The Dreaming Death
Published 2017-09-10 on MindsThe higher mind is inimical to the lower in all senses, and it is the lower mind which is in charge of keeping us alive, and moving forward.
There is never a lack of things to think about, to consider and reflect upon. It is only our waking, structured experience which sets priorities and limits, and restricts the domain of information to something that seems manageable. But when the forebrain begins to falter, just a little in its control, its rigid regimenting of concerns, suddenly the universe yawns wide and everything demands account. Such a state resents the narrow delimited role in life we have to play, its daily routines and chores, tasks necessary for survival. It indeed induces a kind of paralysis of awareness that is directly inimical to doing these tasks, 'what has to be done'; true awareness is inimical to instantiated life.
It's no coincidence that monks live such secluded lives, where most things are provided for, and their information is limited; such allows a form of this constrained super-awareness, limited to certain domains. It also explains the sickness of our modern life, that most pervasive and creeping graying. It is most of impassioned and free life being subsumed into the aspects of necessity, of sustenance, and the moderation of appetites, over open-ended life. The way perversely, as the amount of work we as a species need to do becomes less and less, the time we spend trying to find and keep work, the time we spend either working or preparing to work has grown and grown. Most spend the better part of the first eighteen years of life in such a state, through education, if not twenty-two. And then it certainly doesn't slacken after that point, with most professions. And then we work until we die, or are too infirm to work any longer; most today will never retire. This is the spiritual sickness, the rot, behind the language of 'wage slave'.
People are given to extensively qualify 'enlightenment' and 'awareness', and depict them as liberating; in the former they are actually very simple. Awareness is simply the lesser degree, awareness of heat, or cold, of color and state, of presence and absence, ratcheted up to the highest degree until it becomes effectively total, or at least enough to outstrip the ability of the mind to keep up. In the latter, it certainly is liberating, in a very true sense of the word. But it is lived life which is incredibly imprisoning, and the friction between the two creates an unbearable separation. The higher one's awareness goes, the more one begrudges the common menial affairs of life. Almost as if the mind itself rebels against being used to lesser purposes. By becoming more aware, life becomes almost proportionally more painful to actually conduct. So as a process, the sensation of growing awareness is not liberating, but one of gradual ossification and increasing oppression. Weltschmerz comes into play.
In the end, the two states cannot stand in harmony. The larger scale is the existential enemy of the smaller, and no device nor revelation exists which can properly reconcile them in the mind, or at least one which itself is durable against awareness, which is as absolute and universal as that force. Thus the antipathy must be resolved, generally through one sublimating to another. When the material mind subdues the awareness, brings it back into control, one is sobered, and returns to the grind, dead. When awareness is of sufficient force and breaks the functional mind, it is called madness, and is characterized by debilitation and raving. These are the most common results; the former more than the latter as in most in our materialistic and narrow lives awareness is usually a weak force. There are other possible results, such as the bifurcation of consciousness, into a set of alternating, unstable states, where one is chiefly pragmatic and another is utterly mad.
This is the description which I believe I currently occupy, although the transition is less binary and more gradual, less violent but still prone to static, flashes of one state or another. It is the lesser form of madness, where awareness can be achieved without becoming invalidated by it, kept back from a certain amount of functional systems. But stress and certain trials erode the edges, and endanger the integrity of the functional portions; and in the ebb, awareness trickles into the space.
There is also atemporal bifurcation, where one set of faculties become very dry and functional, logical and dispassionate, while others are utter flux. For instance, a person may be completely adroit with physical tasks, the manipulation of objects and their application, but at the same time they would be completely unable to hear or speak coherently. I believe this is a disposition common to academic philosophers, who tend to display a kind of shearing dissociation between their irrational insights and the logical superstructure they build up about them; a certain part of their brain has gone mad, or become aware, and is sending them incomprehensible signals which the rest tries its best to translate and incorporate into a salient structure. This is very similar to how the waking mind of a healthy person processes dream-memory, but in the philosopher's case it is a perpetual interaction.
At large, the dialectic of dream-wake could be applied to the rest of this description, but caveats are necessary to do so. For one, the phantasms of dreams are not necessarily phenomena of awareness, but constructs of the mind internally. Also awareness doesn't represent the paralysis of other faculties, or even illogicality, but simply routing different 'traffic' through the same sectors produces different results. Where the parallel is most salient is in the inimical relationship of one to the other, the conflict between the limited and functional, and the aspirational and sublime. The latter being a kind of 'glitch', an unintended consequence of the former applied at large, creating abstract realms and domains.
I don't know, in truth, what the 'critical mass' for awareness would be that would invalidate an organism, what the topography of that threshold would be. I simply give my firsthand report and understanding, as someone whose functionality is just moderately flagging, who remains for the time being viable but can easily see over the prospective horizon, and has enough experience of the other side to describe it.
EDIT 2019-1-30: By now, I have found that critical mass.
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