It’s a point I’ve sneaked into conversations on a number of
occasions, each time with no response whatsoever, as if I hadn’t said anything. It’s very
simple logic and I don’t know whether people don’t understand it or they think
it’s silly.
Is life, our conscious experience, just the briefest of
twinkles in a vast black chasm of nothingness? It would possibly not be black
as nothingness implies no visual experience (though we do tend to think of
“it”, the unexperiencable, as black, we could just as well picture it as white,
which though just as meaningless is maybe a little more comforting) , and there
would of course be no chasm, indeed, no volume of any size, nor any time.
We know that our physical bodies arose because of certain
biological processes involving tiny amounts of DNA and those of a materialist
persuasion would have us believe that the transfer and recombination of these
few microscopic strands of nucleic acids was a prerequisite for the eventual
emergence of our consciousnesses. However, from a subjective perspective, our
consciousnesses appeared to emerge out of nothing, as we don’t remember
anything prior to our conception, nor in most cases anything before we were a
few years old.
Christians, Muslims, Jews, and atheists seem to agree that
“we” (for want of a better word) were “created” at a point in space and time,
and that “we” had never existed prior to this, not even in the infinity of time
and space that some new theories on the multiverse seem to imply is a reality.
They do, however, diverge somewhat as regards what happens to “us” when we die.
As the monotheist would have it, one does not exist for infinity and then one
suddenly appears and continues to exist for “the rest of infinity”, which seems
somewhat asymmetric, though if they are happy with heaven existing outside time
and space then that’s no problem.
Atheists, and more particularly materialists, though many of
them are highly intelligent in a technical sense, sometimes seem rather linear
and prosaic in their way of thinking. Consciousness emerges with the formation
of the brain, so they say, and disappears when the brain ceases functioning. I
agree with this up to a point and am willing to accept the possible veracity
of their further claim that once consciousness has gone, that’s it, you will
cease to exist and never exist again. But I am open to the possibility
that this is not true and I also think that on a “philosophical” level it
doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. Immediately after I die, consciousnesses
will be emerging constantly throughout the universe for billions more years,
or, if there indeed is a multiverse, maybe for infinity. Why can’t “I” be one
of these new consciousnesses that the infinite “black chasm” is spewing out in
vast never ending numbers. Was I so unique, so special that the “nothingness”
that churned me out at least once, is unwilling or unable to ever do so again(?),
because we are each of us “I” and the “I”s keep on coming. I think there’s a
problem here with the use of words such as I, me, we, you, etc. Regarding
ourselves as a unique individual or self has always been regarded in buddhism
as illusory and this assertion has recently been supported by neurological
research which indicates that there isn’t actually a self in the brain but that
the myriad of sensory experiences, thoughts, and stream of consciousness
mediated through memory merge and create the feeling that one is a “person” and
this is then reinforced by human society in which one is regarded as and
functions as a unique individual (actually I imagine the neurologists tried
interfering with various parts of the brain in order to find an area where
disruption might lead to a loss of personal identity, but I’m just speculating).
The “ego” or “self” is in both the hardware and the software and being able to
pluck it out and see it for the artifical construct that it really is is far
from easy.
Hindus believe that the Atman (soul, inner self, true self)
proceeds from one life to the next but Buddha did suggest that it was not
possible to establish whether such an “individual higher self” existed and
Buddhists speak in terms of the Buddha nature which is the essential nature
within all things, the fundamental ground of reality. Notice that the
Buddha nature is not split up into separate individual consciousnesses but is a
state of mind in which the the subject and object are merged, there is no
duality, no person set apart from everything else. So one might speculate that
although this “essential nature” is manifesting in separate individuals, these
individuals are experiencing the same state of mind, in which “they” no longer
exist. And we’re not talking Borg here.
One might think that for “me” to be reincarnated there would
need to be some form of mind continuation. But I can’t see any problem with a
break in consciousness and a new consciousness not remembering anything
previous. Not existing is by definition something that cannot be experienced.
When I die, that will indeed be it, JohnK gone forever, but the consciousness that
was the foundation of the JohnK illusion was not a special JohnK consciousness.
In fact materialists keep JohnK “alive” as a once conscious
entity that is now banned for all of future infinity from ever experiencing
consciousness again, not even that of a miniscule midge, amongst the billions
of miniscule midges that swarm within every square mile of heathland around me,
with brains no more than a few molecules in size, just as, before JohnK was
born he was banned from experiencing consciousness for the infinity going
backwards in time to the big bang and further into the multiverse. Yet if JohnK
was doomed to not be conscious for infinity, why did that infinity come to an
end, and JohnK consciousness arise.
But, of course, JohnK is only a transient illusion of
personhood consciousness, shaped by biology and society and seeing itself as a
person through its memory, stringing together all those beads of “experiences
in the present moment” to construct a necklace, a me, an I, a person. The
memory is the string that holds the beads together, but if one was able to look
closely at the necklace, one would see that it was not a continuous bead but separate
discrete beads, and buddhism would have it that between each bead there lies
the dark void, death. In some buddhist philosophies at least, consciousness is
likened to the action of the “dot” on the screen of a cathode ray tube which
appears, disappears, reappears in a different location, disappears, and so on,
but doing this so quickly that, given the relatively slow data processing of the
human brain, it appears as a picture to the human mind, or like a movie, with
separate frames appearing and disappearing so rapidly that the mind thinks it’s
seeing a moving picture.
I don’t want to mix metaphors here as the necklace
represents the person that we see ourselves to be, whereas the CRT and the
movie represent the basic nature of consciousness as we experience it, though
they both seem to reflect a similar thing, namely the quantization of “reality”.
The ordinary mind is unable to perceive these separate quantae of consciousness
(which perhaps last for just millseconds) and the voids that separate them, but
supposedly in deep meditative states time may fade away and the real reality
may arise; particles of consciousness rapidly emerging from and dying back into
the pregnant void, death, just as, it is thought by some scientists, subatomic
particles, the building block of the physical universe, are created and
annihilated …….. created and annihilated elsewhere and
elsewhen ……. ……..,
discrete packages of “physical reality”, manifesting the framework of space and
time.
