Consciousness

All there is, the ground of being, or a function of the brain?

I recently watched and then posted on my Facebook pages a video of Bernardo Kastrup and Francis Lucille discussing the question, “Is AI conscious?” Chris Niebauer then wrote this comment to my FB post: "The question itself is flawed, no thing is conscious. Consciousness gives the impression of things.”

Reading his comment, it was like a switch flipped.

What Chris said wasn't a new idea to me. I've heard and read words to that effect many times before. I've probably written them as well. And it hasn’t been just an idea either. But for whatever reason, hearing those words in that moment, something shifted. It was visceral and profound, as if everything turned upside down. And it remained upside down for several days afterwards. The best I can say is that any thought-sense that there are actual separate, discrete entities to have or not have consciousness was erased, and the indivisible wholeness and ungraspable no-thing-ness and nonsubstantial, holographic, dream-like nature of reality was deeply and viscerally experienced and clearly seen to be so. In relation to the comment that triggered it, I could describe it as the certainty that all there is, is Consciousness (One Mind, One God, One Reality, One Whole). This was not a new sense of things, but a deepening of one that has been steadily growing over many decades.

And then gradually, after a day or so, the intensity of it faded and things were back to normal, not meaning that this experiential sense of life is now absent, but that it is once again sometimes overridden by the conventional perspective of a solid “outside” world—not surprisingly, because the dualistic, materialist view is deeply conditioned and constantly reinforced, and often we don’t even realize we’re operating from it.

I’ve never been one to emphasize having particular or special experiences, and describing this one is not meant in any way to contribute to the habitual experience-chasing and experience-comparing that so often distracts people from the simplicity of what is always fully present and never not here, however it shows up.

Chris Niebauer promised to make a video and say more, and here is that video:

Here’s what I had written before I saw his video:

I have long said that all “things" are concretized abstractions. Thought mentally/conceptually carves up and categorizes the seamless Rorschach blot of experience into fixed, abstract categories: tables, chairs, people, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, nations, etc, all of which then seem to exist “out there” as actual separate, substantial, persisting, observer-independent, definable things. It’s a very convincing illusion, and we seem to actually perceive and experience everything this way until we begin to look and listen very carefully.

That there is a huge difference between the abstract conceptual map and the living territory has been clear here for a very long time, although of course the illusion doesn’t stop happening, and it can still feel believable and be quite mesmerizing. We almost continuously and habitually mistake our ubiquitous conceptual maps for the living actuality without realizing this is happening, and the kind of nondual exploration, practice or play that interests me is in large part about seeing through and waking up from being completely hypnotized by these maps while simultaneously becoming more and more present with or awake to (and as) the living actuality.

I’ve long had the sense of everything being one indivisible whole, whether that wholeness is understood as the emptiness, impermanence and interdependence posited by Buddhism or the One Self posited by Advaita. Whether we call it mind or matter, consciousness or energy, however we conceptualize this wholeness, it is infinitely diverse but undivided, closer than close and all-inclusive, eternal and infinite, unborn and undying, indestructible and always Here-Now. In our direct experience, what cannot be doubted, what is most fundamental is this unbound awaring presence, this boundless consciousness showing up as present experiencing and dissolving back into the germinal darkness of primordial awareness every night in deep sleep.

I appreciate the way Bernardo Kastrup conceptualizes the relationship of the individual mind to the One Consciousness as something akin to a whirlpool’s relationship to the river or a wave’s relationship to the ocean. And I like how he sometimes describes the way the One Consciousness refracts into individual minds as being something akin to what happens in Dissociative Identity Disorder (what used to be called multiple personalities).

Kastrup has talked about a woman with DID who was blind in one of her identities but not in the others, and she had no biological reason to be blind, and they did some brain scans or neurological tests on her, and the area of the brain associated with vision went dark when she was in her blind identity and lit up in the others. That argues strongly for the power of mind over matter.

The view that “everything is consciousness” has long made sense to me intellectually as the obvious fact that we can never experience anything outside of consciousness. We may believe there is an observer-independent world “out there” made of matter that existed long before consciousness appeared on the scene, and we may think that consciousness is the product of nervous systems and brains that have become ever more highly evolved over time leading finally to human self-reflective consciousness and complex capacities for abstract thinking and language.

But while there seems to be credible evidence for this materialist perspective, it can never be proven beyond doubt because we can never step outside of consciousness. No brain or dinosaur bone has ever been found as anything other than an experience in consciousness. And furthermore, the more physics evolves, the more it seems that matter can’t really be found and that observing changes what is being observed. And when we tune into our direct experiencing, the map-world dissolves into something much more evanescent, unpindownable, unresolvable and indeterminate.

But I’ve never held the “consciousness is all there is” view with the certainty that folks like Steve Hagen, Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille, Bernardo Kastrup and many others hold it. I’ve come to experience life more and more from that perspective, and experientially, I can go there easily—it’s the thinking mind that throws up doubts. Ultimately, it seems to me unknowable whether there is or isn’t anything other than, or outside of consciousness, and I wonder if mind and matter aren’t just two different ways of seeing and describing the same inconceivable and ungraspable reality.

I resonate with the groundlessness of not knowing, and I find that a vast freedom opens up experientially when all labels and ideas fall silent, when the need to grasp this reality in any way lets go.

And, of course, “consciousness” is itself a word-label, a conceptualization of something intimately known that can never be an object. It has no qualities, no shape, no size, no particular location. It’s what we most fundamentally are, this aware no-thing-ness appearing as everything. It is alive with an immense energy and has been variously described as presence, radiance, luminosity, intelligence, energy, awareness or God.

Materialists say this can all be reduced to neurons and biological processes in the brain, and beneath that, to subatomic particles and quarks. And many people seem to want to go even further and reduce this aliveness to something mechanical that AI can reproduce, but from the perspective of direct experience rather than second-hand belief, those views are all backward. In direct experience, consciousness appears as neurons, brains and AI, not the other way around. The other way around is a theory that depends in part on speculation and belief. AI can certainly outdo human intelligence in countless ways, but that kind of information gathering, problem-solving intelligence is not all there is to consciousness.

But again, what I find most freeing is the letting go of all certainties and abiding in the groundlessness of not knowing.

And here’s what I have to say now after watching Chris’s video:

It’s a great video. Really helpful for me. And I love that Chris uses the word myth to describe both the materialistic and the consciousness only perspectives, not asserting either one with absolute certainty or finality, holding them both lightly or playfully. But clearly he favors the consciousness only perspective, and I’ve also gradually come to favor it, feel it and live from it more and more in recent years. I also appreciate how Chris talked about the relationship between thinking and materialism, which I also noticed, when my “flipped experience” began to close over as I thought more about it. It takes thought to come up with materialism (and dualism and separation and “things”). As I said, it’s the thinking mind that throws up doubts. But our actual experience is always boundless, seamless, nondual awareness or consciousness.

Does it make any difference which perspective we gravitate towards? Does it matter? For me, the answer lies in exploring what it is like to live with each of these ways of seeing life, and also, which one feels most true when we give open attention to actual direct experiencing and presence itself. One thing I notice is that groundlessness is the nature of pure consciousness, as is love.

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Love to all…