The Creature of Awareness

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 a hypnotized slave of the creature, or does the creature serve awakened Awareness. What is the Who?

The starry universe is branch and stem.

The realm of living creatures, the bud.

The bursting into flower: Awakened Awareness.

Confusion Vis-a-Vie Willful Blindness

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, the Known, and the Knower

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.

From Thucydides (about 2,500 years ago)

"The powerful do as they will, and the weak endure what they must"

A Word (or two) About Nietzsche

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!

C G Jung at the Mall

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, there was a total absence of awakened Awareness.