Hard Problem of Consciousness

[5adja5bMember]

Thanks Don. I guess I’m coming from the angle of everything subjectively experienced ultimately being fabrication – whether that fabrication is labelled nama or rupa or anything else. And in that sense even distinguishing nama from rupa, at a certain point of practice, may become arbitrary.

Anyway, thanks again for your reply, I have a clearer sense of where you are coming from now 🙂

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by  5adja5b.

[Don SalmonMember]

Sure. I would just recommend, at some point, talking with someone directly or actually studying some Buddhist philosophy on emptiness. There are, I’ve found, points at which such study can clarify issues that come up in practice. Culadasa has some good recommendations in the back of TMI.

[5adja5bMember]

I know there are some good resources out there 🙂

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by  5adja5b.

[5adja5bMember]

Actually to add further info (I was wary about going round in circles hence my brief reply above); beyond my own exploration and direct experience, I have looked into this through Culadasa’s teachings (I think it’s the teaching retreat on meditation and insight or the one on enlightenment where Culadasa talks about nama and rupa and leads a guided meditation on them); plus the reading list on dhamatreasure.org, among other resources. Rob Burbea’s book ‘Meditations on emptiness and dependent arising’ is good on this subject (approx halfway through that one).

Just to be clear, are you saying that nama and rupa are two specifically different things?

My understanding, intellectually and what I see and explore at my current level of meditation, is that everything we care to point to boils down to the mind-system interpreting sensation and modelling a reality based on that. It’s all input from an ultimately unknowable reality that is then modeled into the conventional world we see around and within us.

And then even beyond that, the idea that there’s a ‘mind’ that is specifically modelling reality is in itself an empty fabrication as part of a unified, interconnected process.

Consciousness (in its conventional sense of being ‘aware’ of something; I believe Culadasa refines it to being information exchange specifically at the highest level of the mind-system) is too a fabrication, so far as I can tell. I have not experienced consciousness without being conscious ‘of’ something. I actually do not see consciousness as a problem or something unknowable – the sense of ‘someone’ being ‘aware’ appears to be in itself a fabrication and it is my experience that this can be explored in meditation, on and off the cushion, too. The idea of being an awareness that is consciously wandering around and doing stuff (even once one no longer is seduced by an ego-self), while seductive, is one that can be challenged. Periods of no agency at all; and watching that no agency; and even that watching of no-agency has no agency (and is fabricated). Just one system all interacting and flowing into everything else.

With that assumption of ‘someone’ being ‘aware’ challenged, Culadasa’s description in TMI of consciousness applying to companies, countries, societies, galaxies, the universe makes sense to me.

Anyway I speak in the awareness that any insights can be deepened, reevaluated, reinterpreted or seen more clearly as practice develops.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by  5adja5b.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by  5adja5b.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by  5adja5b.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by  5adja5b.

[Don SalmonMember]

re: Just to be clear, are you saying that nama and rupa are two specifically different things?

Distinguishable, but not separate, not “inherently existent.”

Distinguishable in the same way an apple can be distinguished from an orange, without in any way compromising or negating the essential unity (but not uniformity!) of all.

****

I did think of another specific recommendation – anything and everything by Alan Wallace. If you want something more specific, “Confessions of a Buddhist Skeptic’ (the title being a direct, and I think, well-deserved, rebuke to Stephen Batchelor – see Culadasa’s comment about him) and “Mind in the Balance.”

[5adja5bMember]

Fair enough, I can accept that 🙂

Hadn’t heard of Alan Wallace, but he’s now on my radar! Thanks.

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