Awareness of Awareness: Understanding the Nature of Consciousness (Going against the Dogma!)




Alan Wallace
Live from Phuket! show

Summary: This morning Alan promptly warned us that he was feeling a little bit feisty, which resulted in a great historical introduction with examples of how subjective experience has been mistreated and eventually completely disregarded by scientists and philosophers. It includes some fun quotes like this one from John B. Watson in 1913, "The time has come when psychology must discard all references to consciousness," and moreover "belief in consciousness is attributed to superstition and magic." It can be clearly seen how this "virus" of scientific materialism just erodes common sense and sadly is becoming more and more prominent. Aaaanyways, after the spot-on introduction we move into the first practice of Awareness of Awareness of this cycle, observing the limpid luminosity of our very existant consciousness, thereby going against the grain of the entire 20th century! The outro contains some more goodies about the terrible damage that the ideological dogma of materialism regarding concioiusness is doing, and calls for contemplatives of the world to unite. And as you could have expected, we are back to sky photos for Awareness of Awareness, this one taken by Sara!