#516 Learning to experience consciousness Aug. 10 24

   Learning to experience consciousness 

At first, this sentence does not make sense for 2 reasons:

     1  Over the last 6,000 years or so, the word consciousness, and what it is exactly has 

         never been explained precisely by anyone from neuroscientists to philosophers, and

         theologians. We don’t know what it is….yet.

     2  How can I experience consciousness since, being conscious, I am experiencing it already?

The neuro-medical and mundane definition of consciousness talks about mental activities associating

thinking, feeling, memory, and sensorial perception, sort of being aware to analyze, judge, and decisions. It is a cognitive and sensorial process.

Where does Zen stand?

Zen is trying to be simple, down to earth: 

To be conscious is … just being, being aware of something,  but not in the sense of knowing.

Useful? Maybe not.

Zen is talking about “experiencing pure consciousness” or practicing, in a mindful way, 

simple awareness of the current moment using our sensorial experience w/o any analytic or decisional purpose except the decision of just being aware.

Just observing a flower w/o any other purpose is just experiencing pure consciousness or simple awareness, whereas observing the same flower followed by analyzing it in different ways  is “cognitive consciousness.” 

In the former, your mind is just a mirror; in the latter, your mind becomes a thinking brain. 

Meditation is another example of experiencing pure consciousness either from sitting meditation

or walking meditation. In the former, we experience our breathing; in the latter, we experience the feeling of each foot touching the ground.

In both, we are practicing simple awareness, paying attention to something in a noncognitive way, almost thoughtlessly. The mind and its tricks are bypassed. No what, where, how, when, whom.

This is what Zen means by "just being."

Benefits:

Experiencing, and practicing pure consciousness thoughtlessly that is w/o its cognitive components such as during meditation is an integral aspect of learning how to control our mind. 

This is awakening in its purest form. 

Not easy since our ego-driven mind always wants to take over. Practice makes perfect. Thanks