...
He's getting closer and I know it because I knew this when I was three.
There is something it is like to be a rock. Only it's not the rock paying it any mind.
When a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, it does make a sound. There has never been a forest with no one there to hear it. Still, even if you could bring it down to one tree in the middle of a vast expanse of, say, pavement, sterile. Not even one microbe anywhere. It would still make a sound when it fell.
Even though existence, the cosmos, everything, can never have begun and can never end, it is conceivable that an infinite expanse of pure nothing could be the natural state of the cosmos, that absolutely nothing exists. You can take this the way linguistics dictate or the way Zen masters mean it, mox nix. The only existent is nothing. It seems to me that any way you slice it, an infinitely vast nothing, even if it was not always conscious, couldn't keep being unconscious.
I can barely fathom an insentient and limitless expanse of absolutely nothing, but even if that could actually be the true state of everything, nothing, there would have to be a moment when nothing knew itself or we, even if we're mere hallucinations, would not be aware, could not be. Just as there really is something it is like to be a rock, there is something it is like to be unbounded and pervasive nothing.
Consciousness would be impossible anywhere if the penny did not drop at some point in the cosmic void. Nothing can be, even provisionally, without awareness characterizing its state of being.
Do you grok that even nothing is something? That even a completely empty cosmos is still existent? Even when you cave in and agree that you do not exist, you are still no one! No one cannot not exist, and cannot not be conscious, else not even nothing could exist.
Consciousness is not the result of having a brain and/or nervous system. Consciousness is the one common attribute of everything in the cosmos... and that includes nothing. In fact, it isn't taking things too far to insist that consciousness is why everything exists.
In Zen there is lots of talk about form and emptiness, and relative and absolute. These depend on each other to exist. There is no form without empty space around it to define it. We can't define empty space without form to define it. Form and emptiness are relative. And how in the heck can we identify the absolute without tainting it with the relative? What the heck were those old fucks on about?
There is one thing that slips every brain teaser you can make up.
One.
ONE.
ONE.
Awareness. Consciousness itself. Even with every particle in the whole cosmos winked out, leaving absolutely nothing behind, you are left with beginningless, endless, boundless completely empty awareness.
Before anything existed in the void, there might've been a time when it was not conscious — I don't know — but since things started existing in the void — look around — awareness is the only phenomenon anywhere in the cosmos that is impossible to strip out of existence. This is so even if you are an atheist. This is where God and atheism are in perfect accord.
If you can get this straight, it will solve lots and lots of physics problems perfectly... even if you never went to school... and it will give you the mental space to start seeing a world not controlled by mindfuckers. It isn't their weapons and ability to take your life that empower them. It is the delusions they make you believe that do the trick.
always and any time....
