Theoretical Model of Consciousness By Ben Ormstad Copyright 2013 Ben Ormstad Smashwords Edition *** Smashwords Edition, License

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*** Theoretical Model of Consciousness

* Don't confuse the model of Consciousness with Consciousness Itself. Consciousness Consciousness is All That Is. It is the fabric of Existence; the glue that binds everything together like the space your body exists in. Everything starts with consciousness and ends with consciousness. To understand consciousness one must exist as it knowingly not in a scientific, logical or philosophical mental way, but knowingly in an existential being-centered way. Therefore, all the following information will not make you enlightened and realize the truth of your being, but will aim at providing an as understandable theoretical model of consciousness as possible. To get a better understanding of consciousness, the two aspects it consists of must be examined. Awareness Awareness is the most fundamental thing in existence, as it simply is the isness of Life. The awareness is the unchanging, unborn, undying part of Consciousness, which is the root of everything. To get the picture imagine this: Before the Big Bang there was nothing. This is what science says. And this is correct. Before the Big Bang there were no things in existence (at least viewed from the perspective of our physical universe); in that state our universe was merely an unactualized potential, and the entirety of Existence was itself a

singular no-thing. Science assumes this nothing was simply the absence of everything, and that's all there is to it. Has science ever considered looking at what that absence of everything actually is? I don't know, but my guess is that this nothing would be deemed irrelevant or simply impossible to explore. However, it's not impossible to explore. It only seems impossible from a limited perspective. Let's get right to it: This space that existed with no things in it before the Big Bang happened wasn't just space; it was a living space. Why must this be the case? Well, for one, things appeared in it, which means the space had the quality of being able to contain something. If no space existed with this characteristic, nothing would ever have come into being as there would have been no space for it. This means that if a living universe suddenly could be initiated out of an empty space or rather a spaceless space then this space, which is the universe's host, would itself have to be alive. No flower springs from dead dirt. Or, if you prefer, the computer screen must have a steady flow of electricity (be alive) in order to view the video game being played on it. Now, let's utilize this computer screen analogy to explore the idea. The screen itself is the nothing that existed before the Big Bang, and the video game you can play on the screen, when it's on, represents our human life in this physical reality. The electrical current keeping the screen alive is the same current keeping the video game world alive. Moreover, the screen itself is what is showing/playing the video game, which means that nothing in the video game world is separate from the screen. Furthemore, nothing in the video game world is actually a thing; it's all just colors appearing on the screen. The only real thing would have to be the screen itself, which from the perspective of the characters living in the video game world would be viewed as unknowable, meaningless, out of reach, not real, hocus pocus, or just plain delusional. For them, their game world is a physical reality full of physical things that exists separate from themselves never knowing that everything they have ever thought, believed or seen is not actually real, but only colors moving on a computer screen. The next thing to be mentioned is that the screen is playing all the characters. The electricity flowing through the screen and the game world, is what's animating and giving life to everything happening on the screen. The screen and its electrical current, which would be the fundamental and underlying reality of the video game world, is analogical to awareness in our reality. How come? Awareness is the living space that existed before the Big Bang. Awareness is the space that contains all things. You think of your awareness as my awareness, but as we have seen, the computer screen is what animates ALL beings and things in the virtual physical reality the characters in the video game live in. This, of course, means that any feeling the characters in the game would have about having their own (separate from others) current of electricity or specific space on the screen would be completely delusional which the one standing outside looking at the screen easily can see: there's no possibility of anything happening on the computer screen to be existing on its own as an individual thing inside it. All the colors are continuously changing in a neverending dance, while the screen remains

