Unedited version

I believe that 'consciousness,' when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy.*

                                                                                           --William James

This quote from an article by the great William James, published in 1904, has yet to infiltrate much of academic philosophy let alone the proliferation of New Age thinking that takes consciousness to be some sort of fundamental reality. The use of consciousness by many in the New Age movement and its progeny is a regrettable metaphysics. Consciousness in some of this thinking has become a substitute for God, the Divine, and no small amount of Non-Dualistic thinking. In this article, William James points to the need for consciousness to be seen as a function and not a thing. He goes on to make this explicit a few sentences later.

In this blog, we have emphasized that consciousness (sometimes awareness) is an aspect of all experience. As such, it is all-pervasive or omnipresent. Experience, all that is known, cannot occur without consciousness. Therefore, we may say that it is all-knowing or omniscient. All knowledge is contingent upon consciousness. Finally, consciousness is absolutely necessary for the production of anything in experience. Therefore, we may say that it is omnipotent. All of this sounds an awful lot like God, does it not? Well, with our understanding of consciousness as an aspect of experience even God is contingent upon our consciousness for his/her existence. God is a phenomenon that appears in my life, illuminated by consciousness. So, given what we have stated here, we may say that all of life, even other people, is made possible in our experience because of consciousness--and, of course, the multitude of phenomena it illuminates. In this quote by James, he does not acknowledge the role that the diaphaneity of consciousness may play in freeing us from the grip or clinging of/to the pleasure, pain or insensitivity often accompanying phenomenal manifestations. However, I am quick to add the following. All sentient beings, if we experience them as such--and that is something that many contemporary embodiment views conceal or ignore--open us to the possibility of realizing that our sentience is their sentience. Strangely enough--and we shall unfold this view below--we may even perceive that our awareness is their awareness precisely because of its impersonal nature--at first glance a seeming paradox. 




Contemporary views on embodiment and enactive views often make it possible for us to lose sight of the sentience of the other in the manner in which we have just mentioned.* This brings us to a discussion of intersubjectivity.

All thoughts, for starters, occur in a sort of sentient space. Thoughts carry with them the implicit notion both that they can be heard, i.e., that they are directed to or shall we say they are vectorial, that some sort of listener hears them. Thoughts carry the implicit notion that they will be heard. This is not an explicit idea or thought construct. This is implicit in the very nature of thinking itself. Or else, why think? In addition to being listened to, thoughts carry the implicit notion that there is someone, the self, who thinks them. Again, this is not thematic or explicit. It is an underlying and, very importantly, a felt belief--as is the listening. Thoughts are not only that which is thought but that movement which is felt. All thoughts, regardless of their lack of great significance, even the most subtle of thoughts, are felt. The feelings may be very subtle but if one is quiet and attentive enough, these two being two sides of a coin, one may actually feel even the most subtle of narrative movements as feeling-vibrations moving from the lower regions of our abdominal area all the way up to our mouth, if spoken. These feelings give rise to the sense that the self thinks them as well as hears them. Feelings are the basis of, or support for, the belief in the listener and the thinker. Our feelings, being aligned with the narrative content of thoughts, generate specific senses of self and the nature of realities, i.e., the very movement of conventional experience. Also included are the movements of perception which is configured in the same fashion, except perception operates through the sense-realms giving rise to cognitive, felt narratives in association with the perceived. Our perceptions, not simply those we are conscious of but those which configure the realities we face at an ulterior level of awareness, also become felt realities giving rise to pleasure, difficulty, or insensitivity, i.e., not caring or paying much attention to, or perhaps insignificant to us at the moment. 

Now, on the other hand, awareness or consciousness is totally indifferent to all appearances. This is due to its nature of pure diaphaneity as William James was aware of. He made it a point to warn us to avoid the reification of consciousness. Reification tends to overlook the role of consciousness in all experience and places it in a conceptual framework of metaphysical speculation, now even some far-out scientific speculation. This movement, at present, tends to overlook or relegate to the background the importance of seeing the role consciousness can play in the alleviation of suffering or difficulty for all of us.

(For the present, we are not going to focus on the ethical implications of taking pure experience as our fundamental reality--as William James suggests in his Does Consciousness Exist? I hope to get there in the near future. I very much hope others will join in this endeavor.)  

The Usurpation of the Function of Consciousness  

As we mentioned above, thought rests on the tacit beliefs that they are both listened to by a hearer and thought by a thinker. Now here is the tricky part. This subtle (cognitive) belief is concomitant with the feelings felt when movements of thought or perception are in motion. 

