our time spent between bars, floating in an experience that has no representation. We are not conscious of the present because awareness of the present only comes about through a relationship with something else, in what we call past and future.
The future expands our awareness, while the past contracts it. The harmonic equilibrium in the middle, the resistance, is our present. We seem to be move forward in time as our bodies are powered by chaos and limited by order. The past burns the future like oxygen burns hydrogen in the fuel cell of our bodies, beckoning us electromagnetically as the past turns to rust. Chaos and order, forever tugging at each other. Only their progeny seem at peace.
Relationships and You
Blissfully surrounded by illusions, the more an illusion relates to something else the more real it seems. Focusing on these relationships is how we fall asleep, how we manage to wake up, and how we go about our day. By the magic of relationships the familiar is a window to the unfamiliar. We can relate to anything through what we already know. You could say that perception is information about relationships, and as we perceive something we get information about those things that it represents, and other things that are folded into it.
The light you see when you look up at the night sky has not travelled for billions of years. It travels only from the edge of relevance to your immediate perspective. The light you see takes no time to travel. It's a relationship.
There is nothing in a person's reality that exists by itself without interacting with everything around it. A broken car in a garage will interact with the surrounding environment and may even influence the geometry of other things and people nearby. Stresses at home or in the workplace are a part of the total perspective, not limited to what we consider to be the cause of the stress. Every aspect of your reality, every person and thing you like and don't, drinks
from your cup and bathes where you bathe. The separation is only in our imaginations.
What we call chemical addition, for example, is not addiction to a chemical but a person's relationship to their surroundings where interaction with a certain drug can help to facilitate the relationship, and sometimes force a temporary logical narrative. In this way, the drug is an interface with a reality that parallels the current one in relativity. Or, you can say, the drug enables them to adapt to the other aspects of their environment that they perceive. The body doesn't know the diference between the drugs in our food or any other drugs, only the efect they have on how you interpret relationships. Some efects are more powerful than others and may have unintended consequences.
Look at this cute litle hamster. She's ambitiously climbing his wheel like there's no tomorrow.
His litle feet seem to fly to each rung of the wheel, but she never quite reaches even the height of the center axle. Some of us might see the hamster running up but never out and begin to wonder about our own place in society, feeling like there's no end to the race like the hamster might. Others might not see a hamster at all. But the big question is how does this hamster understand calculus? Is she over qualified for his job as a hamster wheel operator, or is there some kind of magic
involved? Worms also perform what we call calculus to find food.68 But how? We are not more intelligent than a hamster, nor more intelligent than each other. Some of us learn faster than others not because of intelligence but because we meet with less resistance in our
interpretations, relating to more things and are thus able to interpret relationships in a more balanced way when it comes to overall harmony.
But humans are not the only beings that interpret relationships – all of reality does. If you have a well-kept house, for example, and decide to not fix a second-floor window that was recently cracked then the other windows around it may begin to interpret relationships diferently. They are more likely to adopt the interpretation of "brokenness" and atract more opportunities for broken windows and related manifestations. The entire property can be afected by this small change in the interpretation of relationships. Tomorrow has found a new interface.
These relationships are integral to our universe and our lives. We naturally want to create relationships with something... anything. We constantly seek out opportunities to create a relationship with someone or something else to further the illusion of our existence. A person, place, thing, idea, anything that is or can be somehow represented. We give names to this consciousness-creating process: love, lust, hate, obsession, laughter, passion, anger, fetish, happiness, etc. It doesn't mater what kind of relationship it is. We don't know anyway – we
These relationships are integral to our universe and our lives. We naturally want to create relationships with something... anything. We constantly seek out opportunities to create a relationship with someone or something else to further the illusion of our existence. A person, place, thing, idea, anything that is or can be somehow represented. We give names to this consciousness-creating process: love, lust, hate, obsession, laughter, passion, anger, fetish, happiness, etc. It doesn't mater what kind of relationship it is. We don't know anyway – we