Conversations on Consciousness

Sue What is it about consciousness that makes it so interesting?
Stephen Consciousness makes consciousness interesting. It’s exactly that
self-similar quality, the fractal nature of it, which makes it so endlessly
fascinating.

Sue This implies that if we have these two related kinds of illusion and you
can wake up in a dream and say, ‘Oh, but now I realize it’s a dream,’
you might be able to wake up in waking life in the same way—and have
lucid living.
Stephen Yes, certainly. The religious, esoteric, religious traditions of
enlightenment talk about that exactly, and lucid dreaming seems
to be one of the best metaphors for what that enlightenment would
be like.
Here you are in a dream that you don’t know is a dream, and so you
have a very limited view of what your possibilities are, who you are,
what you’re doing there, and what really matters. Suddenly you
remember that you’re dreaming and that changes everything. And in
the same sense with enlightenment, it’s said that one comes to understand
a deeper level of unity. Normally we are acutely, uncomfortably
aware of separateness and the fact that there’s a great distinction
between Sue and Stephen. You’re over there and I’m over here; but
there’s another level on which we both have something in common:
not the self, but the ‘I’, the experiencer. When you tease this apart
you find out that there’s no way to distinguish the ultimate nature of
that experiencer in Stephen or in Sue, because the stuff that distinguishes—
Stephen’s name, his birth-date, all his physical characteristics
and all that—is the stuff which is not necessary to being who I am.

Sue You’re saying that if you were to wake up in waking life, which might
be called enlightenment, somehow this separateness would disappear;
the self would disappear? Yet in a lucid dream it almost seems the other
way round: when you wake up you feel more yourself, as though before
I became lucid it wasn’t really me dreaming, but now I’m actually here
in my dream.
Stephen Yes, but it depends on what you mean by ‘yourself’. Do you
mean, ‘I feel more like who I am,’ or is it this person that people call
Sue Blackmore? You don’t feel more like the outside view of you, you
feel more like the inside you, and that’s the point: to really feel that
identity is something like the difference between snowflakes. Suppose
we take ourselves to be individual snowflakes with a particular
crystalline form. Certainly there’s a difference between the two, they
have different structures. And here one snowflake is falling into the
ocean; what does it fear? ‘I’m about to be annihilated, I’ll disappear,
I’ll be gone, nothing.’ But perhaps what happens instead—and this is
a metaphor for death or enlightenment—is an infinite expansion, as
you remember that you’re not just that one drop of frozen water, but
that you are water. So this metaphor of substance is another level
that is simultaneously present with the form; the separation doesn’t
disappear: it’s just that it’s only the form; the substance is unity.

Sue When you were talking about enlightenment, you described it as something
like the individual or self, slipping into a great unity. Could you
say, in the question of free will, that the choices are coming not from
this little conscious you, nor even from this body, but from everything?
Stephen Yes, and that’s why it depends on what you mean by ‘me’. When
I speak of the totality that I am I don’t mean just this complex body
stuff here; what compelling reason do I have to limit it to that? Given
the experiences I’ve had, I have to keep an open mind on the question
‘What am I?’

Stephen LaBerge