Anybody who is yet uncertain about the relationship of consciousness to Pristine Awareness need only consult their gender affiliation. Pristine Awareness has no gender. Consciousness as a conditioned state of Awareness must filter its preferences through the hardwiring of the brain and thusly come up with a "conscious" response to external stimuli.
Pristine Awareness has no gender.
The scope of Awareness is much broader and infinitely more subtile than that of consciousness. Consciousness is an accident to Awareness in a creature with an advanced nervous system, and like starting a fire with a magnifying glass by the light of the sun, consciousness brings the various wavelengths of Awareness to a point focus of fascination. This can be a powerful tool in the light of problem solving, but when Mind is identified with consciousness, consciousness becomes a blunt instrument dulling the acuity of Intuition.
When Mind becomes the conscious subordinate of Pristine Awareness, Intuition and Awareness in concert serve the spirit of inquiry. The spirit of inquiry is the guarantor all life, and the executor of certain death.
Smoke gets in your eyes.
The defining quality of any creature is Awareness. It is not uncommon to encounter vivid ramblings over "consciousness": is this creature "conscious", is that creature "conscious". Consciousness this, consciousness that, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness. Be all these hair-splitting researches as they may, there can be no doubt that an amoeba is aware. Slime molds are aware. Planarians are aware.
Mind, consciousness, and psychologies are conditioned states of Awareness in creatures with nervous systems sufficiently evolved to support such sophistications. Awareness is simply aware.
The entire thrust of Zen is the awakening of Awareness.
Where is the residence of mastery. Is Awareness the entranced slave of some creature, or does the creature serve an awakened Awareness. What is the Who?
The starry universe is branch and stem.
The realm of living creatures, the bud.
A bursting into flower: the awakening of Pristine Awareness.
Sometimes it is difficult to keep in mind that no-one is confused on purpose. Certainty is an instinctual survival enhancing trait, and the mind in its quest for "certainty" spontaneously seeks to ferret out and eschew error. So: since confusion exists in the mind as naturally occurring entropy, and clarity exists as the dissipation of said entropy, it would seem that everyone has the right to their own confusion, and that everyone has at least the potential for clarity.
Be that as it may, an old, tired, shopworn phrase comes to mind.
"There is none so blind as one who will not see"
The knowable is the lucent resonance of Being. The known exists as resonances established in the receptive stillness of Pristine Awareness. The knower is the solipsistic resonance of individual Awareness.
The knower as an entropy dissipating resonance feeds upon the lucency of Being to firm up the cell wall of its Existence. Excreting discord and assimilating the satisfactory.
"The powerful do as they will, and the weak endure what they must"
And Athens went on to lose the war.
An intelligent sociopath (and fiercely proud of it) Fredrick Nietzsche wrote with the panache of a high-paid opinion columnist. His hostility to decorum found in nineteenth century Europe a target rich environment, and he delighted in the slaughter of sacred cows. He seems to have considered his own thought a diamond mine of brilliant insight, and could connect disparate dots into a cats-cradle of "logical" inference. In a phrase once addressed to me after an episode of bar-room erudition "if you can't dazzle them with logic, baffle them with bull shit."
What a guy!
Carl Gustav Jung (1875/1961) sojourned to Africa in 1925. He stood overlooking a seemingly endless plain, seething with astonishing varieties and astounding numbers of life forms, and he had an epiphany.
But for his standing there, in the midst of that seethe of life there was a total absence of awakened Awareness.
