‘Awareism’
‘Awareism,’ Consciousness, & the Matter of Things
It’s high time to formally pair ‘awareness’ to ‘matter’ and honor that marriage for what it is, the basis of all existence…
Science takes it for granted: life is built from matter, while awareness, consciousness, the very act of being is a function of matter, of molecules, elements, chemical processes.
Why?
Why do we assume matter can exist ‘on its own,’ but that being and awareness need matter before they can exist?
Awareism, the subject of this article, makes this assertion: there is nothing but awareness of creation.
Existence Awareness
Is it possible to be aware of something that doesn’t exist?
Hallucinations might come to mind. Seeing something not there is more or less the definition of a hallucination.
But aren’t we aware of something — a strange something, yes — but aren’t we aware of something that does exist if we’re hallucinating: the hallucination? Even if only ‘in our head,’ there is something we are aware of. Memory is all in our head too. Does that make memory not exist?
Awareness of thoughts, hallucinations, the imagination, expectation of the future, knowledge of the past: even if only in the head, these exist. Illusions exist as well. We might misinterpret what we’re perceiving, but we are perceiving something: the illusion.
What about describing a thing of which there is no awareness, but that does exist. Is that possible?
That might seem possible. Maybe an image from the past that no longer exists. On second thought, that’s a memory, and memories do exist.
Perhaps a thing as yet undiscovered, like a supernova, the light from which has yet to reach Earth. It seems safe to assume that undiscovered supernovas are out there, existing. But no, because it’s not that we’re not aware of something that does exist; it’s that we are aware of something that does exist and that something is the idea, the assumption that undiscovered things ‘exist.’
It’s a bedrock assumption of science: a thing can exist even though there is no, and never has been, awareness of it, like a ‘primordial earth.’
To assume ‘things’ exist without the need for anything other than an assumption…it may not seem like a big deal.
But it is.
Experience: The Coin of the Real
‘There is nothing but awareness of creation.’ That’s awareism in a nutshell.
It might seem better stated as ‘all things are awareness of creation,’ or, ‘everything is awareness of creation.’ But awareism makes no assumptions. It affirms nothing about the nature of reality, even as to the ‘existence’ of any ‘reality’ at all.
And that likely seems strange. But so might conceptually placing boundaries around things that can’t be separated without changing both, like partners in a marriage, Earth from sky, mind from body, or even just one side of a coin from another. Because if one side of a coin doesn’t exist, then the other side can’t exist, so where do you place the boundary between ‘them’?
And that’s one way of conceptualizing awareness|creation, as flip sides of the same coin. Just as ‘tails’ cannot exist without ‘heads,’ so ‘creation’ cannot exist without ‘awareness,’ and, vice versa, awareness cannot exist if there is nothing to be aware of. Continuing with the analogy, we could go further and describe this coin of two sides, awareness and creation, as experience. Experience is awareness of creation.
A simple fix for a sinking foundation
Awareism doesn’t address whose awareness of creation because ‘awareness’ isn’t a feature. It isn’t a quality possessed by, or a function of, anything. Nothing ‘has’ awareness.
Rather, ‘everything’ is awareness|creation. Awareness|creation is the ultimate ‘building block.’
Are you getting the picture?
The awareness of creation is what we are.
Space, time, mass, momentum, gravity, these are all functions of awareness|creation, not the other way around.
There is no way to define a reality that is independent of the way we choose to look at it — Chris Ferrie, Why is no one taught the one concept in quantum physics which denies reality? Medium, 8/9/2021
Whose awareness? That which is aware.
What creation? That of which there is awareness. (Or is human awareness the only awareness?)
It might seem childishly simple, but the best foundations are. A universe made from independently existing matter following the laws of physics in otherwise empty space is simple, too. It’s been the prevailing view for centuries. But it wasn’t simple enough because space now seems curved. Matter has turned wavelike. The laws of physics have split down the middle, quantum mechanics vs. relativity…
The old foundation is breaking down. The house is sinking.
