Wanting to awaken
is the desire to produce something permanent in consciousness.
When it is not engaged in meaningful problem solving, consciousness falls to story-telling, both to others and itself; and in story-telling, nothing is permanent. Everything is always changing, indeed, story-telling survives by constantly renewing its contents. This lack of a permanency in consciousness is what frees men from living totally by fixed responses to the environment, and gives them the ability to picture it otherwise, then execute the imagined change.
This lack of a permanent structure to consciousness is natural to man’s brain, and is therefore uncritically accepted and generally found unremarkable. Nothing metaphysical is being alleged regarding this situation. It is simply being noted that while all other organs have a permanent, predictable product, consciousness does not. Its sole product, (thoughts), are characterized by a lack of permanency and predictability. The brain seems to be compensating for this by introducing into consciousness the sensation of a self, an entity that experiences consciousness that is itself permanent. (Like a ship whose cargo is constantly changing, yet the ship itself is always the same).
This is one purpose of the neurally based sensation in man that there is a him in his consciousness that is directing and experiencing his consciousness. By providing the mental impression that there is a permanent self that is the consistent medium for the im-permanent thoughts, the brain frees up consciousness to pursue its extraordinary activities.
Under routine conditions this arrangement runs unnoted in men. Only when the disruptive results of anomalous neural wiring occur, do questions regarding the, sense-of-self come to light. Judged by whatever be the majority standard, it is only when a particular person’s thoughts are deemed so unreflective of locally defined reality, and he seems totally unable to realize it – do men even momentarily, imprecisely ponder the relationship between what seems to be the them inside of them, and the thoughts this them is presumed to willfully have. (Put crudely but not inaptly: except when men of ordinary consciousness are thinking about some other man as being crazy in his thinking, do they ever have a brush with the craziness that is ordinary thinking).
J.