To always provide an answer, or to accept another person's answer, is to deprive the soul experience of knowing the answer. Ultimately it is only the authentic experiences that offer us, individually, the keys.
The purpose here is merely to ponder together in search of our own understanding.
"Experience must always be individual, and self knowledge, which is the indispensable foundation, can only be attained by individual effort." -Isha Schwaller de Lubicz
I use my eyes to see my reflection in a mirror, or see the words in a book I read, or to differentiate the car that is mine in a parking lot full of similar vehicles. I use these eyes, ears, nose, mouth...to mediate the world I live in.
And, I also seem to have an auto pilot that sometimes gets flipped on and I don't even notice. I am driving to the grocery store on Saturday and suddenly realize I am turning on to the street of the office where I work. I wasn't even conscious of where I was going until I got there- the wrong place. Some other I just took over the wheel and shoved me ... I don't even know where, just out of the way.
In the evenings, after a long day its great to crawl into bed and close my two eyes and fall into sleep, into rest. But, where do I go? I mean I go to sleep, I know, but ... is this the same place I go when the auto pilot takes over? to sleep? Hmmm... sleep is the place, or state, where
the activity of the brain is altered, and consciousness of the surroundings is practically suspended
Sleep is a state of being. An office building is a place. I can drive my self to the office, but for some reason I f a l l into sleep.
Why is going to sleep expressed as a fall? The consciousness of the surroundings is suspended because the activity of the brain is altered, and this apparently leaves our physical body, the eyes, ears, nose etc in the car driving or in the bed snoring, alive, but without consciousness.
Having used my brain to clarify some of this shifting of realities I can only assert now that what we call reality is also not a place, but a state. After falling into sleep, or in the process of falling, the brain is sort of turned off. Or, like a computer it goes into sleep mode and the screen goes dark. Yet the body continues to operate but without consciousness. And sometimes while technically wide awake the brain can also seemingly turn off and suspend consciousness yet the body still drives the car, or the physical being,
This is how we lose the keys. Unconsciously we set them down, and have to search for them later.
Let me say this same idea now a different way.
Having used my brain to become conscious of this shifting of realities between I am driving the car and auto pilot is driving the car, I can see that I, in my body am an auto pilot sometimes, and also a seer of, a witness to this auto pilot.
So naturally I think I should meet and get to know this auto pilot I.
I think that with my brain " I", - I will call out the name of the auto pilot and see if I get anyanswer.
H e l l o.... hello automaton- are you there?
Hello?... No response. Why is that? Is there no consciousness there to answer ? Is it fair to say, is it true to say, that "I" sometimes move or mediate in the world with consciousness, in a conscious state, and sometimes I don't? Sometimes I am unconscious? I think so, yes.
I think I have discerned at least two "I" 's.
Moving on.
Does this then mean, does this conclude, that the I is a process, or is a processing, or a processor in the brain.
Am "I" the brain? Do "I" come from the brain?
Well I don't think, -or I mean "I" do think, that we don't have all the evidence.
And there is still this matter of consciousness. We saw that when the brain goes into sleep mode, altered activity mode, there still is an "I", and it is a somewhat conscious "I".
I will venture to say now that we do have two "I's". We have a brain "I" and a consciousness "I". And the brain and consciousness are evidently not the same since each seems to continue to operate an "I" ongoing, even if one or the other has shifted a mode of operation, it's modus operandi.
Further it seems evident that the modus operandi of the automaton is unconscious, lack of consciousness, bodily awake, but consciousness absent.
So how is consciousness relative, or a reality to the I ?
Is there also a third "I" ? Is there an I that evolves as the brain I and the consciousness I combine or unify?
To work with these questions it will be useful to bring in some support. Here is the introduction of Isha Schwaller de Lubicz. She says...What a human being
"commonly calls consciousness is his brain-consciousness, which is only a mirror reflecting thoughts and inferences whose origin and reality [the human being] cannot clearly discern, based as they are on chance associations of ideas, impressions, and emotions."
In her book The Opening Of The Way the "I" is referred to as the witness, or the different witnesses unique to a human being if one choose to notice and cultivate these aspects of one's being. A human, she says, has three levels of consciousness, ..." the Automaton, Permanent Witness, the Spiritual Witness". The innate conscious of Nature is evolved uniquely. In the animal kingdom this innate consciousness becomes animal instinct, the instinctual consciousness. But, she goes on to say,
"..in man it is dormant because of his artificial education, which concentrates his attention on the evidence of his senses and his reasoning faculty. ...Brain consciousness, in other words, is only a mental projection of what a man believes himself to be, of what he believes himself to want and do, but effectually rules him because he does not know what influences from within and without determine it, and with it his behavior; and also because brain consciousness has no more contact with real consciousness than have two radio stations working on different wavelengths."
So in discerning these three levels of consciousness, the witnesses of Isha's book, its necessary to look at, or look for, the evidence of each of these in ourselves, in our " I' 's.
And these are the clues she offers us if we want to look for evidence.
x
And then in her work she unfolds for us the other two witnesses, the two nonmortal states of consciousness generally unnoticed . These we truly can find evidence of if we are still interested after arm wrestling with the Automaton.
Thank you, Isha Schwaller de Lubicz.
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the UNSEEN. |
SCHWALLER DE LUBICZ | AUTOMATON |
| GOSSAMER GLOSSARY | CONSCIOUSNESS | SPIRITUALITY |
