Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

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Spiny Norman
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by Spiny Norman »

Sam Vara wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:41 am
sentinel wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 4:30 am
Say you are looking at a tree , there is eyes vs tree , eye consciousness (seeing tree) occurs ,
but say your mind immersing in thinking of something , your attention not at the tree , then there is no eye consciousness ? The seeing or eye consciousness is not there because your awareness shifted .
So , if we accepted there is underlying tendencies of defilements , is it strange for the underlying awareness that hidden ?
No they are exactly the same with regard to being unconscious. We are ready to be conscious in the same way that we are ready to act in ways that are greedy, hateful, or delusional. In neither case is there a mysterious sentience which brings them to our attention. They arise when they do because of conditions that we have inherited.
That doesn't explain anything. Why does attention shift to the tree when there is movement in the tree? The only sensible explanation I can see is that the visual field is being monitored, ie there is an underlying awareness.

Similar to being woken up by a loud noise, or driving a car on auto-pilot, things that you STILL haven't provided a practical explanation for.

There is nothing mysterious about underlying awareness, its just a simple and logical explanation for what takes place.
What's mysterious here is your vague reference to inherited conditions. :shrug:
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by sentinel »

I think animals share the same consciousness with us . A kind of hidden mode consciousness , once activated would surface up .
When we are asleep touching the body does not give rise to body consciousness . The person are not aware of being touch .
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by Sam Vara »

Dinsdale wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:56 am
Sam Vara wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:41 am
sentinel wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 4:30 am

Say you are looking at a tree , there is eyes vs tree , eye consciousness (seeing tree) occurs ,
but say your mind immersing in thinking of something , your attention not at the tree , then there is no eye consciousness ? The seeing or eye consciousness is not there because your awareness shifted .
So , if we accepted there is underlying tendencies of defilements , is it strange for the underlying awareness that hidden ?
No they are exactly the same with regard to being unconscious. We are ready to be conscious in the same way that we are ready to act in ways that are greedy, hateful, or delusional. In neither case is there a mysterious sentience which brings them to our attention. They arise when they do because of conditions that we have inherited.
That doesn't explain anything. Why does attention shift to the tree when there is movement in the tree? The only sensible explanation I can see is that the visual field is being monitored, ie there is an underlying awareness.

Similar to being woken up by a loud noise, or driving a car on auto-pilot, things that you STILL haven't provided a practical explanation for.

There is nothing mysterious about underlying awareness, its just a simple and logical explanation for what takes place.
What's mysterious here is your vague reference to inherited conditions. :shrug:
What type of explanation do you want? Consciousness of the tree arises when the conditions for that consciousness to arise are there. A movement, and a sensitive organism with the potential to see it. Prior to the movement there is no consciousness of it, because one of the conditions is lacking. The fact that we have an organism sensitive to certain types of movement is an inherited condition.

As I said earlier, there are no practical explanations anywhere of the sort you seek. That would mean solving the "hard problem" of consciousness. If there is an "underlying consciousness", there is still the same problem in explaining its origin. You are claiming that consciousness needs explanation and yet there is no explanation of how an "underlying" consciousness escapes the necessity of being explained. And there is the additional problem of explaining how something can be both conscious (i.e. conscious of what is going on all around, so that it can alert the senses) and not conscious (i.e. we are not aware of it happening).
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by form »

Dinsdale wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:56 am
Sam Vara wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:41 am
sentinel wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 4:30 am

Say you are looking at a tree , there is eyes vs tree , eye consciousness (seeing tree) occurs ,
but say your mind immersing in thinking of something , your attention not at the tree , then there is no eye consciousness ? The seeing or eye consciousness is not there because your awareness shifted .
So , if we accepted there is underlying tendencies of defilements , is it strange for the underlying awareness that hidden ?
No they are exactly the same with regard to being unconscious. We are ready to be conscious in the same way that we are ready to act in ways that are greedy, hateful, or delusional. In neither case is there a mysterious sentience which brings them to our attention. They arise when they do because of conditions that we have inherited.
That doesn't explain anything. Why does attention shift to the tree when there is movement in the tree? The only sensible explanation I can see is that the visual field is being monitored, ie there is an underlying awareness.

Similar to being woken up by a loud noise, or driving a car on auto-pilot, things that you STILL haven't provided a practical explanation for.

There is nothing mysterious about underlying awareness, its just a simple and logical explanation for what takes place.
What's mysterious here is your vague reference to inherited conditions. :shrug:
I.e. there is an unconscious awareness in action all the time.
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by form »

So what does "higher consciousness" in dhammapada means?
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by Sam Vara »

form wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 11:29 am
I.e. there is an unconscious awareness in action all the time.
There is, in a causally determined world, something that gives rise to everything, including consciousness. What that thing is, is necessarily a matter of inference. But an "unconscious awareness" runs into an immediate problem of unintelligibility. It's not conscious, but it's aware?
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by Spiny Norman »

form wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 11:29 am
Dinsdale wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:56 am
Sam Vara wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 8:41 am

No they are exactly the same with regard to being unconscious. We are ready to be conscious in the same way that we are ready to act in ways that are greedy, hateful, or delusional. In neither case is there a mysterious sentience which brings them to our attention. They arise when they do because of conditions that we have inherited.
That doesn't explain anything. Why does attention shift to the tree when there is movement in the tree? The only sensible explanation I can see is that the visual field is being monitored, ie there is an underlying awareness.

