We have different internal lenses which serve to act as different perspectives for our own experience and internal states. The self and other lenses. Awareness can assume the role of these different lenses. There are two functions of awareness, it can do the looking, or it can make you feel looked at.commonsense wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:46 pmDoes this mean that one cannot remember what is observed? Or rather is it what one has experienced that can’t be stored in memory?Impenitent wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 2:40 pmmemorycommonsense wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 2:28 pm What is the difference between observing and experiencing?
-Imp
When awareness does the looking, it is looking as the self. When we feel looked at, awareness assumes the role of other and becomes hidden from us. When awareness looks as the hidden other, we feel self conscious. We feel an external eye looking upon us and judging us. Normally awareness remains occupied for a typical person who works a job, has a family, etc, but from time to time, awareness can occupy this role of bodily actor, the thinker of thoughts, the source of actions and intentions. This is an egoic person, like a child pretending to steer a car.
When awareness looks as the self, it can look at its own internal processes as the other. By doing this, it separates itself as the awareness, from itself as internal processes. So thoughts, intentions, even sensory feelings can become other. This creates a large detachment between awareness and everything within awareness, which can feel very internally spacious. But it also creates a large dualistic divide between self and other, the self being some detached observer, feeling like a disembodied or spirit entity, trapped in a body.
The challenge is to either let these self vs other distinctions drop away to allow awareness to simply absorb what is, or to somehow smash these distinctions through the looking and not finding of the self. Once this is seen that the other is not other, and all is self, or rather that they are not two, or nondual, then theoretically this spaciousness could occupy everything and everywhere, allowing a vastness of awareness rather than the point-like existence of the detached dualistic observer. To understand that what you thought you were looking as, is actually not a thing, or an entity, but a construct, existing within its own construct, would amount to loosing this self other distinction, no self. There would be no selves and by virtue of that, no others. No one. And no things. Only what is.
There is a short term memory registry we typically use for decision making, planning etc, which also has a self reinforcing or recreating tendency. This might be a source of the sense of being an internal knower, i.e. a subject or entity which is the owner of experiences, i.e. the self. It might not be the whole picture, but a piece of the entity. But when reflective awareness disengages, this memory effect seems not to be occurring. This could be the ISness, nothing attached.