The one consciousness

[cognition]

Hi,

Newbie here.

I am trying to understand how everything is ONE consciousness. I may have understood that the body and mind are not real and the soul/consciousness is the only reality. I'm not able to understand how everything is in fact ONE consciousness.

I may have made some headway by the analogy of the space in a pot being identical with the space outside, or, the different waves being identical with the ocean at their root.

Still doubts linger. Any help will be appreciated.

[Sy Borg]

Doubts are reasonable in this situation. A few considerations:

- consciousness is extreme interconnectedness. Some phenomena are quite interconnected, but not enough, or in the right way, to generate consciousness. However, in the future they may do, just as life on Earth was not conscious for a long time and then it slowly "woke up".

- if we lived within a larger conscious system (or systems), how would we know? Also, how conscious do we mean? As conscious as a cockroach, a mouse, a dolphin or a human?

- might there be types of consciousness that are so different to ours that we would not recognise it? Eg. very slow or very fast.

[cognition]

TY for your comments. The analyses of the three states of dream/deep sleep/waking prove that our true nature is consciousness. Consciousness is indivisible because if there is a division then that has to be known by consciousness itself, which leads to infinite regress.

I may understand this logically speaking, but am trying to imbibe it intuitively.

The subject-object paradox is also brought to relief by understanding consciousness. That consciousness is the "inner" reality of both the subject and the object is perhaps as I may have understood it the only way to explain relation.....

From: www <dot> swami-krishnananda <dot> org/com/com_neoh.html

"Thomas Hill Green, a great pioneer in the movement of this interpretation of absolute idealism, argues that all relations, whether in sensation or perception, require to be synthesised in order to form contents of a single grasp of knowledge. This synthesis of the manifold of sensations and perceptions is impossible without a synthesising consciousness. Even the existence of the related terms cannot be accounted for without a non-relative consciousness that lies behind relations. This consciousness must be spiritual because it is supernatural, above the appearances of Nature. Consciousness cannot change, for, if it does, it would have to be known by another changeless consciousness persisting through change; else we would end in an infinite regress in our search for the very possibility of a knowledge of change. Consciousness is eternal, for its cessation is inconceivable. If we can think of its cessation, our consciousness ought to survive its cessation, and we would again land in a deathless consciousness. Consciousness should also be universal, for it relates the objects of the whole universe. It is not merely my sensations and perceptions that are synthesised but also the various objects present in the universe. The consciousness that relates objects outside is not my personal mind, for the objects are out there independent of me. Hence, there must be a universal consciousness in which all objects and subjects are held together."

[Sy Borg]

I felt that Krishnananda's explanation was circular and ultimately not coherent. The conclusion "God did it" is the end of inquiry. There is no answer, no evidence, no proof, no logic for God. We either interpret one's most special experiences as being "a supernatural consciousness" or we don't. Ideally, if one believes in God, they simply do it without trying to construct post-hoc explanations to justify beliefs that many philosopher would consider to be unsubstantiated.

Still, there's no law against unsubstantiated belief. People should do what works for them, within the social framework.

I do not believe in the supernatural, only the natural, both discovered and no discovered. Nor do I see consciousness as eternal, rather it is conditional. Any entity that is unable to do anything to promote its wellbeing or avoid dangers has no need for consciousness. In fact, consciousness would be terrible, a drawback. It would be hellish to be gradually broken down, bit by bit, like a comet nearing the Sun, and not being able to do anything about it.

The whole point of consciousness is to be able to do something. There is certainly eternal reactivity, though, of which consciousness is one type.

[Consul]

From: www <dot> swami-krishnananda <dot> org/com/com_neoh.html

"Thomas Hill Green, a great pioneer in the movement of this interpretation of absolute idealism…."

QUOTE:
"Thomas Hill Green (1836–82) is widely regarded as the founding and most influential figure in the tradition of British idealism that flourished in England, especially Oxford, and Scotland, especially Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the second half of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century (see, e.g., Mander 2011). Green’s idealism was systematic, embracing metaphysics and epistemology, ethical theory, political philosophy, and philosophy of history and religion. In metaphysics and epistemology, Green reflected the influence of Immanuel Kant, criticizing the British empiricist legacy of John Locke and David Hume. Green argued that empirical knowledge is the workmanship of the human mind, that reality depends on thought and cannot transcend it, and that the possibility of objectivity requires the existence of a single corporate or divine consciousness of which individual minds are proper parts. The only defensible form of idealism, Green thought, is absolute idealism, in which all aspects of reality are operations of a single consciousness.…"

Thomas Hill Green: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/green/
:QUOTE

[Sy Borg]

Indeed, when one looks at maps of the cosmic web, its similarity to the interconnected structure of the brain is uncanny.

