Hello reader. I am sure we all have our own version of how things are regarding existence. I thought I would present a stream of thought that details part of how that lays in my head.
A rather short essay on the primordial template of consciousness.
Essay 1
[i]Explanation of terms:
- Primordial - instinctive, fundamental - beginning of memory aware.
- Template - pattern, sequence - patterns before and after awareness.[/i]
The seed . . .
[i]This is my first attempt at writing an essay of the consciousness. I thought it worthy of criticism, discussion, debate and modification. I will do my best to defend the core of my thoughts but as it is merely an essay written on the fly it might lack some structure. It was a case of inspiration, that I thought it would be best written on the fly; that this discourse of thought made it here.
I use the words conscious and consciousness interchangeably to allow for some interpretation on the readers part. The Explanation of terms is left intentionally vague.
My influences are David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Yin and yang, Modern Science and all of you wonderful people at I love Philosophy.[/i]
The position . . .
To understand my what my conscious is now, I feel I have to understand what my conscious was before becoming self aware or self-conscious.
To understand how my conscious came into being from a point of view of a person approaching what is referred to as the mid life in 2017, I feel I must time travel in the luxury of my own “mind of memories” back to my first memory and beyond.
First of all I have to proceed in reverse to find a stage that caused life before awareness. This stage we can call the “continuum”. I feel it proper to go in reverse given that I have this feeling of complete awareness as of now. Awareness in this discourse refers to two things: 1. The parental awareness of knowing a new individual person is on the way and 2. Self-awareness or self-conscious, which is the state that the aforementioned new individual person enters to become aware of oneself.
If I go back as far as I can to my first memory so that I can identify a milestone of life that I call my “inception of awareness” - the first time I became aware of my self - it is at this point that I go back a small time further before my first memory - at this point I am viewing the world through young eyes and senses to build patterns of a reality I am yet to become aware of. I call this the “pattern stage” and it is the pattern stage that our whole life from the “inception of awareness” becomes dependent on. This dependence is a “dependence of causation”. So what about the pattern stage? What comes before the pattern stage? I posit two stages prior to the “pattern stage”. The first just before the “pattern stage” that I call the “instinctual stage” and before that the “biological stage”. The “biological stage” is caused from the coming together of two people to make a baby and the rest is history.
On the “continuum” exists conscious people that can add to the “continuum” yet another conscious person, as many times as is caused by the act of a relationship, that leads to events that causes a new conscious person to come into being. We know that the being that is caused is initially unaware of anything because it is but a mere biological cell. The cell then splits and multiplies until at some stage we consider it to be a person - not a self-conscious person but an unconscious person - a person that is still considered a person because this person contains everything necessary to proceed forward in life with little effort until the said individual becomes self-aware or self-conscious.
What of these early self-conscious thoughts then? What are we to make of them?
To me they would be similar to impressions of some sort that each time self-projected help to build the strength of the self-conscious to something powerfully self accepting at some arbitrary stage before pubescence.
I posit that the “pattern stage” then enters into a secondary mode called the “second pattern stage”. This “second pattern stage” continues in parallel to the self-conscious for the rest of our life. Growing stronger from the “pattern stage” until leveling off for a while only to give way to more a more “wise stage” in life.
From the “second pattern stage” on, we develop the distinct nature of yin and yang and we think in dualistic terms about many things in life.
After the leveling off we enter the “wise stage” where we start looking for the more absolute nature of our existence. This is a distinct stage that shows itself like no other stage in life as there seems to be some very abstract reasoning going on consciously.
The conclusion . . .
I conclude this short essay now with a few thoughts. I read back over my words and see that I have left gaps. I also noticed when using my imagination while reading it was easy to cover the previously mentioned gaps. I question myself as to the value of this stream of thought. I wonder how I can improve on it through much meditation.
Now I leave it to the discernment of those who have read it.