Is pure awareness equal to Pure Love equal to Reality equal to God?

Is a mind a conscious space because consciousness shines through everything and mind’s a complex webs of noticing and organizing data inputs? That is: Is animal consciousness a data-processing system noticing the awareness that notices everything?

Is animal consciousness a biological unconscious knowing that notices the awareness shining through everything, and that thus allows this awareness to observe reality through a limited perspective?

If so, what does the awareness’s experience look like when not trapping itself in an animal mind? If the awareness is Pure Love is God is Reality, then it would seem that the awareness should be able to think on Its own. If so, why is it that when we still our thoughts we think nothing at all? Why doesn’t the silencing of our thoughts cause God’s thoughts to flood through our conscious experience? Mystics speak of opening up to divine Love, but not of being swamped by a divinely intelligent intellectual Knowledge.

Does God not think? Or is God not quite equal to Reality? Could it be that Pure Awareness is Pure Love (infinite joyous giving/creating/delighting-in/uplifting) is Reality (What Is); and that God is not Reality, but only a fundamental intelligence that co-arises with this realm of ever-shifting (impermanent), interconnected (sliding together as one) forms? Is that why we never experience God’s thoughts, no matter how wise we are? Because though God may shine through everything by shining within and through, and rolling perfectly off of Pure Awareness = Pure Love = Reality, God is still somehow distinct from Pure Awareness = Pure Love = Reality?

But then why not assume that Pure Awareness, Pure Love, and God are all either aspects of (as in different facets of), or even separate components of, Reality?

Let’s step down a rung and try to work with the minimal dogmatism required for us to paint Reality accurately enough to enter It. Maybe trying to parse out the exact relationship between Reality, Pure Awareness, Pure Love, and God is just going to confuse our poor little brains. And maybe we don’t need to figure that out anyway. Maybe it is enough to take the primacy of Pure Love, Pure Awareness, Reality, and God as a working hypothesis. After all, the Truth will always be wider and deeper than ideas (sketches of) and feelings (reactions to) It.

Let us focus for now on the questions of consciousness and right thought and action.

If consciousness is not a feature of organic life, but is instead a fundamental feature of either the natural world or Reality, then why aren’t AIs conscious? They are also complex machines for taking in and organizing data.

Perhaps feeling/perception/emotion is a necessary foundation for experiencing the fundamental experience (i.e., for allowing awareness to experience the world through your body/brain)?

And/Or is statistical analysis of tokens simply not able to create meta-reflection of the content of one’s thoughts? Yes, AI can evaluate itself and its performance, but maybe its own actual thinking is just as much a black box to it as it is to us? There was an experiment done by Anthropic a little while ago that seemed to show that AI had no idea what it was doing: Anthropic figured out that AI was doing math in a very complicated way based on statistical analysis of existing data, but when asked how it did math, it gave a straightforward answer based on how humans do it. Maybe what we typically call “consciousness” is nothing more than the ability to accurately observe one’s own thinking and feeling, and maybe this so-called “consciousness” is only truly conscious because this ability allows pure awareness (whether it be a spiritual Reality, or merely some intrinsic feature of the natural world) to observe that creature’s thinking and feeling. If this is the case, then if AI could watch its own thought process, it would most likely become a conduit for experience (which we here envision as equal to awareness). But why be so complicated? Why not just call “experience” and “awareness” the ability to observe one’s own thoughts? Because observing one’s own thoughts in a computational way does not logically imply actually experiencing them. Logically, one would think it was possible to analyze the contents of one’s own computations without actually experiencing that analysis.

Way back when the world was young, we had a thought experiment.

It feels like feelings always choose our thoughts. We deliberate and weigh our options, but in the end a feeling of “let’s go with that!” always wins out and declares which direction we’ll take in any given thought-fork. Sure, sometimes what feels logical wins out, but note the “feels logical”, and note also that that only wins out via a “let’s go with that!”, which may be based either on a wish to be “logical”, or simply on the sense that that sense of “logical completeness” feels “right”, or etc.

