Whats inside your head when nobody's observing it?

reply to post by NightSkyeB4Dawn


Ahh, That is strange, indeed. I can kind of comprehend what you are describing, but not fully. Something I do on a random basis weekly is ask myself a question in the morning before I even take a foot out of my bed. I ask myself whether or not that is actually the floor and not a cliff or something similar, different than the floor. If I cant decide, I dont get out of bed.

A person should never trust their eyes 100% all the time. People have hallucinations all the time, and I dont like to take chances, hehe.

rekar

This is part of a post that I wrote on another thread. I just lifted it and posted it here as I feel it may be of some use.

I may be getting off topic here but I want to talk about the nature of consciousness, something that is bound to be really abstract (and maybe meaningless to you, as your consciousness may differ from mine).

Try to think about how consciousness relates to reality. It must necessarily be through the five senses namely sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Lets take for example the reality (apparent reality) of a table. You become conscious of the table mainly by seeing it, touching it, etc (I say mainly because although you could taste it by licking it, or sniff it, or become aware of it by striking it and hearing and the sound produced, none of that stuff usually happens, nobody licks tables and tables usually don't give off odors, and as for the sound aspect of a table, that's a little bit more complicated.)
It's the same for any aspect of reality, you see it, hear it, taste it, etc. In Yoga they refer to the five senses as being the five windows to consciousness (I may be wrong about this). Consciousness uses the five senses to access reality, it relies on the five senses for sensory input as to the nature of reality. If you shut off the five senses there is no way for you to be conscious of reality (at least the physical aspects). All of this relates to an organism/being with a physical body (as far as beings who are disembodied or ethereal beings it's not worth speculating about). Does this give us an insight into the nature of consciousness? A little bit, this is just preliminary information on how consciousness works which tells us very little about the true nature of consciousness or reality itself. All of this becomes apparent when you do meditation for prolonged periods. In meditation one is, to a certain extent, shutting off the five senses. If the conditions are right the meditation practitioner gets to a point where he is existing in a state with no sight, no hearing, etc. This is something that is hard to describe in words, it has to be experienced. Once again it is due to the nature of how we relate to reality through the five senses, I can't possibly relate to you something that has no correlation to the five senses. OK, so now you are in a state where the five senses have been shut off. Does that mean your consciousness is also shut off? No, you are still conscious of something. You are conscious of being, namely you are conscious of being conscious. Now you're getting somewhere. This is where you can get a little more in sight into the nature of consciousness and what it means to be conscious. In order to understand this think about the eye. The eyes see what is in front of the eyes. By its very nature, it is impossible to actually see your own eye with your own eye (you can look in the mirror and see a reflection of your eye but then you are only seeing a reflection and not the actual eye itself). I think this is not hard to grasp, especially for someone who is contemplating Infinity. Consciousness works in much the same way. Usually consciousness becomes conscious of other things. It is only when you do this "trick" of meditating that you turn consciousness upon it self and use consciousness to be conscious of consciousness.

The part about how the eye sees things may not be 100% accurate, or rather the way I explained it may not have been the best way to accurately describe what is going on. I'll do another post later about sight and vision.

Ciao ciao

Originally posted by DaleGribble
reply to post by Most Infamous

 

when you can see inside your skull let me know cause i want to do it.

thanks for the calrification. im gonna ponder the subject for a few more hours and then ill let you know what i come up with.

How can I explain this? I'll have to get back to you after I do a post on the nature of sight and vision and what it actually means to "see" something.

As for seeing inside your skull, I don't want to say it's possible, but, I won't say it's impossible. If you want to be able to do it, it'll take a lot of effort.

CIAO CIAO


One more thing, I noticed a lot of people use this term "LOL" or "lol". What does this mean?

reply to post by Most Infamous

One more thing, I noticed a lot of people use this term "LOL" or "lol". What does this mean?

Laughing out loud.

