Do you experience awareness? I'm sure you do or you would be residing
up on a hill with some stone markers or in an urn somewhere. So tell me
how can you experience awareness without consciousness? I think this is
an issue of semantics. Does Nisargadatta mean conflate "awareness" with
"being?" Being theoretically exists without consciousness because it
pervades everything and is the basis of everything. Some folks call
that "being" "God." "Awareness" would then be a poor choices of words.
And yes I've read Nisargadatta.
On 03/19/2015 12:18 PM, anartax...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] wrote:
Nisargadatta is using the words awareness and consciousness in
specific, technical ways. In his view consciousness is a sub-property
of awareness. Awareness is pure being, and consciousness 'emerges'
from that. Much in the same way M said 'when pure consciousness
becomes conscious', or something like that anyway. So whatever
definition you might have in your head, to read Nisargadatta, you need
to scope out how he is using the words in his context. You have to be
conscious to notice awareness, but consciousness is dead without
awareness, awareness is the essential aspect or property of being.
Consciousness is the expressed character of awareness. When you become
Brahman, this is what you experience, you cannot know this before
then. In speaking this way, dividing experience into such layers,
Nisargadatta, like any teacher, is getting the student to attempt to
enquire more deeply into their own experience to see if this is so, or
not so. If you see it is so, you do not need to think about it any
more for your own use, because it is a teaching fiction designed to
clarify the intellect during enquiry.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <noozguru@...> wrote :
You can't have awareness without consciousness. Without being
conscious there is nothing to be aware of.
On 03/19/2015 11:19 AM, Duveyoung wrote:
*Q:* But when you look at yourself, what do you see?
*Nisargadatta:* It depends how I look. When I look through the mind,
I see numberless people. When I look beyond the mind, I see the
witness. Beyond the witness there is the infinite intensity of
emptiness and silence.
Edg: This is the constant teaching of Nisargadatta throughout his
talks: awareness is not consciousness.
