There is a moving essay on the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in a recent New Yorker. It's by Joshua Rothman. This excerpt is near the end: "Then, late last year, my mother had a catastrophic stroke. It devastated the left side of her brain, wrecking her parietal and temporal lobes and Broca’s area—parts of the brain that are involved in the emotions, the senses, memory, and speech. My mother now appears to be living in an eternal present. She can say only two words, “water” and “time.” She is present in the room—she looks me in the eye—but is capable of only fleeting recognition; she knows only that I am someone she should recognize. She grasps the world, but lightly. As I spent time with my mother, I found that my intuitions were shifting to Dennett’s side of the field. It seems natural to say that she “sort of” thinks, knows, cares, remembers, and understands, and that she is “sort of” conscious. It seems obvious that there is no “light switch” for consciousness: she is ...
The struggle is about semantic meanings. Strawberry fields? A field of strawberries or a metaphor for something remembered?
ReplyDeleteFor Tolle, unconscious means unaware, not present, not conscious in the now, not having an internal watcher; and conscious seems to mean having an aware presence or watcher which transmutes the noise of the egoic mind into a study of the essence.
His egoic mind is the problem; always occupied with past and future, with the pain body(pp 36/7) and noise of the past, and anxieties about the future. With externals. Not the music of time, but the destructive noise of the mechanics of mind.