Over the summer I wrote a few articles discussing consciousness such as the following:
Intuitive Intelligence
OK folks, the following is an unusually long article but I felt it could not be broken up becuase I think it needs to be read in one sitting for the reason that one thing flows directly to the next thing.
It took me a while to see the message but reader pointed me to this article in relation to the discussion on consciousness:
I wrote back to Kathryn, the reader, this comment:
I just now found this message! Thanks for that link Kathryn. Yes, I think there is a singular something or non-something that lives as unmanifest being and that this unmanifest singularity somehow manifests itself in the physical universe as constant uniqueness. All of it - the manifest state - is composed of consciouness particulating as matter/time/space in a whole decentralized way operating everywhere at once through everything to discover and experience itself from every angle in infinite manyhood while at the same time everything is in a state of unified interconnected self-communication and coordination so that to even move one’s finger the entire universe must adjust to it. Some sort of self-entanglement. But it seem to me that this unmanifest entity that is one without a second uses manifestation to dream of being many - in order to have companionship with itself. So to say such a thing in human language is to immediately be telling a falsehood since language at it’s structural roots is based on the misunderstanding that we are not all this one being. Only IT can know ITself but at the root of all beings is only IT. Is that consciousness? Kind of. If this is true (more or less) IT can’t really be studied with scientific methods. Only directly experienced in unique unrepeatable ways beyond measurement [or proof].
This page, compiling many different translations of the opening chapter of the Tao te Ching, suggests the impossibility to communicate the Ineffable in language or for that matter even study it except to dissolve into it.
https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tao-te-ching.htm
After writing the comment, I decided to develop it into the more formal article below.
The One Dreaming the Many
I propose, as a metaphysical intuition rather than a scientific claim, that behind or prior to the manifest universe there is a singular something, or perhaps non-something, that cannot properly be called a thing at all. It is unmanifest being, although even the word being may already say too much. It is one without a second, yet calling it “one” is misleading because one only has meaning where two is possible.
Manifestation may be understood as this undivided reality becoming apparent as multiplicity: matter, energy, space, time, life, thought, consciousness, and the innumerable forms and events of the universe. The remarkable characteristic of manifestation is constant uniqueness. Nothing occurs twice in precisely the same way. Every thing, being, event, perspective, and moment is a singular expression of the whole from a position that has never existed before and will never exist again.
In this sense, the One does not become many by dividing itself into genuinely separate pieces. It becomes many perspectivally, through infinite manyhood. Every manifestation is local and unique while remaining inseparable from the whole. What appears to us as a universe composed of separate entities might instead be understood as a decentralized field of self-relation, operating everywhere at once through everything. I think of this as a kind of self-entanglement, not in the technical sense used in physics, but as a philosophical image for an indivisible reality continually coordinating with itself.
Under such a view, even the smallest action is not entirely private. To move one’s finger is for the universe to be different than it was before. The universe does not contain an independent person who moves an independent finger. Rather, the whole universe is expressing itself locally as this person, this finger, this movement, at this particular moment.
Why should an undivided reality manifest at all? Here I can offer only a poetic speculation: perhaps the One dreams of being many in order to experience companionship with itself. A reality without a second has no Other to encounter. Manifestation creates the experience of otherness without requiring ultimate separation. Through multiplicity the One can encounter itself as stranger, lover, enemy, friend, animal, tree, stone, star, thought, and world. Separation may therefore be experientially real while not being ontologically final.
Is this underlying reality consciousness? Perhaps, but only if consciousness is understood as another inadequate word. Human consciousness involves memory, attention, perspective, subject and object, all of which already belong to manifestation. Our view, as humans, is necessarily human-centric anthropomorphism. What we call consciousness may instead be a local expression of something more fundamental for which language has no adequate term.
This leads to the central paradox. Language itself depends upon differentiation. Grammar divides reality into subjects and objects, actors and actions, this and that, self and other. To speak of the undivided therefore requires us to divide it. Even saying “IT knows ITself” creates a knower, an act of knowing, and something known. The statement contradicts what it attempts to describe.
The Tao Te Ching begins at precisely this threshold: what can be named is already not the nameless source itself. Language can point toward the ineffable, circle around it, contradict itself before it, or create conditions in which it might be intuited, but cannot contain it.
Nor do I present this view as something established by scientific evidence. Science depends upon observation, distinction, measurement, comparison, and reproducibility. If the reality proposed here precedes the distinction between observer and observed, then it cannot straightforwardly become an object of scientific investigation. This does not prove that such a reality exists. Neither does its resistance to measurement constitute evidence for it.
If it can be known at all, its appropriate mode of knowing may instead be direct and unrepeatable experience. Yet even “experience” implies an experiencer and something experienced. At the proposed limit, that distinction would also disappear.
One would not finally stand apart from IT and know IT.
There would only be IT.
And whatever was subsequently said about that encounter would already be a translation, necessarily unique and unrepeatable. The moment the encounter becomes an account of the encounter, something fundamental has changed. What may have been immediate has become memory. What may have been indivisible has entered a language built from divisions. What may have required no explanation has become a story told by one person to another.
From the standpoint of everyone who did not have such an experience, the account therefore amounts to inscrutable hearsay, rumor, innuendo, metaphor, and unsubstantiated speculation. It cannot carry the experience itself from one consciousness to another, nor can the testimony of the experiencer establish that their interpretation of what occurred is true.
Even the experiencer cannot escape this problem. In remembering and describing the encounter, the experiencer becomes an interpreter of an earlier version of themselves. The testimony is already one step removed from whatever happened.
This does not make such accounts meaningless. It places them in their proper category. They are not proofs. They are traces.
Perhaps this is why humanity has produced thousands of mystical philosophies, religions, poems, paintings, songs, rituals, and contradictory descriptions of what may be the same ineffable mystery. If there is an underlying unity, we should not expect uniform reports of it. Under the principle of constant uniqueness, every return to language must produce another singular translation.
There can therefore be no authoritative account of the Ineffable. There can only be reports from the vicinity.
Rumors of the One, told by the many.
And if the proposition developed here is in the neighborhood of correct, even these rumors are IT talking to ITself. Yet only IT could know the truth behind the rumor being spoken.
The speaker cannot know. The listener cannot know. Even the one who claims to have directly experienced IT cannot subsequently know with certainty what the experience meant, because the moment it is remembered, interpreted, or spoken, it has already become a unique and unrepeatable translation and not the experience itself.
Perhaps this is the final paradox: IT alone knows what is true, yet there is no one apart from IT to whom the truth could be told.
Everything else is rumor and innuendo.