The Ground Floor

With extreme doubt, we accept the possibility that we may have no way of knowing truth. If we accept from the start the possibility that no knowledge is final or certain, this may help keep our minds flexible and adaptable, loosening the mind's stubborn clinging to pre-established habits of thought.

Can we move forward from this extreme doubt, this doubting of our senses, our memories, even our very selves?

If the conscious mind is going to probe further, a good place to start is the nature of consciousness itself. We can talk about "consciousness" and "the conscious mind" without applying the label of "self" to them. We can use words like "we" to refer to conscious experience, without assuming a self in it.

How would this new attitude work in practice?

Imagine, for example, the awareness of a rose. The mind's initial reaction may be to separate this awareness into three parts, "self," "rose," and "self being aware of rose". We can stop before this separation, and say merely, "There is this quality of rose-awareness."

In this way we find the fundamental nature of consciousness: a streaming now of awareness. There are these sights right now; there are these sounds right now; there are these smells, tastes, and feelings right now; there are these thoughts right now. There is everything in this field of conscious awareness right now.

When we look at a rose, two things arise in our awareness: the awareness of the sight and smell of the rose itself, and the awareness of the idea of a rose which we believe explains the sight and smell. The bare awareness of sights and smells is a mental step before interpretation of what they mean, before identifying where they come from.

It is important to make this distinction in order to see the difference between direct knowledge and believed knowledge. Direct knowledge, the actual sight and smell, requires no belief or disbelief. It is not subject to truth or falsehood; it is merely there. Once we go beyond that, to interpreting the sight and smell, to labeling and identifying, we arrive at ideas which claim to be related to the direct experience. These ideas are then believed.

As to the age-old question, which is more fundamental, the world or our experience of it, the real answer is that our experience is directly known, and "the world" is an idea we have come up with to explain that experience. The real answer is that direct experience of our perceptions is more fundamental than beliefs about what causes those perceptions. We can not even talk about what actually causes those perceptions; we can only talk about what we believe causes those perceptions.

It is also important to recognize the distinction between the awareness of an idea, and belief in that idea. Ideas, too, are subject to direct knowledge. If I have the idea of a rose in mind, then I directly know the idea of a rose, regardless of whether I believe it, or whether it is "true."

Next: It's All Connected