Awareness Monism (5/11)
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
3. “That-makes-sense-ers” vs. “that-makes-no-sense-ers”
All my perceptions (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.), thoughts, mind-images/visualizations, feelings, etc.—i.e. all my experiences—are different “colors” or qualities of the same experiential ground. This canvas or screen, which manifests these qualities, is not something that is mine, but that is me. The ground is the being of those experiences. So, I am the being of those experiences—which simply means, I am those experiences. The experiences are in constant flux—awareness constantly manifests new qualities; new qualities come into the now, but they all share the same being, which is this and which is now. E’s body, thoughts, etc. are experienced as located on the canvas, and are present with more consistency than e.g. random auditory experiences, but they are also just patches of color covering the screen, which change constantly. For example, the canvas is now covered with an experience centered around E’s body: in the center of the visual image is the screen, peripherally framed by glasses, my jumping fingers on the keyboard, the window, etc.; there is the hum of my computer ventilator and the bark of a dog outside; there is the tactile experience of my toes grasping the stand of my table; there is the sound of thoughts in my head; etc. The particular content is in constant flux. Focusing attention on something just means that some quality or qualities are made present or become stronger. Every moment is a different experiential landscape.
What I am, then, is the being of these experiences, and also the experiences themselves (there is no being without something that “has” that being—being is of something). Yet the experiences themselves come and go, but I remain, as different experiences. This is why it is conceivable to me that “I could be a different human being ”. That is, instead of an “E-movie”, there would be “some-different-human -movie”. What would be the same is the canvas/screen, albeit painted with different content, manifesting different qualities.
This “being of experience” is what is awareness. Awareness is bound to some content, some quality that it manifests, whose being it is. AM is the claim that there is only one awareness, i.e. that all experiences are manifested by the same being (in the ontological sense[1]), for and in the same I, which is at the same time their being and their witness. Experience is, crucially, not something that is independent and in a certain external relation with this witness, but the witness is the experiences; the experiences exist in being experienced, and the experiencing, their being itself, is itself the experiencer. Experiences “experience themselves”. The experiencer is not apart from them, but it is them.
All this is phenomenologically self-evident to me. This is what I see when I look at my experience. I am not suggesting that this is the right way to think of “self”, or of “experience”. This is a frame, a way to do that, that has certain implications and leads to certain realizations, which are true relative to that frame.
At the same time, I am very much aware that this way of conceiving of things might be very unintuitive or even meaningless to many people, who cannot relate to it and who conceptualize their experiences (and themselves) very differently. I might be very mistaken in the conclusions I arrive at based on these phenomenological realizations that are my starting point, perhaps in some way that I cannot even conceive of—but I believe that what I am trying to express by my words is “real”. That is, there is a real insight, a real understanding to be had by grasping it. AM could be true; and if it is true, it has profound existential implications.
Unsurprisingly, in my experience of attempting to communicate the idea/insight, few people seem to be receptive to grasping my intended meaning. This could of course be a sign that what I am talking about is somehow invalid or senseless. However, I conclude, based on the fact that there are many people who apparently do relate to it, that perhaps the more likely interpretation is that the idea is not understandable by all for reasons that many other perfectly sensible ideas are not grasped by all—there is something missing or very different in their personal conceptscapes and phenomenologies that prevents them from understanding it. (In the same way, their conceptualizations might seem to miss the point or fail to make sense to me.) That in itself, of course, does not mean that the insight itself is true; it might be mistaken.
I have a few ideas for why this might be the case, for why some people resonate with the idea, and some do not.[2]
As has already been pointed out, in order for a person to grasp the claim of AM, they need to understand the referent of the term “awareness”. And that understanding seems to depend on one’s inclination to conceive of themselves, their “I”, as essentially empty.
This, I speculate, could in some cases have something to do with the strength and consistency of a person’s self-narrative. If a person has a strong, unified, egosyntonic narrative self, they might reify it and identify with it. For example, if there is no (or only a weak) discontent and dissonance over what the human being that they are feels, thinks, and does, and what they want to feel, think, and do, i.e. there is no strong reflective dissociation of personality into conflicting clusters, the person might simply identify with the unity of content (personality, feelings, etc.) that they are to themselves.
If a person, on the contrary, experiences personality disturbances, where their self-narrative is inconsistent, weak, fragile or changeable, the ego-cluster/personal narrative is too fuzzy to be reified and conceptualized as a “thing” they can be. If one’s thoughts and feelings are a problem, they are noticed as things that intrude—they are noticed and reflected on as objects, which presupposes a conceptual dissociation of the contents (thoughts, feelings) from the self that judges them. Beneath the fuzzy cloud, there is the empty self. The fuzzier the cloud of content/ego, potentially the clearer the view of the blank ground underneath.
However, the opposite could also be true—a person seeking stability and unity in the midst of a changeable maelstrom of what they are at different times to themselves could instead remain focused on the content, trying to piece it together and solidify it as best they can to create a consistent narrative structure. So unstable content (unstable sense of self) could also obscure the view of the ground, rather than reveal it. However, instability always means shifting, changing, and reordering; and in the spaces in between, when there is nothing to hold onto, the ground could sometimes be revealed.
So I hypothesize that people with psychologies marked by narrative inconsistencies, e.g. people with egodystonic mood and personality disturbances, because of their unstable self-narrative frames, might find it easier to grasp and identify with the “empty self” of awareness, making it possible for them to conceive of being born as a different human being. On the other hand, people who live a narratively consistent life, whose emotions and capacities more or less cooperate with who they want to be, who don’t experience such strong shifts in self-perception and perception of the world, will have a tendency to identify themselves with the narrative/content structures that are consistently present.
The key phenomenon I hypothesize might make a person more receptive to the idea that the I is essentially empty seems to be dissociation—more precisely, dissociation (of the self) from narrative self-structures (including one’s feelings, thoughts, desires). These might also be induced by the use of psychedelics or self-reframing meditation practices that lead to “ego death”.
However, I think that self/identity disturbances that come with different forms of dissociative states (be they organic or induced by meditation or drugs) are neither necessary nor sufficient for “grasping awareness”; they just might be possible paths to it.
[1] i.e. by the same Being.
[2] I think identifying what it is about some people that makes them more receptive to certain ideas (and not only philosophical) is an extremely valuable endeavor in general. What do eliminativists have in common? Or compatibilists? Or platonists? What does that tell us about the nature of the philosophical problems themselves, that there are people sharing some traits that make them inclined to favor one tribe over the other, one solution over another? What does that reveal about how things really are?