7/11/11 On awareness: Awareness is like a point, infinitely small but still present in your psyche.

Awareness can be moved, we are constantly moving it with our conscious thoughts. We can move our awareness to our left hand, or our sense of smell. Awareness is not fixed within the body either. Our awareness can be focused on a friend in conversation, or a beautiful tree a few yards away. Conscious thoughts tend to clump around awareness. For example, placing your awareness on the tree from before, the thoughts that would first clump around that awareness would likely be names: Tree, leaves, bark, green, brown, rough, smooth, etc. Quickly after these first thoughts might come more complex ideas: I might climb that tree. I might chop it down and make a house. That would be sad because the tree is beautiful. Because these thoughts so frequently come with our awareness of things, we typically confuse awareness, that tiny point, with the thoughts themselves. This is most certainly not the case, because awareness can travel into the realm where conscious thought, by definition, cannot dwell. Awareness can be shifted into the realm of the unconscious. There, unconscious thoughts will clump around it, as they should, because these thoughts desperately need to be comprehended by consciousness. But the thoughts will not take the linear, linguistic form that conscious thought does. Instead, they take the form of images, or perhaps scents or sounds. Raw sensory data that can then be interpreted by consciousness. It can be shown that awareness can be consciously moved into areas of the psyche where conscious thought cannot dwell. It is then reasonable, or at least possible to imagine, that awareness can also be shifted to places outside the body where conscious thought, ie the senses, cannot reach. This might begin to explain, or rather be the first step on the path of explaining anna and sarahs dream phenomenon. On models: All that I have said above is not true when viewed through an objective, scientific lens. It is simply a model of reality, and hopefully a useful one. The nature of consciousness is to build vast impenetrable walls around the self to differentiate itself from the rest of reality. This distinction between me and not me requires extensive use of models if anything is to be brought through the walls, inside the psyche to consciousness. The image your eye sees is not the object, it is an image, a model of it, built in your consciousness based on the best data available at the time. That data is not the image itself, the data is a series of photons vibrating at a certain frequency. And yet even that explanation of the data is another model, an isomorphism (write more on isomorphisms). It is the psyche that isomorphically translates the raw, indescribable, meaningless data into a model, a meaningful psychic image. As we receive more data, we are able to create more psychic images, more 2 dimensional models. Our consciousness integrates all of these two dimensional models together, and excitingly, a 3 dimension model is produced. As things become more complex, the simple 2 dimensional models provided by sight, even when integrated into 3 dimensions, contain an insufficient level of detail and information. We need to add sound, and touch, and taste, and smell. Science, and art, and dreams too, to some extent, all are a continuation of this modeling process. We create better and better models to bring more and more of reality across the barrier of the self and into the psyche and consciousness. The fact that reality comes to us in the form of models and

not in the raw form of the pleroma means that by necessity our models are flawed and never show the whole picture, no matter how detailed they are. Some modeling languages are better at describing some aspects of reality than others. Science and religion are not usually contradictory, they are simply using different languages to describe reality. Different languages appeal to different people, and more importantly, different aspects of ourselves. The logical side of me finds no satisfaction in the notion of an all mighty god who created the heavens and the earth, but another side of me is deeply stirred by the notion of god and the continuity of creation. Yet even that, more mystic, side of myself finds fault with the dogmatic, Abrahamic god that dictates morality. So, I simply reject that aspect of the Abrahamic model the torah proposes. We are constantly finding and redefining our models of reality to suit our needs. In many cases artistic, mythical, abstract, metaphorical or theological models work much better at describing the human condition, that is the interplay of the psyche with reality, than the scientific models do. It is what is meaningful, not what is correct that is satisfying, and true, and liberating. My model of awareness will probably not hold correct when analyzed though the lens of neuroscience. Nonetheless, I feel that it accurately describes phenomena that I have experienced better than any other model I have been exposed to thus far, and I will accept it as truth until I find a better model. Yet even if a superior model arises, my awareness model will not be proved strictly false, simply more cumbersome and perhaps less detailed than the new, better model. Models are never wholly false or wholly true, they are simply subjectively better or worse at describing reality. Polar and Cartesian coordinate systems are both mathematically true and both can be used to completely describe various functions. But, in most circumstances, one system is far more cumbersome to use when describing a certain function than the other. We do not always choose the model that shows the world more correctly. In the case of Polar vs Cartesian coordinates, both systems are correct. Here, we choose he model that makes the world easier to understand, that model that gives the function more meaning to us. When we move out of the realm of scientific models all together, into artistic models of reality, into models involving the unknowable and the infinite, the notion of correct losses almost all of its meaning and we are forced to rely more heavily on ease and fullness of understanding instead of some objective correctness.