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POST/MODERN mind

Psychological Meditations       

A role of Buddhism in Postmodern Psychology & Psychotherapy        

Buddhism and Psychology

Consciousness

Consciousness is space and time. Present and aware as this breathing person, it extends infinitely to become the entire Universe, known and unknown, knowable and not. Not limited to just one person or one brain, it is the entire Universe-being-aware-of-itself.

Consciousness is Mind experiencing itself as being-aware of the Universe and Reality. 

In contrast, our individual consciousness and mind are self-sustaining, complex, infinitely intricate, dynamic, self-evolving and self-referential reflections or re-presentations imprinted on the brain tissue of each of us, which we learn to experience and identify as our subjective experience,  as “me”, the “I” or the “Self”.

Individual consciousness is constructed from a seamless field of brain activity consisting of discrete moments of awareness of sensory experience arriving from our five sensory organs - visual (sight), auditory (hearing), tactile (internal –organs/muscles & external-skin), olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste) interacting with mind’s internal activity – images, thoughts, memories, plans, inner speech, as well as all other neurocognitive processes in the brain.

All sensory input is, essentially, a philogenetic / ontogenetic evolutionary variation and progressive specialization / differentiation of one basic and global sensor which might have originally developed from a simple on / off switch detecting the presence of light, or, later on - light intensity, maybe initially detecting a presence of some basic chemicals in the immediate environment – nitrogen, oxygen, carbon ions, salt, which later differentiated into more specialized sensory modalities, beginning with light, heat, smell, taste, gravitation detection, pleasure / pain detectors, taste, smell, sound, light, shapes, movement detection and so on, to culminate in human five senses and human ability to translate their signals into the fabric of human awareness. Continued evolution of awareness usually results in the development of body boundaries along the skin surface, a sense of me vs. not- me, and the eventual establishment of a survival-enhancing virtual “command center” –the self- experienced as the nucleus of one’s subjectivity.

Interestingly, when attention – distribution of awareness – is directed back and focused on one’s own subjective experience, the experience dissolves into progressively smaller units until they are too small for the awareness to register them. That sensitivity of awareness to re-present experience can be expanded indefinitely within certain modalities but is often limited by the physiology of the sensory organs. When awareness reaches the limit of it own sensitivity, the experience disappears from consciousness, including the very experience of the aware subject itself. Why does the experiencing subject disappears? Because the aware and perceiving subject is a constructed experience itself.

Our ability to describe consciousness and mind is contingent on our ability to construct a language and a vocabulary for its description. Language is observation. Consciousness is more like space and time present here and now within each of us, but also extending indefinitely into the Universe.

Not only it is best comprehended and described as analogous to space and time, using the current model of space (strings theory for now) but also, quite literally, it "is" space and time.

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