What is consciousness?

[Profpat]

Hi Mikal;

Did this awareness affect your thoughts of love?

[Mikal]

That awareness began to grow with self-examination...without self-love which is not selfishness but strong self-respect there cannot be strong love for others. We cannot in other words give away or share what we do not possess. Yes this awareness affects all we know and hope to know about love.

[Profpat]

That awareness began to grow with self-examination...without self-love which is not selfishness but strong self-respect there cannot be strong love for others. We cannot in other words give away or share what we do not possess. Yes this awareness affects all we know and hope to know about love.

Thats my belief also Mikal

[Mikal]

Profpat...I kind of look upon the growth of this awareness as the journey to unhate ourselves and this would not go back in any insidious way to those blessed with the responsibility to first love us in life but moreso to ignorance and especially our ignorance about laws which are universal

[Andrew]

What follows is a reproduction of my post in the forum "Conscioussness Explained".Sometimes things are understood better by contrast. A clear contrast we need to establish is the one between CONSCIENCE and IDEOLOGY. Ideology would be a set of values that determine the functioning of a society as a system. While the conscience would be A NATURAL PHENOMENON developed by human species alone (or at least human species thinks so). Conscience is merely capacity for communication with symbols. When a person passes out, this is exactly what happens: he or she loses the capacity for the communication with symbols. Conscience's got at least two properties: MEMORY which is the storage of information, and capacity for ASSOCIATION which is the process of thinking. The patterns of association maybe determine A CULTURE.

[melanie]

What IS consciousness? __ Consciousness IS ?

What we 'THINK' we know of Consciousness in the Immediacy of this moment NOW

This 'Self' is vast and deep and can never be plumbed.

Invisible _ except as colour
Silent _ except as sound
Intangible _ except as feelings
Without taste _ except as flavour
Without smell _ except as odour

Dimensionless and Unknowable _ except as number, form and meaning.

Wherein _ every thing and every relation on every scale,
the infinitely small joined to the infinitely big,
have their being as One _ Ever Unchanged.

Brought into awareness through these senses,
as an 'image'
creating the appearance of a momentary 'experience'

From the viewpoint of a specific 'creature'
at a specific 'place' and 'time' 'me' experiencing 'the world'

Curiosity is Eternal Self Discovery.
We are a portion of the cosmos ,perceiving a portion of itself.

Of this Omni_science.

[chazzysaw]

Consciousness is one of my favorite subjects of discussion. I enjoy reading the different opinions on this site and some I learn from to give me a better insight to my own thoughts and ideas.

[SteveA]

One Light

The mind is the thinking process.
It's the nature of mind to label, define, describe, categorize, and separate. Anything you see as separate is a projection of your mind.
The appearance of separation arises with the appearance of thought.
There is no actual separation. Separation is apparitional.
The thought "my life" does not create a life fragmented from universal life. The thought "my consciousness" does not create a consciousness fragmented from universal consciousness.
The thought "my body" does not create a body fragmented from the universal body.
The universe is one.
Thought does not fragment the universe, it merely creates the appearance of fragmentation.

When white light shines through a prism, the component colors of the spectrum appear.
The component colors of the spectrum are not separate from white light. They appear separate due to the nature of the prism.
But the light is one.



When universal consciousness shines through the mind, the spectrum of the world appears.
The world is not separate from universal consciousness.
They appear separate due to the nature of the mind.
But universal consciousness, your mind and your world are one.

You are universal consciousness shining through your mind creating the appearance of your world. It's all one, and it's all you.

But there appears a problem with trying to put it all into a self - if there's an unknown or growth and the source of these was also part of that self, then could neither know yourself nor control yourself.

I do like the graphic that you showed and it's similar to some of my views.

If you look at the single white line, it's symbolic of a source of white light which contains all frequencies (a complimentary view of this in time is interestingly enough matched to a single "impulse" event, though if you delay some frequencies in time, you can also have it appear as a very random source, but if you slide them in time, they align back to a single impulse - all the energy in a single event, but without a form in space or time).

But anyway, I think you can extend your prism diagram to make it a fractal tree, each prism takes some characteristics of the energy and uses it to channel the remaining (potentially unlimited) energy into another prism that can do the same - similar to the way energy flows in the universe between objects.

There's not an easy match between this form though and a time line - if you continually delve down a branch and head for the leaves, that could be seen as the path of a specific "leaf" object, determined by various decisions along the way, but that makes most of this structure unknown possibilities. If you instead sweep out each layer, then you can connect these into a single time line.

I believe that the origin represents ones current limits and this origin moves backwards over time (toward a larger "trunk" of the tree), but there's likely no end to that, except you can't choose a direction to move in that respect, you can only rearrange the things you already have and so though most things that are experienced are all least partly a result of what you are, and though it may be seen as a single whole, that can be due to the fact that there's nothing known or experienced beyond ones knowledge and experience, but, one and all, or one and an unknown, aren't necessarily identical (I don't think it's possible to self determine what is learned - though there could be an illusion of this by masking knowledge from some perspective and then revealing it, but it appears a leap of faith in that respect and I'd prefer to build a bridge ).

[labelwench]

We experience 'Now'. present

We can reflect on 'Then'. past

We may consider 'When'. future

The 'Who' and 'How' are still in question....

[Meem]

"Cogito, ergo sum"

I think, therefore I am.

I am, therefore I think.

"Ergo sum, cogito."