I hope this is not a no no. I mean not writing the required number of words.

reply to post by Most Infamous


I understand. i was trying to make a funny. You must not be from the US or any other english speaking nation or its not your first language? either that or you are new to the internet?
you dont have to answer that i am just wondering out loud. i guess that would be WOL. if you use that term you have to give me a penny "WOL" is now the property of DaleGribble and shall be used with out my express writen consent. see that was another bad joke.. but not really.


edited to remove the word not

[edit on 15pmu12007 by DaleGribble]

Very interesting question!
Like you I have this crazy question when I was like a 10 yrs old. I always ask myself who is thinking the thinking. I thought I was just childish then but in fact the older I am the more interested I become.
So I kinda come to a solution that there must be a origin to this thinking. Our brain is a technical object, whether it is observed or not, it is still there in our skull. But our mind is our life, if we like to think our brain don't exist then it won't whether observed or not. So our mind is our reality. When we are 'out of our mind' then perhaps we will get close to that origin thinker but to become that original thinker I believe takes deep silent meditation. Because our thoughts spring from a nothing platform, so to get to that nothing platform ,we surely gotta silent our thoughts.
So I believe brain is a poor representation of our consciousness, it acts like a tool. It represents our nervous system but not our mind.

Sex, sex and more sex.

Actually its going on in my head when people are looking too...

What are you looking at me like that for? I'm a man!!!

[edit on 24-4-2009 by grover]

Your brain has safeguarded itself from this by arming itself with both a conscious and subconscious. You're always home.

reply to post by clementlim


Yes!!!!!!!!!!

This is the kind of response I am looking for. I could've said all this in my originla post, however, I wanted to see if other people (like you) would come up with some original thinking.

You deserve the star.

Sort of busy right now, just wanted to give you a big up and thank you for your input. I'll try and do a proper response later on.

CIAO

Let me share more views...
Our consciousness of physical world begin I believe when we can even remember what happen yesterday. Like an infant can't remember consciously. At the 'infant point' it is almost like pure consciousness where you just react to whatever it natural to you. You cry when hungry but when grow older, people tell you crying is shameful, so the idea stuck to the perceived consciousness- a consciousness which I termed external self. So whatever we think and view about anything is actually all given to you by others, media or other source and never really your own or original. And our existence primarily is how we define our SELF. Really anything we do or think in our living just gotta do with how we define our SELF in one way or another. But this is one interesting thing to life, we have the freedom to our own definition of ourself. So in everyone unique world, nobody is ever wrong, but we like to judge others because we feel the need to feel right about our external SELF by wronging others.
An 'infant mind' won't judge because I believe they are close to the original SELF where there is no injected views and beliefs. So at a very primal level, we are actually all the same. That is why after coming to this point, I find it quite foolish that people are actually judging themselves whenever they judge others! I'm not saying I am saint but at least I'm aware if I did judge someone and try to change for the better and I don't claim I will reach God after death and I don't claim to know HIM better. Do you?(Food for thought)
Many people try to take the easy way out and seek GOD by believing that by mere belief they will reach it externally(another perceived consciousness) If my above views is agreeable to anyone, you will agree with me too that that is impossible because the consciousness is a big hint about GOD because he is in there I am sure, or else why would we even have the capability to think and argue about GOD.
And everyone has consciousness just different conditioning, and if HE is in there( yes this is what I claimed for myself, you can form your own), then HE is in all of us. Lets think about it, every year we define ourSELF differently, hoping to come to a satisfactory definition. So worry, stress come when we can't get to that point of definition. But when we stop defining and do things originally, there is a feeling of peace or a positive nothingness, etc simply enjoying a sports you like, nobody tell you to like it, after playing a sports you just like it, it is original. Don't tell me you think yourself into enjoying something you love. So if you like mathematics a=b=c, then god=in ourself=original self=things we love without thinking or injected views=endless possibilities=- god is not a stagnant thing
By living our life we are actually finding him just in different ways. This is which I believe that we love friends or partners who are different from us as we want to experience something different to expand our experience of godness. By believing we are finding him because your parents or church tell you so, then let me introduce this vocab call 'make-beliefs'. Beliefs are always man-made.
So all in all what is really inside our head when nobody's observing it? Nothing in technical terms but everything if according to how I describe above because the origin is doing the thinking=god=endless possibilities=ourself which mean we have control over it. That is why I feel a spiritual person are very creative people because they feel the endless possibilities and not just the possibilities give by the society, parents or friends. Our vast universe is a good hint, it expand infinitely but if one Earth on the map of Universe, we are virtually nothing.


[edit on 25-4-2009 by clementlim]

[edit on 25-4-2009 by clementlim

[edit on 25-4-2009 by clementlim]