/lit/ - Literature

>>17406278
>Has anyone else thought of their consciousness as operating within a single centralized space and every phenomenal event is occurring within this centralized space?
Yes, this is one of the main points that the Hindu philosophy school Advaita Vedānta make about consciousness. Their main philosopher/theologian Adi Shankara was a prolific author and commentator and he wrote extensively about this around the turn of the 8th-9th century
>I was thinking earlier about how all we’re really exposed to is sense impressions and our relationships to them on a subject-object basis.
It is actually the intellect which is exposed to and which engages in subject-object relationships, consciousness doesn't do so itself, the light of consciousness allows the intellect to do this when the intellect is illumined by the light of consciousness (awareness), this awareness is itself free from the subject-object relationship, it is only acts as the background and basis for the subject-object distinctions of the intellect to appear in itself, within the undivided space of eternal awareness. You are aware of subject-object relations, the subject-object relation is not aware of itself, because that would involve the subject of the relationship at once being the subject of the subject-object relationship with the original object, as well as being the subject of an additional subject-object relationship with itself so that it may know both terms of the subject-object relation which is necessary for the subject-object relationship to be self-knowing. This is impossible though because the subject simultaneously being its own object is a contradiction in terms, like the simultaneous presence of heat and the absence of heat. The ultimate background of all things itself consists of self-revealing awareness which is itself intrinsically free from subject-object distinctions and which is unchanging, immediate and self-revealing, which is why its light is constant while the subject-object distinctions change. This self-revealing awareness is different in nature from the subject knowing itself as its own object, the former can be self-knowing while the latter cannot be because the former is a perfect and completely homogenous unicity (or is non-dual) and so it doesn't consist of any dual distinction of observer and thing observed. The subject of each relation is defined by its relation to the object, but awareness or consciousness simply is without needing to be defined by anything else, it is the necessary foundation and basis of all particular knowledge, through which they have their being.
>Your attention acts as a mouse for the interface of consciousness to choose which object it needs to “dialectically” relate to. It locks onto one target at a time.
Consciousness is actually non-volitional. Volition and its acts appear in consciousness which is how you can tell that they are different from consciousness.