Similar to being woken up by a loud noise, or driving a car on auto-pilot, things that you STILL haven't provided a practical explanation for.

There is nothing mysterious about underlying awareness, its just a simple and logical explanation for what takes place.
What's mysterious here is your vague reference to inherited conditions. :shrug:
I.e. there is an unconscious awareness in action all the time.
Unconsciousness in the sense that it happens automatically, in the background, and doesn't require our conscious involvement. In much the same way that breathing is automatic.
I don't see any other practical explanation for the examples I've been describing here, and none has so far been provided.
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by Spiny Norman »

sentinel wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 9:16 am When we are asleep touching the body does not give rise to body consciousness . The person are not aware of being touch .
Yes they are, if you touch them a bit harder, or make a noise. So there isn't a complete lack of awareness while sleeping, it's more like consciousness is in "standby mode".
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by retrofuturist »

Greetings,
Dinsdale wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 12:05 pm
sentinel wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 9:16 am When we are asleep touching the body does not give rise to body consciousness . The person are not aware of being touch .
Yes they are, if you touch them a bit harder, or make a noise. So there isn't a complete lack of awareness while sleeping, it's more like consciousness is in "standby mode".
Luckily, too... Otherwise the asthma attack I had in my sleep half an hour ago would have killed me.

Metta,
Paul. :)
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by form »

Did you ever have experience like this. U have constructed and experience as such, but when u were meditating, u realise that was a terrible misunderstanding, and u realised the true occurrence. That can be quite long ago. So unconscious in a Freudian sense not really as it is literally.
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by chownah »

Isn't the concept "unconscious awareness" an oxymoron?.......if there is no consciousness then there is no awareness.......aren't "consciousness" and "awareness" exactly the same thing?
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by sunnat »

The whole of consciousness is made up of the sub-conscious and the conscious both of which are aware, the sub-conscious all the time, to varying degree in relation to each other depending on the degree of 'awakedness'.

When fully awakened, enlightened, liberated, realized, there is no more sub-conscious.
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by cappuccino »

no need to complicate the issue, simplifying would be best
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Re: Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?

Post by pegembara »

Dinsdale wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 7:47 am
pegembara wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 7:42 am
Dinsdale wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2019 7:33 am

The example here is not noticing the journey because you're engrossed in a phone conversation. Contact is noticing, so in that scenario there is mind contact rather than eye contact.

We've haven't clarified what bhavanga is, or how it relates to this discussion, so I don't understand why you're dismissing it out of hand.
To be fair I only refer to the post further up.
sentinel wrote:
Without the nerve there is no ear consciousness or hearing at all .
could there be an awareness underlying or consciousness in latent ?

This is where the Third Basket, the Abhidhamma, becomes useful because it provides a further more fine-grained dissection of the cognitive process. That "consciousness in latent" was given a name, called the bhavangaCitta/life-continuum. When an object impinges on a sense door (a sound wave approaches the ear drum, or a light photon strikes the eye receptors, a smell, etc..) the bhavanga temporarily retreats to the background and let the other sense consciousnesses arise and come to the foreground. Then once the cognitive process completes, the bhavanga supervenes again. See Ven. Bodhi's CMOA for further details.
This is only a partial explanation.

But why do you dismiss bhavanga? What's your objection to it?

Do you reject all Abhidhamma stuff or just this bit?
I am not familiar with Abhidhamma but the bhavanga citta mentioned doesn't seem correct. It assumes a background consciousness/soul/self that is everpresent ie. latent consciousness which isn't found in the suttas. Whatever is happening in the pre-conscious or subconscious level doesn't count as consciousness.

Each 'consciousness' has a corresponding object - sights/ sounds/ smells/tastes/touch/temperature/feeling/mind objects-infinite space/infinite consciousness etc. There is no stream or continuum but discrete packets of 'consciousness' that only appear as continuous like fast moving frames on a video.

The perception of impermanence(aniccasanna) is one way to break the illusion of selfhood(atta). So when you ask "Six sense base without sense object any sense consciousness ?" you imply there is a free-floating consciousness(entity) that exist on its own.
We experience the world as a seamless stream of percepts. However, intriguing illusions and recent experiments suggest that the world is not continuously translated into conscious perception. Instead, perception seems to operate in a discrete manner, just like movies appear continuous although they consist of discrete images.
https://reliawire.com/consciousness-time-slices/
viewtopic.php?t=7122
And what is right speech? Abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, & from idle chatter: This is called right speech.
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