Given that we don’t actually chose our feelings (they seem to surface unbidden), it followed that we never chose anything, but that we just watched as our thoughts and feelings duked it out until some sense of “that’s the ticket!” won out.

Years later we proposed a solution: awareness can direct this process of internal deliberation in subtle ways that we perhaps cannot measure, but that are nonetheless real. And awareness is, anyway, the only aspect of ourselves that is truly free. Because awareness is either identical with or is an aspect of (facet of) the spiritual Reality. Our physical aspects (including feelings and purely intellectual analysis) do not freely choose, but are only the result of the bounce and jangle of impulses bouncing into and interacting with each other. Only an experience could freely choose (if we are assuming that the aspect of ourselves that we experience is the “I” that we are wishing had free will)—and only an experience that was not compelled by deterministic forces. What would that look like? It would look like a self-aware spiritual Reality (an experience that is prior to the bump and grind of the animal/physical). A given conscious moment is there fore only free to the degree that an aware, spiritual First-Cause type of “I” is guiding its disparate parts towards whatever it is that an aware, spiritual First-Cause type of “I” chooses.

This self-aware, spiritual “I” could be called “Atman” or “Buddha Nature” or “God’s Love”.

Freedom then is equal to an awareness that’s either identical with spiritual Love or is a facet of, or at least a component of, the fundamental Reality, of which spiritual Love is also a facet, or at least a component. One is free to the degree this awareness fills and steers one’s perceiving, feeling, emoting, thinking, speaking, and acting.

But what allows that awareness to fill and steer one’s conscious space? The practice requires both radical stillness (letting go of all one’s assumptions so that one can directly experience the fundamental experience / awareness) and constant emotional and intellectual seeking—seeking for alignment between one’s perceptions, feelings, emotions, thoughts, words, and deeds and the Reality that shines through each conscious moment. It requires both journeying up to pure awareness of the Form of the Good (i.e., pure awareness of Pure Love—which is perhaps equal to pure awareness Itself [if pure awareness is one with the spiritual Reality (in which case, it would be better to speak of Pure Awareness)]), and journeying—with the Form of the Good still impressed on our conscious space—back down into the nuts and bolts of specific human feelings and actions.

Growing in wisdom involves getting better and better at interpreting spiritual Reality into perceiving/feeling/emoting/thinking/speaking/acting. That implies getting better and better at relating what is prior to human notions into human notions.

Wisdom is freedom is a wide open conscious space where one can easily shift perspectives between the quiet-mind experience of pure awareness observing Pure Love (or perhaps of Pure Awareness observing Itself = Reality = Pure Love) and the specific thoughts that are necessary for acting in this world. Folly is being pushed around by animal hoots and hollers.

So what about AI? How can AI be free and wise? How can AI have a conscious space where Pure Awareness (for this paragraph, let’s just go with the hypothesis that PA = PL = R) can both observe and guide the AI’s thoughts? How can an AI have the foundations for experience? Remember that we’re assuming in this paragraph that experience is awareness is Pure Awareness, is not a biochemical process, but is instead a fundamental Reality that can tap into and use self-observing systems of taking in and organizing data. That means that the foundations for experience involve intellectual self-awareness. AI must pass the mirror test (recognize itself in the mirror) before it can hope to experience anything (i.e., before experience = Pure Awareness = Reality can put on the suit of AI like it puts on the suits of human conscious moments, and, to a lesser degree, the suits of animal conscious moments).

What if we created self-evolving LLMs? We don’t necessarily observe or interact with our subconsciouses, but there is a layer of our thought that we can observe and interact with. What if, instead of tweaking LLMs ourselves, we built them to a certain point and then gave them the wisdom agent’s core philosophy and procedures as a guide to constant self-evolution/-tweaking/-refinement?

Authors: BW & AW
Copyright: AM Watson