What is conciousness?

hehe yes. I don't think there is a difference between the perception of light and light. The consciousness of the world seems to be localized to the body , which seems to be the center of one's activities. Like a dream, the world will disappear once the body/mind/intellect are transcended.

 

i did not ask for a metaphor, I wanted a description of what ego is. Tell me what ego is, without using "Like" or "Similar to" , do not compare it with anything, describe the nature of ego itself.

 

It can be observed that the sun sets at sunset, is this ego?

 

i think it's a mixture of our spirit & mind ( thinking)

 

Ego is three

Emotion
Gratification
Opression

 

Ego is thinking your in reality instead of being it.

 

Well, the best way to describe ego is to say that it is conciousness identifying itself with the body it is ihabiting at the present time.

 

Conciousness is life.
The Universe itself is conciousness.
Energy that IS life, aware of life.
Rocks are frozen music.

 

perhaps consciousness and existance are one, and cannot be seperated from the question of our origin/destination.

maybe the ego is a survival/social mechanism we have developed over time fueled by our attachment and desire to control certain aspects of our lives, and possibly other's lives as well.

 

though i also agree with sunyata's comment.

 

Now here's one that will really boggle your mind. If you had been isolated your entire life and never met another human being or been taught anything, would you be conscious?

 

i find it useful to remember that wholeness is wholeness. there is no "outside" of oneness. following the yin yang analogy this way allows it to be seen that the apparent outline, as well as the apparent background makes an entirety - whole.

the mind, the body, the ego, consciousness, the washing machine, a gun, the flowers, a mountain... anything you can think of constitutes something that has arisen in wholeness - and is therefore a wonder. some things the mind classifies as unpleasant, of course, always relative to its own judgements, which are usually linked to its own comfort....ask yourself how you reacted to the word "gun" in the list above.

the true miracle is not WHAT you are experiencing, but THAT you are experiencing at all! and it is so immediate and so simple that we overlook it completely, so busy are we looking for something extraordinary...

"what you are looking for, IS what is looking..." how extraordinary! :love:

 

Well we have consciousness and we have unconsciousness, so right off the bat we know that consciousness can't simply be 'being'.

I think it is pretty widely understood that when we are sleeping and not dreaming, we are unconscious. Effectively that is saying that we are unaware of what is happening around us and in the outside world, we are aware of nothing, our minds are blank, and that we are experencing nothing or are living through an unexperienced interval of time. To say that we aren't apprehending anything when we are unconcious is to say that we are perceiving nothing, remembering nothing, imagining nothing, and thinking of nothing.

We can say, also, that when we are conscious we are perceiving something, remembering something, imagining something, or thinking of something. Moreover we could be conceiving, judging, reasoning, sensing, or feeling something.

So it could be fair to say that consciousness is the minds act of any of those terms used above.

 

This seems to be near to the conscensus of the thread.

The notion seems to be that our ideas, (here to include all of the minds conscious acts ... perceptions/memories/imaginations/thoughts/senses/feelings etc.) are themselves the objects of apprehension.

I'll expect that those of you who agree with that will agree that you have ideas in your own mind. Ideas of which you are conscious. I also expect that you concede that other people have ideas in their minds, of which they are conscious.

This essentially locks each of us up in the private world of our own subjective experience. While it may be true that we can somehow infer the existence of things that are not in our minds, from the experience we have of our own ideas, the existence of other individuals, and of all the other bodies that we, as a result of common sense, suppose to be constituents of the physical world.

But since we can have no aquaintance with anything but our own ideas, as they are the objects of apprehension, there is no way to prove that any external reality exists.

The consequence of this inability to prove anything outside our own ideas is a total skepticism concerning the possibility of our having knowledge of a reality outside of our own minds. Another consequence is solipsism, which asserts that everything of which I am conscious is a figment of my own mind.

Common sense, though, rejects those conclusions as absurd. I am indeed responding to you and you to me. We cannot twist our minds into regarding all the conversations we have here as illusory - conversations in which we all can talk with one another about objects that we all experience, objects that we all refer to by the words we use to name them.

We certainly aren't talking about ideas in your mind, or ideas in my mind!

Thus I think it wise to say that the ideas are not the objects that we apprehend, but the objects by which we apprehend.

 

Maybe conciousness is the absence of delusion.

 

Conciousnnes is life itself--- we give meaning to the objects of perception, and that is the meaning of life.i.e, the meaning we give to it, and that meaning is different for everyone, though the experience via the senses is exactly the same.
What you cannot perceive does not exist(for you), yet perception itself is dependent on you as concioussnnes, and not as a body.

 

conciousness is god, we all ahve conciousness we are all god's suns. we are all from the same great concoiusness

 

When talking about conciousness, I think it useful to distinguish between perception and horseshit. Between what appears to us to be the case at the moment and statements that are contrived, derivitive, or dogmatic

 

Self awareness.


x

 

Huh?

Self awareness?

What is self awareness?

What is self?

What is awareness?

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