Over the last couple of weeks I wrote a half dozen articles exploring new ideas about the lost-in-thought state (LITS). They’re on my Substack blog in case anyone is interested. I wrote them mainly for myself to clarify my thinking. My main conclusion is that LITS is the primary function of the mind. It’s not […]
Tag: Consciousness
An argument that supports the idea that consciousness existed before animal nervous systems
I’ve decided to publish a few articles on intellectual topics. I’m not changing the main focus of the blog; it will continue to emphasize experience and information that’s useful and interesting to spiritual seekers. I’m going to describe an idea that first occurred to me several decades ago. It’s a weak argument and a vague […]
Francis Lucille comments on the observation that started this website
About twenty years ago I noticed something about my mind that seemed extraordinarily important to me for spiritual seekers, but to my surprise I couldn’t find more than partial mentions of it in spiritual literature. After reading and skimming many books over a period of about five years, I managed to find partial mentions in […]
Provisional definitions of ‘know’ and ‘consciousness’
To explain things clearly, fundamental words must be carefully defined.
I’m toying with the idea of writing a book about enlightenment. To help sort out my ideas, from time to time I may write chunks of that potential book on this blog. One of the ways we can clarify ideas is by choosing technical terms and defining them carefully. The word “know” I’ll give “know” […]
Heraclitus on Pramada
About 18 years ago I noticed to my astonishment that all my life I had been unconscious in a certain sense while I was in the waking state. Another way of saying that same thing is that I began to see what it means to really be conscious. The first sentence is negative and the […]
Turn the lights on
A few days ago I quoted this statement by Annamalai Swami: You stumble around in the darkness of your mind, not knowing that you have a torch in your hand. That light is the light of the Self. Switch it on and leave it on and you will never stumble again. (From Annamalai Swami: Final […]
What is suffering?
This thing we call suffering — what is it, really? We hate it so much that we take it for granted. Taken to extremes it’s a state in which we wish we didn’t exist. But even if that’s true it doesn’t answer the question. Can we use suffering as a gateway? As a target for […]
The Endless Search for the MacGuffin
Even the simplest creatures move toward food. For example, the cuddly little organism in the picture above, Escherichia coli, a bacterium that lives in our intestines, swims toward sugar. I do pretty much the same thing every time I happen to see a container of ice cream. Not all living things can control their movements, […]
The greatest miracle
Pain hurts. This is the greatest miracle we know of. If this sounds strange, please read on. I picked pain for my example rather than sound or sight or blueness or impatience or orgasm or affection or a billion other phenomena which are equally miraculous only because English happens to have a peculiar word, ‘hurt’, […]
General anesthesia and Advaita Vedanta
It is sometimes said that Advaita Vedanta began with Gaudapada’s commentary on the Mandukya Upanishad. It is from this Upanishad and commentary that we get the doctrine of the three states (waking, dream, and sleep) and turiya, the fourth. Whether Advaita really began with Gaudapada’s commentary, I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual historian. But […]