Wednesday, 2 June 2021

The question of whether there can be consciousness without self or self without consciousness, which is largely, but not altogether, a muddle of ill-defined terms can be clarified somewhat by asking a simpler question. Can there be self without you? The answer that immediately arises is, of course there can! It's not that you have or are a self, or even that 'a self' makes any sense as such, but more like that you are a participation in self, and a pretty flawed one at that. It is self-ness that is wonderful, that is the substance of all experiencing, whereas your self is more like a project, incomplete and probably never meant to be complete, but simply a transient way in which self-ness can be made to appear. In this sense self-ness is another way of saying consciousness, but one that happily presupposes something much more than can be reduced to an oddly paradoxical emergent of mind.

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