Under The Shadow Of The Self

LAST YEAR, by some defects from the remote control, I could no longer use my Television in full power. That is, from then on I could receive only a few from a packet of tens of channels. To my amazing , I discovered that I was also liberated from ... the Television long before !
I suddenly realised I do no longer need to switch from channel to channel to find something interesting in the nights as some years ago, in the beginning of my Jobless-in-Profession ...
It seems the existence of the Television is today for me no longer needed !

BUT one thing I do miss today : Mr Data from the science fiction serie The Next Generation !
The next generation of Mr Data ( his brother ) got a device from Dr Soong ( their maker) and therefore could experience Feelings and Emotions ...



STILL THERE are very very long way from now for science today to perhaps create a Mr Data like that ! ...
Perhaps everything we learn and do today in the creation of computers is ... nonsence comparing to that !

We still know ... nothing about the mechanism from the Operating System in our brain in the language of Science today, for example ( Is it so ? What is Neural Network then ? Perhaps I should study something about that ... ).

But one thing we do know for sure : Every thing in our brain is created and operates dynamically and recursively ! That is, the era of predefined functions or procedures with predefined parameters would be over long before, and the time of predefined inputs and outputs or predefined querries from Databases with predefined entries or objecs would also be ... thousands of years ago ...



USING the Self as a starting layer, we could see many many amazing happenings in our Being .
Clearly not all processes are directly under the power of the Self. In fact, there are many processes that operate in non stopping fashion without Feelings or Emotions ...
Getting information from outside, decode it, save it somewhere in our brain, and retrieve it when necessary has nothing to do with feelings, for example. Still how and when to to that, are another questions, but the miracle of Parallism in our brain is that, as long as our head is ... in order, the streams of information is going in and out without delay.

So is sometime we do not intent to pay attention to anything, but perhaps our senses could be still in some ways catching events around us and save safely somewhere in our brain, if they are still in operation ... That is, Information in our brain is nothing more than pure data just like that in our computer memory.
A house or a girl, for example, have nothing to do with Bad, Good, Nice, Not Nice , Big, Small, ... by themselves. In fact, their True Nature has no Name, is not big, not small, not nice, not not-nice, not long, not short, not bad, not good, ...
Looking that way the Self is clearly the greatest Artist from Time who makes lifes more colorful. It defines the added values in the Dual Space : bad, good, sorrow, happy, wrong, right, rich, poor ...



WHEN we free the Self on top of these information, then we could be just like Mr Data experiencing full of Sorrows and Fearness, using the device of his brother : He was suddenly in a sea of Feelings, full of Emotions ... So we see once again that the Self is a Fee who magically transforms these information into active Entities with Feelings, with Emotions ...
And clearly the State of Awareness ( or Consciousness ? ) of Events in our life defines the bindings between processes ...
We also see clearly that when these bindings between some Entities and the Self are somehow broken, Informations in some defined contexts are still in our memory and we could still access them when remembering something, but they are now nothing more than the dead bodies of some creatures without any Feelings or Emotions ...



BUT even Lions and Tigers today or Dinosaurs hundreds of million years ago could also experience moments full of Love and Passion with their children, or full of Angers and Desires when chasing their victims ...
And they also could improve their skills for catching their preys ...



THE TRUTH is, in Reality we do not cry days after days in the sea of Sorrows and do not laugh days after days in the sky of Happiness. We are not as a gorilla-baby crying to death beside his mother's body, and we do not find raw meat and fresh blood delicious like tigers today...
Because there are many things more in our life that Mr Data could never parallel and even Dr Soong could never imagine !

The ability of being outside those processes, for example, as a true Outsider watching the events and gathering knowledge from our lifes silently - what I should call The Knowledge process - and do something without the interference of the Self - the existence of what I should call The Witness or The Identity process or perhaps stated by Buddhism: The Buddha Nature ! ...



FURTHERMORE , dynamically created processes are amazing and very powerful things but the ability to regulate and reduce them from the extremes, or even destroy them (The Awakening process ) to free us from the sea of feelings make evolution in Spiritual life possible ( It is The missing ground of Darwin Theory : We are still the same with two legs and two hands as millions of years ago, but we do no longer want killings or raw meats ... )...

So what ? Is that then ... everything in our brain ?

OF COURSE NOT ! Perhaps they are merely some very small observations from the forest of understanding !. Perhaps we could never fully understand ... everything in our brain : It is a dynamic world in its own right and we are not Dr Soong of thinking Beings ...
The origine of Thoughts and the happenings in the Inner Space, for example, always remain mysterious ( for me, at least )...



BUT all of That makes our existence unique in Nature : We are not merely some creatures or learning machines who could think, learn and do something, who could recognise Friends and Enemies,and who could experience Ambitions, Sorrows, Hates, Happiness, Unhappiness ...
We are also capable of freeing ourself from the sea of feelings, and disclose something wonderful from somewhere within us : The Buddha Nature ...
And That makes us Humain being, not merely a thinking being ...


© February 2002 ,
Nguyen Sau Rieng

NOTES :

At this moment, we still do not identify Awareness and Consciousness as two different states: I know I am seating reading ... , for example, is the Awareness or the Consciousness from my being ? But surely they are not merely the results of some ... (Neuro)Biological events ...

What exactly are The knowledge Process and The Identity Process ?
Well, You could believe in their existences, you could show that for yourself, you could also throw them away as ... nonsense ! ...
But for the moments, they are our ... little secrets ...