#41 Michael Taft: A Universal Theory of Awakening

Full text: https://deconstructingyourself.com/a-universal-theory-of-awakening.html

Full-blown awakening means to notice clearly that everything you experience is a brain-generated virtual representation arising in working memory. This is known in various traditions as nondual awakening, understanding the nature of mind, and so on.

Your senses gather data about the world around you, as well as your internal state. This data streams to the brain, where it goes through layers and systems of processing. The processed sensory data is then assembled into an ongoing, continuously-updated virtual representation of the world around you and the you in the world. 

Usually this experience of self-and-world is transparent, meaning that we are not aware that it is a representation. We take it to be the real world which we are experiencing. And, of course, there is a real you (a human being with blood and guts) and a real world (other people and animals, plants and planets, and, well, everything) out there. But you have never experienced this real world directly. 

The highest awakening possible is to notice that there is nothing in working memory that is not a representation. All your most intimate thoughts are representations. All your most precious emotions are representations. 

Noticing the representational nature of the experience of emotions is responsible for most forms of arhat-like manifestations. Cessations happen when part or all of this representation collapses because the brain temporarily stops generating it. The higher intensities of mindfulness practice are the result of narrowing the scope of working memory to such a small area of sensory experience that its representational construction becomes obvious (i.e. metaphorically, you can see the “pixels” out of which the image is created).

The word awakening, in this case, is a metaphor. Being asleep means that you still experience the self-and-world representation as transparent. You believe the “dream” your brain is assembling. The extent to which the self-and-world representation has become opaque (i.e. you see its constructedness) is the extent to which you are awake. You have awoken out of the “dream” of the representation of self-and-world.


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