I am 26 years old. I grew up most of my life atheist as I was raised in a very anti-religious household. I transitioned to an agnostic view sometime after I started studying global religions as I noticed each religion essentially reaches toward same idea - divine power which binds us all and guides us toward enlightenment/happiness/paradise. Then I'd say within the last 5 years I've developed even further spiritually and feel I have found God.

I majored in Biology and am very much a man of science and logic. I believe the idea of consciousness and god are based in science as well. To me, God is the universal power which we are all connected to. It's an incredible cosmic energy which balances every action, thought, and feeling that is put into it. Through exploring and understanding consciousness we are able to become one with the universe and in the same vein, one with everyone and one with God.

This post is vague as I don't care to go into my views on this platform and am only trying to increase my post count so I can pm people. But for anyone who is curious to delve further, I recently came across 2 online sources which help explain and introduce these ideas fairly well. Perhaps they may challenge you to think in a way which you may not have before or help you along your own path to finding spiritual enlightment.

ciao

article about spiritual awakening/exploration:
http://powerofpositivity.com/11-sign...ual-awakening/

video which inspired article, strongly tied to consciousness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4YYEObxhAE

tell me more about why you want to be able to PM people

Haha. I am also an online PLO player and plan to move to Argentina in 2015. There are a few players I am trying to contact. Do you know if the requirements for pm'ing are time based or post based or both?

I don't actually know exactly and I think that's on purpose. I suppose this is off topic for this forum but new accounts trying to enable PMs is often a bad sign, hence I asked anyway. Did you have an old account you lost access to or something? If so, it is sometimes possible to recover it. You can ask in ATF

Trying to define "spiritual awakening" is about as difficult as trying to define "consciousness". Neither of which mean very much, nor offer much in terms of analytical utility: at least not yet.

When you say you're "very much a man of science and logic" I meet your self-assessment with credulous skepticism.

I have often wondered why "being aware" is such a spiritual puzzle, while the ability to jump is not.

because the ability to jump is explainable by mechanics, tendons and muscles, energy and gravity, and so on. "being aware" is not explainable by any of these things. The brain isnt aware, in that the brain is simply a thing that takes inputs, processes these inputs, and has some outputs. A PC does these same things, but isnt aware as far as we know. All these inputs, processing and outputs can be explained by mechanics, biology etc, but there is no mechanism by which we can explain consciousness ( yet) . I often wonder if its just an illusion, created by the brain being a neural net which feeds its outputs back into its inputs.

awareness isnt a thing separate from the things its aware of. This is another strange phenomenon.

What about when awareness is only aware of itself?

Is awareness aware of itself? As far as I can see, theres only thoughts saying so

In some fashion, yes. At least human awareness is aware of itself, beyond any specific thought. Perhaps you might say it is aware of itself as a subject rather than as an object (of perception).

Kant's transcendental unity of self-perception is interesting on this subject

I dont see how. This would also imply that awareness was aware of being aware of awareness, and aware of being aware of being aware of being aware of awareness, and so on.

When I look, the only thing that is telling me that awareness is aware of itself, is thought. Awareness itself has no knowledge of itself. But maybe I am missing something significant.



I will read that link , anyway.

See Thesis 6: Consciousness of Self is not Knowledge of Self

Spiritual awakening allowed me to see my opponents hole cards

Off topic, but I'd like to hear more about Argentina. I've spent some years there, and I've read about players moving there. There was this particularly interesting discussion thread on poker players who had moved there many years ago, which I read when I was planning on moving there. You should search for it, it was informative. All I remember is that one guy kept getting mugged. Too bad you can't PM, OP, I'd like to hear about this. Can you tell me what province you were thinking of, at least?

When there are no thoughts or perceptions, there’s not naught. There’s not an awareness of anything either, which makes it difficult if not impossible to describe. It’s just an awareness-of-being, more near an experiential feeling or sense than an intellectual conception or thought. It’s like asking “What’s it like to be alive?” It’s not ‘like’ anything other than itself, nor can we contrast it with its opposite since we don’t know what it’s like to be non-alive or more near the point, non-aware.

Did Kant wholly accept cogito ergo sum? I can’t. As far as certainty goes: there’s thinking, ergo, there’s amness or isness or beingness. That ‘I’ think, therefore, ‘I’ am seems circular.

It's been a long time since I read Critique of Pure Reason and it's likely I understood about half of it anyway, but I think he does.

this paper talks about it.

I don't think the argument in and of itself goes farther really than concluding that "amness", as you put it, exists. It doesn't say much about what an "I" is beyond that. Also I think you have to understand the argument in relation to epistemology where what is in question is the ground of justifying beliefs. The "I" in "I think" is taken for granted in a way because the point is more about epistemology than anthropology

isnt this awareness of being just awareness of sensations, subtle things like blood flowing, heart beating energy moving through the body etc?

I think this is wrong.

We can explain jumping mechanics as much as we want, but no matter which explanation we have we will always reach a point where something just is and without an explanation at that. It is no different than consciousness in that regard.

Not sure what you mean. I would agree that everything can be reduced to "something just is", but I assumed you werent talking on that level, since talking about anything at that level is pointless and meaningless? but in scientific understanding, we can explain jumping, but not consciousness

Science again fails in explaining anything personal like consciousness! It just is! Wait where did I hear that argument before oh that's right..god just is.

consciousness isnt personal

It's personal to each separate human individual.

its not personal in that its not owned by anyone

Sorry I just assumed everyone had consciousness.