Human awareness
When photons — light waves — interact with our eyes, there is a transfer of energy, however small, that we feel. We call it ‘vision.’
We call it hearing when we feel air pressure changes in our ears. We call it smell and taste when we feel chemical reactions in our nose and mouth. Touch is when we feel heat, friction, and pressure on the skin.
Awareness in humans manifests via feeling. And not just in the five senses. We also feel thoughts in our head, hormonal reactions, pain. We even feel our sense of self.
All feeling can be traced back to energy transfers — to matter interactions in our brain, gut, sensory organs, neurons, nerve endings, etc. (For more on detected interactions, see the Medium post, Blazing a Trail to Reality).
Are we giving ‘awareness’ material form here? Taking it off the high shelf of philosophical abstraction and moving it down the academic hall to the science lab — for any student to measure, manipulate, investigate?
In one sense, yes. But the way to understand awareness as feeling is not as ‘energy’ or any other scientific quantity, but as the transfer of energy ‘itself.’
Photons, I suspect, play a role as awareness ‘carriers,’ i.e., as the material manifestation of awareness. They’re the ‘mediators’ of electromagnetic interactions.
All that we feel, we feel NOW. In this kinetic whirl of ours, this ever-moving, transforming, evolving, revolving universe, all feeling, all awareness, of memory, thought, surroundings, knowledge of past, and possible future, is all felt NOW. That’s when all interactions happen.
Feeling ‘creation’
When we feel, we’re feeling a change in matter — a change in our material universe. It may be small, tiny even, but it is a change; it’s a transfer of energy, from matter, to matter.
And that’s awareness|creation: it’s a dynamic. Awareness registers change, creation builds the change. And isn’t that life, constantly new, renewed, changing, evolving?
Awareness of creation…the feeling of changing matter, it might seem all too weird and simplistic to call it a ‘building block.’ But — and not to compare life to the Internet — but ones and zeros are dead simple as well, and yet that is what every digital computer is based upon, that’s the foundation, Boolean (binary) logic. The logic of on, and off. Simple?
And while the term ‘awareness’ has a passive, ‘it is what it is, and I am aware of what it is’ kind of connotation, this is emphatically not the case. The ‘what is’ of which we are aware is the creation. The ‘two,’ awareness and creation, are not passive elements of the coin ‘experience,’ but active participants.
We don’t see light waves of a certain frequency. We see ‘blue,’ ‘orange,’ green,’ ‘brown,’ and so on. Not the words, but the feeling of those ‘colors,’ the experience of differentiating light waves of various frequencies. That experience — that way of being aware of a light wave of a certain frequency, or of a feeling in the gut we term ‘hunger,’ or the ‘all is in place’ feeling we might call ‘contentment,’ or of anything for that matter, of a thought or a memory — the way we experience these things is built. And in so building, we build how we see ourselves in our world, how we respond to our world — we create who we are.
It may also seem that awareism builds a world relative to ‘me,’ to my (or your) awareness. And a ‘relative’ world can seem a scary thing, a world of no foundation, no grounding, no absolute ‘truth.’ But ‘my’ awareness includes you…and vice versa. Together we build and share the world we each are. We’re all in this together, so the foundation we lay is the foundation we are.
And truth? In an objective reality ‘truth’ is a complex, even fraught, concept. Some seriously wonder if there is any such thing as ‘truth’ at all.
In awareism, truth is simple. It’s the honest representation of experience. That’s all, and that’s everything, everything we need to build life worthwhile.
Self ‘awareness of creation’
Like truth, consciousness loses all mystery under awareism. It’s simply awareness of self.
But therein lies the true secret, the true power, the essential meaning inherent to awareism. Because that which we are, as conscious beings, is that which we are.
Welcome to the world you are…
This has been a brief introduction to what I am now calling ‘awareism.’ Other posts will follow. Previous posts have outlined awareism or aspects of awareism without using that moniker. There is also a book, Life, the Universe, God, and All that Stuff, available on Amazon.
