Consciousness, not produced by the brain. Not consciousness. Occurrence.
Awareness seems like such a large part of human experience — a uniquely human thing. Human consciousness. That's what we think the field of awareness actually is. This is the old way, the old way of understanding what it is that's happening with people.
But there's a new option. Because the old assumption is wrong. What is instead happening is that existence is occurring. And into existence the brain is projecting a very interesting, and dynamic, image.
The coherent, vivid, illusion of self. A voracious illusion that grasps at everything — even existence, which it claims to be the result of it's own effort.
Now, of course, the right hemisphere does indeed map the real, as accurately and as well as it can. All the sense data comes in, and that's what the right hemisphere does with it. It is 'concerned with reality' in a way the left is not.
Which raises an interesting possibility. When you see a tree, that image of the tree is put together by the right hemisphere, projected into ‘consciousness’, where the image occurs.
You could of course ask — who sees the image? But that's to miss the point. No-one sees the image. No-one is needed to see the image, for the image to occur.
Images happen. Experience happens. Life happens. It's not that images are seen by someone — they just occur, as images. Occur within awareness? No. Just occur. Occur within occurrence. Experience is not experienced by anyone, it just occurs, as experience. Life is not lived by anyone. It just occurs, as life.
Jarring, yes. New, yes. But also quite simple. There's not much to understand here, but the reason why it can seem so very strange and counter-intuitive is that the whole point of what the brain exists to do is to rationalise everything in terms of the existence of self.
And so the old way of looking at the world beckons. It has its call, has its power. Anything that threatens the idea that there is a self there, watching all this, experiencing all this, living all this — that thing is sticking its head over a very dangerous parapet. An overwhelming urge can arise — shelve this. Contain this. Hold it at arm's length. Don't put it to the test.
But for those who do want to put this to the test, who do want to see if there is something that really does have juice, that really can work, in real life - there's some very interesting things to see.
Not least of all is the fact that this new understanding of the brain, the mind, the self, reality and time, opens up an unprecedented way of understanding the power of genuine human virtue.
And with that power, we'll see what we can do.
Because we need some power now, because all of this has left us in quite a compromised position, mere fictions we.
The problem is this — How can a fictional mind, a fictional self — a fictional you, to cut to the chase — ever hope to effect real change? How can you ever hope to resolve suffering, or indeed, to have any impact on anything ever, if you yourself are fake?