Those feelings serve to authenticate the movements of cognition thereby granting them the sense of being actual or real by their intimate association with those feelings plus consciousness. So, we might say that the visceral nature of all cognition instantiates or, better, incarnates knowing thereby giving the self-sense--implicit in all narratives--validity and solidity and the sense of selfness, the I-am. Hence we are embodied. I am. I am the knowing and am is the feeling. All this is made possible by the additional fact that consciousness is present and providing this movement of instantiation or incarnation that which turns it into experience. Consciousness is experience rendering. It gives sentience to phenomena, in this case, to narratives and feelings inclusive of the presuppositions of there being a thinker and a listener. Here is the moment that the role of consciousness is usurped. Since consciousness is diaphanous, a word carrying the Greek for phenomena as that which appears, it is that which phenomena can be seen through (dia-phanous). Again, it renders phenomena sentient, alive as experience. It is distinct from phenomena and yet implicit in all phenomena. There are no appearances without it. Its distinct nature may be exploited in at least two ways, one to our detriment and the other to our benefit. The detriment is found in our unexamined sense of self. Because of the Janus-like presence of diaphanous consciousness and meaningful phenomena, the presumed audience and thinker become the self-sense. This presumption--the exquisite usurpation, has no perceivable beginning. But, it does have an end.   

The Janus-like relation between awareness and phenomena, i.e., phenomena  meaning the evanescent appearances, implies feeling--in all cases. We do not normally focus on the incarnate aspects of the movements of (what we call) mind. Mind, in our sense of the term, is the movement of the narrative structuring of the entirety of experience. If we closely observe the movement of sound we can easily peer into the structural and ephemeral workings of mind. Sound is an ephemeral movement. In its appearing, it is disappearing. A visual analog would be a flame. Looking at the flame, it is a visual paradigm of evanescence, it must continually disappear to appear, just like all experience. Vision, if not informed by this, will seem to grant us access to stable things, there for our use or observation. This is not the case at all. If we focus on the experience of those same things and take our cue from that, we will note that movement, i.e., time as experience, is on the move. One can feel this, but not necessarily see this. Take a look at a faded curtain and give it some thought.  

Narratives are evanescent and meaningful agents accompanied by feelings. In other words, mind is always incarnate in feelings, not in an abstract, conceptual version of a body-- which is a substance narrative. The feeling-body is not a thing; it is a felt movement informed by narratives, taking informed to mean forming, structuring--a dynamic and evanescent movement. This felt movement is structured not only by the explicit words we hear in thinking but by a process of anamnesis, a remembering that makes thought seem rational and meaningful. The implications are staggering. How far back do we go to find the most basic elements that serve to grant meaning to the present moment, to our present meaning-full present? There is no perceivable beginning. The reservoir must be ever-present, alive and infused with consciousness without which it would not function. It is consciousness which grants it life.  

All sentence-like thoughts are granted meaning from the unfathomable depths of history, the wellspring that makes any explicit thought meaningful. This wellspring is ever-present as the sustaining source, the reservoir that grants significance to the explicit. Of course, this is a speculative movement of mind and is not direct experience. The Buddha, for example, would not have approved of this movement--to theorize about this would have little to do, in his eyes, with the alleviation of our difficulties. I'll try to adhere to his outlook. 

More often than not, we in our narrative cultural movement, take mind to be an inhabitant of a flesh body in a physical or natural or material world. From our perspective, this narrative, this belief is and has been a terrible curse. How? It inclines us to ignore feeling the movement of narratives in the experiential feeling-body, or subtle body, and observing that it also conceals much of the movement of experience. It conceals the movement of the meaning-granting acts of situation creation. Each of our moment-to-moment experiential circumstances, inclusive of both self and what we call objective reality, is being granted life and significance through this sentient movement of narratives, or intentionality--as Husserl termed it. He saw that the transcendental ego was the underlying intentional agent of the constitution of experience. 

Here you are, on a park bench, alone with your thoughts--and the silence in which they occur. As you realized from the preceding, this silent-sentience is not thematic, it is the presumed listener to and author of thoughts--if without much consideration you pause to reflect and take note of this underlying aspect of experience. Now, suddenly, a friend approaches and you, in an effort to capture her attention say, "Hello." Now please consider this carefully. You may even wish to experiment with this if it comes to mind in a similar situation. As you say hello, the sentient-silence has gone from your implicit experience of it and may now be considered to have disappeared. But, what if it did not disappear? What if it is now the presumed listener to your "Hello"? The sentient-silence has taken birth in the other. Is this your experience? Is this what happens? What can we then say about the SS? What conclusions can we draw? More importantly, is this what we actually experience just under the radar of reflection? There was once a popular saying. It went like this, "The eyes are the mirror of the soul." Now, I'm not sure what "soul" means, but the expression was usually taken to mean that when we look into another's eyes, we have some insight into their soul. Well, let's take a closer look at this expression. What about taking it to mean that when we look into another's eyes they are the mirror of our soul?  

*Unedited 

*Current narratives, promulgated by many financial interests, seek to reduce human beings to material entities at the expense of their living subjectivity. Inherent in these narratives lurks the danger of a reduction of empathy narratives and an increase in our capacity for violence. The sentience and subjectivity of all living beings must be respected and made primary in our moral attitudes at the expense of profit maximization. By profit, I do not mean only financial profit but all self-interest material maximization at the expense of other sentient beings.
** Some in the sophisticated Tantric traditions of so-called "Hinduism" and Buddhism speak of this "body" in Sanskrit as the sūkṣma śarīra, pronounced (suk-shma-sha-ree-ra) in Sanskrit.