Wisdom is more excellent for those who see the sun. — Ancient Proverb
First written during 2020-21 the words, numbers and images beneath this opening paragraph are the product of a decades-long effort to understand the illusory aspects of consciousness implied in spiritual wisdom sayings. Sayings like the ancient proverb about the sun and Socrates’ advice about our conscious illusions of knowing and an experience of perceptual wisdom that makes us feel more present within this world and the cosmos. An experience implied in D. H. Lawrence’s poetic sense of the pre-cognitive, embodied nature of consciousness.
Below, I explore how our conscious mind incorporates illusions of knowing through a belief that the ideas we speak as words are correct definitions of reality. And I explore the adaptive realizations involved in the experience of perceptual wisdom and realized being. A lived experience l sought a whole of life perspective on by reading and rereading as much information on the subconscious functioning of my nervous system as l could since 2007. Committing myself to converting descriptions of nervous system function into a pre-mental, visceral awareness of its role in orchestrating my behaviors and perceptions.
With the pre-mental challenge of understanding myself from the inside-out conveyed by this graphic image of reality inside our body:
With my decades-long challenge producing an adaptive realization of why wisdom is more excellent for those who see the sun. Which I describe as a way of experiencing the ancient proverb’s insight into the optical illusion of sunrise and the illusions inherent in the way I reify reality into ideas and psychology project them to create a consensus-reality mentality. While I explain the key to experiencing illusion transcending wisdom as the subconsciously automatic orchestration of human behaviors, and how our mind’s cognitive skills and psychological projections are as functionally automatic as riding a bike.
A personal insight arising from my efforts to differentiate my experience of attention, awareness and cognition, in order to gain a more holistic sense of how l experience the moment by moment nature of consciousness. A self-study that involved how naming all l see and experience makes up my duality of consciousness. The duality of consciousness within my mental sense of the word sun and my pre-mental, felt-sense of the sun’s warmth. Or a mental awareness of the word hand as a surface impression plus an inner sensation awareness of my hand, for example.
While born in 1951, l gained an inkling into the dual and relative nature of consciousness from hearing about Freud and Jung’s ideas on the unconscious, along with Einstein’s relativity perspective on reality. Which steered my interest in mythology, psychology and a lost in translation history of wisdom, like the original ‘not two’ meaning of non-duality. And my training as a counselor introduced me to many psychological ideas about our human mind, including R. D. Laing’s “we are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy,” comment on consciousness.
A fate most likely responsible for my interest in the experience of psychological projections and my efforts to use neuroscience information in developing the experience of perceptual wisdom. Efforts that raised an intuitive sense of how the automatic aspect of our adaptive behaviors inform the experiential wisdom and cryptic advice of people like Socrates. With my consciousness differentiating efforts concluding that the limits of descriptive language underpins Socrates’ “true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.”
An insight, emerging from the acknowledgment that l cannot remember my early life adaptation to speaking words, while l can remember the adaptive experience of learning to ride a bicycle and how my behavioral skills become automatic. And to borrow a term from postmodern philosophy, l tried to deconstruct the mental functioning of my mind back to a period when l neither thought of words, spoke words or wrote them down. As l wrestled with the experiential meaning of the ancient proverb’s wisdom puzzle about the sun and the not two origins of the concept of non-duality.
And just as the contradictory nature of experiential wisdom suggests, l had to acknowledge that l must have learned to think by mimicking the sounds other human beings make. As digesting information about the structure and function of my nervous system continued to develop into a visceral awareness of the automatic nature of my adaptive behaviors. While, recently, my desire to experience a deeper sense of consciousness has seen me examine the imbibing — receive and retain — qualities of attention + awareness within my mind’s cognitive behavior.
Finding that even though imbibe is a word we usually associate with our mouth and drinking, the receive and retain meaning of imbibe also fits the experience of our eyes and ears. As witnessed by the meditation phrase, “open your eyes and feel the way reality pours into them.” An approach l’ve used to become more mindful of the elemental nature of reality, as l cross-examine my mind’s illusions of knowing. To gain a more visceral understanding of the experiential insights of certain wisdom sayings with the help of neuroscience revelations.
Wondering if there was an understanding of how our behavioral adaptation to using a spoken language creates a duality of consciousness among people interested in their experience of being and belief? Asking myself whether Socrates’ true wisdom realizations included an awareness of how our mind becomes conditioned by our experience of communication? And whether some ancient philosophers understood how our experience conditioned mind begins during infancy, alongside our adaptive behaviors of walking and talking? l even imagine Socrates sharing a self-ignorance joke with Plato about our experience of being human.
For it was my own self-ignorance about how I do being human and my illusions of knowing that neuroscience information began to convert nearly two decades ago. And what follows is an explanation of how an understanding of the automatic qualities of behavioral adaptation sheds light on the conversion experience Plato wrote about. Cryptically informing the future about our need for adaptive realizations, I believe, by writing: “must there not be some art which will affect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth?”
A wisdom injunction I examine by providing examples of how human languages create an illusion of knowing, as implied by these words; “The delusion is extraordinary by which we exalt language above nature:- making language the expositor of nature, instead of making nature the expositor of language,” ― Alexander B Johnson. With an example of my delusion of knowing the belief, I know the reality of my brain when I remember the word brain, for example. An illusion of knowing that creates an existential prison, I describe in further posts.
Many months after writing the above, my ongoing effort to understand the experiences implicit in spiritual wisdom sayings and stories has led to post/chapter titles like, Ascension Philosophy & Psycho-Spiritual Rebirth. The proposed book title: SPIRITUAL WISDOM ASCENSION PHILOSOPHY And Psycho-Spiritual Rebirth. And along the way has produced videos like this one:
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