With that established, Mr Green, could we please have some hard evidence for this one consciousness or evidence that reality depends on thought? If life on Earth is wiped out, does that mean the Sun and the Moon disappear?

Oh, I see Mr Green, yours was a post-hoc rationalisation to justify your wish to believe in life after death, or that death is illusory.

[Consul]

QUOTE:
"The British Idealists were not only distinctive in their view of the nature and significance of metaphysics, for the majority of them held also to a distinctive metaphysical world-view—the philosophy of the Absolute—with which the school became virtually synonymous. …The order of treatment is chronological and therefore begins with Green.
The range of differing readings it has met with testifies to the difficulties of finding a clear and unambiguous interpretation of Green’ s metaphysical system, but in its broadest outlines at least it is easy enough to grasp, and such a plan is useful to have in mind before focusing in on the details of the argument. For Green, reality is constituted by relations; the world is a single and eternal system of related elements. But relations are the work of the mind. So, Green infers, reality too must be something essentially mind-dependent. But, he continues, quite clearly none of us individually generate the world—there is more to it, for one thing, than simply whatever we are acquainted with—so our knowledge is best taken as but one moment in the wider experience of an all-encompassing eternal consciousness whose experience does make up the whole of reality."

(Mander, W. J. British Idealism: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. p. 89)
:QUOTE

QUOTE:
"…the world-consciousness of which ours is a limited mode."

(Green, Thomas Hill. Prolegomena to Ethics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884. p. 54)
:QUOTE

[Sculptor1]

Hi,

Newbie here.

I am trying to understand how everything is ONE consciousness. I may have understood that the body and mind are not real and the soul/consciousness is the only reality. I'm not able to understand how everything is in fact ONE consciousness.

I may have made some headway by the analogy of the space in a pot being identical with the space outside, or, the different waves being identical with the ocean at their root.

Still doubts linger. Any help will be appreciated.

Give up now. Everything is so obviously NOT one consciousness. This is just so bleeding obvious.
If you think it is then all I would have to do is think the next sentence and you would be able to read it.
SO here it is....
" ..........................."
Fill in the blank..
Answers on a post card to
! Amgulllible
Whatthe hellton
SIllyland

[Sy Borg]

QUOTE:
"The British Idealists were not only distinctive in their view of the nature and significance of metaphysics, for the majority of them held also to a distinctive metaphysical world-view—the philosophy of the Absolute—with which the school became virtually synonymous. …The order of treatment is chronological and therefore begins with Green.
The range of differing readings it has met with testifies to the difficulties of finding a clear and unambiguous interpretation of Green’ s metaphysical system, but in its broadest outlines at least it is easy enough to grasp, and such a plan is useful to have in mind before focusing in on the details of the argument. For Green, reality is constituted by relations; the world is a single and eternal system of related elements. But relations are the work of the mind. So, Green infers, reality too must be something essentially mind-dependent. But, he continues, quite clearly none of us individually generate the world—there is more to it, for one thing, than simply whatever we are acquainted with—so our knowledge is best taken as but one moment in the wider experience of an all-encompassing eternal consciousness whose experience does make up the whole of reality.

Many words used to justify beliefs that paint reality as one in which eternal afterlives are possible. Green seems to confuse the fact that things exist in relation to one another and the act of perceiving those relations.

Alas, the world is not eternal. It may survive the Sun's future expansion in about five billion years, but there won't be a whole lot of consciousness going on. Not even the universe (of this big bang) is eternal.

[Consul]

QUOTE:
"…the world-consciousness of which ours is a limited mode."

