Copyright © 2006 by Jay B. Gaskill
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Reflections on the Stages of the Awareness of Being:
Why A “Great Convergence” May be Underway
By
Jay B. Gaskill
We humans learn relationally, that is to say, our awareness of ourselves and the world around us is acquired as we are able place things, ourselves included, into some kind of contextual field. There really is no such thing as the innate “knowing” of something without the context from which the knowing arises. This means that even in our very first stages of awareness, the first tiny spark of self knowledge arises in differentiation and contextual relationship.
As infants, our field of awareness gradually acquires the sense of “I am-ness” by achieving a degree of relational awareness, this is: of one’s own conscious being and of its status as local being, that is, as center of awareness with an increasing grasp of spatial and temporal location.
Because we are thrust into an event space realm dominated by exchange relationships, this dual discovery of our own awareness and its local properties is almost always first brought about through the necessary exchange processes that sustain life, such as being fed by mother. Throughout the life and development of any conscious being, the sense of “I am-ness” can be pictured as an expanding field into which is assimilated an increasingly rich array of relational detail.
The developing array of relational detail that begins to enrich our “I am-ness” fields, consists of aspects of the surrounding local event space that are in an interactive relationship with local I-am, and an increasingly well integrated and complex set of internal cognitive forms, principles and “thinking models”. Among these models is nested the master organizing model of “I-am in the world”, the nascent, developing Global Reality Model whose reach and integration ultimately defines the interface between every local I-am and “the world.”
What philosophers call epistemology is the systematic study of commonalities between the Global Reality Model’s of local conscious beings as they learn to interact with the world and each other.
As local conscious matures, it quickly develops one of its key faculties, the empathetic faculty by which we begin to include within the Local I-am Field the existence and normative significance of other “I-am” states. The empathy faculty permits us to generate internal models that replicate the internal states of other thinking and feeling beings, in effect our Local I-am Field learns to detect the presence of other Local I-am Field’s. All social interaction and all interpersonal ethics concern Local I-am Field > Local I-am Field relational exchange relationships. But that is a separate topic.
At some point in the development of any mature Local I-am Field, we detect the presence of non-local being or “being-ness”. This is often described (or even dismissed) as a “mystical” experience, apparently on the grounds that it is inexplicable in materialistic terms. This is “non-sense” because the cognitive faculties by which we extend our own Local I-am Field to other Local I-am Field’s cannot be explained in strictly materialistic terms, either, but we don’t refer to empathy as a “mystical” experience.
What is at work here is one of those unexamined biases or core assumptions that have been allowed to creep into the accepted common global reality model: the rejection of non-local reality, including non-local being as the product of unscientific superstition.
The demolition of this silly notion is a separate topic. Let it suffice to point out that modern theoretical physicists and mathematicians (most mathematicians never bought into materialistic thinking in the first place) have begun to rediscover the non-local aspects of reality and to appreciate the profound implications of that rediscovery: that the strict materialistic picture of reality is discredited.
Many mystics and spiritual leaders stop at this point. It is enough to have glimpsed the ultimate being-ness that lurks just behind the curtain of the mundane, to meditate on that discovery, to derive solace and ethical guidance from the implications of unity of being that it discloses.
But that stage, as important to human development as it is, remains analogous to the infant’s nascent Local I-am Field, just after it has accommodated the reality of the beloved “food lady” and competitive sibling as important elements in the life-support exchange web.
These additional stages can follow in an approximate developmental sequence:
Religions are tradition-supported, shared software constructs designed to facilitate contact with this Ultimate Being in the context of communities of co-seekers who share normatively rich Global Reality Models that are congruent with the religious software.
The models of natural science are abstracted, formally scripted, provisional empirical Global Reality Models that are designed to track the event contours of exchange relationships in the world.
As scientists begin to incorporate Non-Local Being, and its normative alignments, into their empirical reality models, the Global Reality Models of the religions and the sciences will become increasingly congruent.
JBG