Hi chownah,chownah wrote:There are many things considered to be immaterial which are considered to arise from things considered to be material.......things like magnetic fields, electric fields, gravity etc. So I guess it might not be so unusual for one to think of consciousness as arising from the material. Can you give a reason why you think this does not happen?manas wrote: That is not to say that consciousness is self; but rather, that it is immaterial, does not arise from some special combination of matter, and is at least as real as the atoms and molecules that make up these bodies of ours.
chownah
I can recall (reading) Ajahn Chah as making that distinction also, that matter is one thing, and mind another. I really don't know how Buddhists can allow the kind of nihilism that has pervaded much of modern scientific thought to invade their own thinking. Can you actually see these words? There, that's an instance of consciousness. The force of gravity can't see these words. The Earth's magnetic field can't see these words. But you can. It's not rocket science, it's actually self-evident. No amount of clever combining of atoms and molecules can produce even one moment of conscious experience. We have managed to send human beings to the moon, but we have not been able to create even one single-celled organism (such as an amoeba, for example), even with all of our technology. That's because living things come from other living things, they don't arise out of dead things. As for how it all began, well that's one of those imponderables that we need not trouble ourselves with, is it not?
metta,
manas.