(Green, Thomas Hill. Prolegomena to Ethics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884. p. 54)
:QUOTE

Here's the whole book: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dl ... 5/mode/2up

[cognition]

Now, this existence must be identical with consciousness; else there would not be even existence, considering the infinitude of consciousness. All existence is consciousness, and all consciousness is existence. If consciousness were different from existence, it would be non-existent, which would be the negation of consciousness itself. If existence is different from consciousness, then, again, consciousness would be non-existent. Further, the very value of existence would thereby be cancelled, due to the impossibility of the admission of anything as existing devoid of any relation to consciousness. Referring to our own selves we find that we can never separate our consciousness from our existence, or our existence from our consciousness. The moment we think, we know we are, and to grant that we are is to imply that we know we are. That the world is, means that it is known, and its knowledge, again, should be what exists. Existence and consciousness do not determine each other, but mean one and the same thing. The two must be inseparable in order that either of them may be possible. The existence of the object as well as of the subject is what is known immediately to consciousness. An external object may be capable of an empirical distinction from the subject that knows it, but pure existence which is common to both is apprehended by a general consciousness. Pure existence is the highest of universals, it comprehends all the generals known to us, and its essence cannot be distinguished from the universal consciousness. This consciousness cannot even be called self-consciousness, for the latter suggests empirical existence limited to space and opposed to an object outside. Absolute existence is absolute consciousness.

[Consul]

QUOTE:
"…the world-consciousness of which ours is a limited mode."

(Green, Thomas Hill. Prolegomena to Ethics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884. p. 54)
:QUOTE

Here's the whole book: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dl ... 5/mode/2up

"[T]he fullest statement of Green’s metaphysics is to be found in Book One of his Prolegomena to Ethics (1883)[.]" – W. J. Mander

Note that I do not want to defend Green's (or any other philosopher's) absolute idealism!

[Consul]

QUOTE:
"In the growth of our experience, in the process of our learning to know the world, an animal organism, which has its history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness. What we call our mental history is not a history of this consciousness, which in itself can have no history, but a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes its vehicle. 'Our consciousness' may mean either of two things; either a function of the animal organism, which is being made, gradually and with interruptions, a vehicle of the eternal consciousness; or that eternal consciousness itself, as making the animal organism its vehicle and subject to certain limitations in so doing, but retaining its essential characteristic as independent of time, as the determinant of becoming, which has not and does not itself become. The consciousness which varies from moment to moment, which is in succession, and of which each successive state depends on a series of 'external and internal' events, is consciousness in the former sense. It consists in what may properly be called phenomena; in successive modifications of the animal organism, which would not, it is true, be what they are if they were not media for the realisation of an eternal consciousness, but which are not this consciousness. On the other hand, it is this latter consciousness, as so far realised in or communicated to us through modification of the animal organism, that constitutes our knowledge, with the relations, characteristic knowledge, into which time does not enter, which are not in becoming but are once for all what they are. It is this again that enables us, by incorporation of any sensation to which attention is given into a system of known facts, to extend that system, and by means of fresh perceptions to arrive at further knowledge.

For convenience sake, we state this doctrine, to begin with, in a bald dogmatic way, though well aware how unwarrantable or unmeaning, until explained and justified, it is likely to appear.…"

(Green, Thomas Hill. Prolegomena to Ethics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884. pp. 72-3)
:QUOTE

[Consul]

QUOTE:
"Green’s doctrine of the eternal consciousness was extremely influential. Post-Idealist thinking, however, has not been kind to it, and it has long been regarded as the Achilles’ heel of his system; the arguments for it dismissed as weak, and its claims rejected as incoherent or inconsistent—either with each other or with the world at large they seek to account for."

(Mander, W. J. British Idealism: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. p. 94)
:QUOTE

[cognition]

Doubts are reasonable in this situation. A few considerations:

- consciousness is extreme interconnectedness. Some phenomena are quite interconnected, but not enough, or in the right way, to generate consciousness. However, in the future they may do, just as life on Earth was not conscious for a long time and then it slowly "woke up".

- if we lived within a larger conscious system (or systems), how would we know? Also, how conscious do we mean? As conscious as a cockroach, a mouse, a dolphin or a human?

- might there be types of consciousness that are so different to ours that we would not recognise it? Eg. very slow or very fast.

Consciousness is beyond extreme interconnectedness
Consciousness is indivisible, for, if it is
divisible, then the division or gap has to be known
by consciousness.

The very fact that in deep sleep we are not aware
that we are he/she or even a human being proves
the absoluteness of consciousness and that at
the root we are the same as insects, and perhaps
even inanimate things.....