Consciousness

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We can think of consciousness being aware of its own actuality as a loop of self-reflection. But a loop implies time, right? Now suppose that the loop gets smaller and smaller—infinitely smaller until the loop disappears. This would mean that there is no time between actuality and the awareness of actuality. There is no longer self-reflexivity or the passage of time. It is a singularity of presence that is a singularity in time. It is completely self-aware right now; its self-existence is its self-consciousness. It is completely timeless. – Brilliancy: The Essence of Intelligence, ch. 3

We can see our nature as a vast ocean of consciousness. All manifestation arises out of that consciousness, and each of us is a unique wave in this vast ocean. However, our usual, temporal experience is akin to being a wave without an ocean, merely one object in a void, floating among other objects and separated from them by time and space. We take the surface appearance to be all there is, rather than as form that is arising within the vast ocean of consciousness. The problem is not the fact that we have come into this world, have been born into a body, and are living in the world of physicality. It is that we believe that the top of the ocean or the shape of the wave is the entire reality. Through our bodily senses, we experience the forms of this physical world. Through them, we come to believe that this world is the ground from which we originate, and that our existence is dependent on physical form and content.

Yet, from the realized point of view, all experiences, including the physical, are just waves in the ocean. – The Power of Divine Eros: The Illuminating Force of Love in Everyday Life, Ch. 6

When we refer to the soul as a field of consciousness we mean a medium composed of pure consciousness. The capacity to be conscious of something, in the sense of being able to have an awareness or perception of something, reflects the fact that the soul is first and foremost an organism of consciousness. We can be conscious because we are consciousness. That is, what is usually thought of as a process or product of the soul, the function of consciousness, is not only a function but also the very ground itself of the soul. We are always this consciousness, and are always feeling ourselves as consciousness, but do not recognize this because we are paying attention exclusively to the content of our consciousness; we are constantly listening to the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are. These stories become the mental lenses through which we look at ourselves and everything else. – The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Ch. 3

Synonyms:
awareness, individual consciousness
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