DOES BODY/BRAIN ‘CONSCIOUSNESS’ KNOW REALITY?
~* A Caveat: All that’s said here is not meant to pretend, contend, or defend. In word-smithing unknowables like ‘awareness,’ there’s a certain non-conceptual ‘knowing’ that, effortlessly, must happen, that transports one beyond intelligent understanding by the mind. As J. Krishnamurti said: “Thought is never intelligent… the perception of the truth is intelligence, and in that there is complete security.”
In sum: believing the mind actually knows something may well be a necessary step, but it is not sufficient. A good pointer here is “Let nothing bind.” In truth, the person never knows. 😉
The non-personal fact of awareness, which we all are, is not a sentient experience that changes; it’s not measurable, conceivable, believable, or transferable; it IS, beyond all knowing by a knower. Awareness is so subtle and essential that the mind-made ‘person’ cannot know it; awareness gracefully presents itself to itself only. In fine, it takes awareness to know awareness. It seems – in our grossly amplified inner ‘world’ filled with fear and fury and desires that prod and pull – we’re almost totally overwhelmed by these daily sensational experiences. Yet, often in quietude in the midst of life’s chaos and confusion, some of us have ‘timeless‘ glimpses of non-personal being – a pure, undiscribable presence which they may recall later in time/memory as a personal ‘experience.’ And also, it seems, some of us actually, directly, recognize this timeless awareness.
Some others variously write and perhaps teach that awareness is an ‘experience’ and do so sincerely, albeit dismissively, basically saying,”If I can’t personally experience it, feel it, then awareness does not exist.” That’s conceptually understandable, but awareness is not in the sentient field of experience, thoughts and emotions of the mind-made ‘person.’ It’s not personal, not material, and not therefore perceivable. But it is the very timeless substance and source of reality.
Only awareness IS, all else is in non-personal fact, imagined, conceived and believed as my ‘reality’. Again, unless and until a rare, direct knowing of awareness effortlessly happens, and the illusion of reality portrayed by consciousness is instantly seen through, one will stay imprisoned by one’s own sentient convictions.
One can’t say more about this without repeating, which one seems to keep doing, but, for me, to write about awareness without directly knowing that one IS AWARE ALREADY may be useful but also mislead both the writer and the reader.. for a while. In any (apparent) event, some few seem to realize That one IS awareness, and, simultaneously, that one cannot know What one IS, there being no knower, nothing known. That lived fact leaves one happy and content to be a ‘living paradox‘, to know and not-know. To allow, to let nothing bind – to be fully free to love, live, and let be. 🙂