the same. At the very most, each being and thing on the screen could be represented by a folder in the computer running the game, which would be the gathered data each being/thing has accummulated throughout its given amount of past experiences. But they would all still just be pieces intricately intertwined in the system running the game, not separate at all. If this space that existed before the Big Bang is alive and aware, unchanging, undying, and unborn, then it means it is the exactly same space existing now as did all those ages ago before our precious universe was born. And since the screen is everything happening on it, it means this aware space is everything here in our universe. Noone and nothing is separate from it. As physics knows, the smallest constituents of physical reality are tiny, tiny hypothetical things that exist with enormous spaces between each other, and they alternate between being in this reality and switching out of it. What are they switching into when they're not here? Who knows? For the time being, it doesn't matter. It only matters that we get a real look at this so-called physical universe of ours. It's made of 99% pure space (actually it's made of 100% space .. but that's another story), and what was earlier thought of as physical isn't even physical anymore. Just take a look at quantum mechanics, and different theories proposing a virtual or holographic reality. Even scientists can't really deny the idea anymore. Anyway, the point is, the nothing before the Big Bang was a living space; which is what awareness is. This is ONE awareness existing as everything in the universe (just like one computer screen projecting an entire video game world inside itself). You, me, and all other beings and things appear within this one living space-awarenss-nothing. You think about your awareness, but in reality this awareness is the same in everyone and in everything. All space in the entire universe is the exact same space. It's not chunked up in pieces or organized into different sections: it's all just one space hosting the entire physical universe. The cool thing about this is that you can in fact check this out in your personal reality by letting go of everything you've learned since your birth (which doesn't mean delete your knowledge, just completely drop your belief in it being fundamentally true). If you can do (undo) this, then you'll easily tap into the foundation of your being, which is awarenss, which is the living space that the universe exists in. If you manage to not just tap into this awarenss, but dive into it and become swallowed completely by it like a wave returning to the ocean and merging with it, then you will get the Ultimate Knowledge, you'll be enlightened and know the Truth of Life. These sound like big words, but it's really simple. The foundation and host of your reality is space, and it's alive and aware, and you're part of it. Underneath all of your conditioned humanness, you'll find the ground of being, which is awareness. Become it and you will know everything to be yourself, and your little personal self will be eradicated just like the wave that merged back into the ocean. You will be the ocean, and all waves will be you. But you will be nothing, no one, because that's what everything is. Just a space that actually exists. Only a thing can experience itself as a limited, constricted and defined self, but all things are actually nothing, because the fundamental reality is no-thing. This is no-self. When you realize you are no-self, you will be enlightened. Then there will be no

more self, other or world; only direct, unfiltered, pure experience of whatever's happening in/to consciousness. This part cannot ever be comprehended without intimate experience. First there is only space. Then a Big Bang happens and a universe is begun. The universe lives its life and ends. Again there is space. Then another Big Bang and another new universe begins. Repeat forever. Like night and day, awake and asleep, life and death. But the space is always there. It is what is watching and playing. Mind Mind, on the other hand, is the processing aspect of consciousness. The mind does actually posses the same fundamental qualities of being as awareness, but it is its opposite. The mind is the everything while awareness is the nothing. Where awareness is unchanging, the mind is changing. The awareness is eternally static, and the mind is eternally in flux. Awareness is and witnesses, the mind is and processes. Awareness is the space in the universe, while the mind is the things in the universe. I know this all might seem a bit backwards. How come the mind can be equated to ALL the things in the universe, when mind is something we as living beings posses? You see, the universe you're talking about didn't exist until you were born. But then what about all the other people in the world, that already were here? Well, each and one of them had no universe until they were born either, and they didn't exist for you until you came here. There is an extremely popular belief in the world of humans where they believe an objective and measurable universe exists outside of them, and they don't even question the fact that both themselves and this entire universe disappears totally about 50% of their time every day their whole life! Well, they don't question it because when they come back to this reality in the morning, they can remember the previous day, and tell themselves that they were sleeping. And even if their being experienced different realities throughout the sleep, they remind themselves that they were dreaming. Because of these two ideas, sleeping and dreaming, people never realize what's actually happening, because in order to do this they would have to experience their existence directly without the external knowledge the world has given them. You believe you're sleeping, and you believe you're just dreaming. In direct experience, all you really know is that after being awake in this reality for a certain period of time, you become increasingly heavy and it is as if an unknown force is pulling you back into the nothingness you awakened from in the morning. Of course, we think we know the body gets tired, and so does our mental space. Thus, we need to rest and recharge the body and mind's batteries, because scientific research has confirmed this is so. And if we dream during the night we're most likely just processing information from what happened throughout the day, or the dream might be unconscious desires coming true through masquerading as something else for us to accept and live through them. I want to remind you that all of these ideas are just beliefs. Direct experience indicates that this human life is no more or less real than the so-called dreams we're having at night. Please check this out for yourself

before drawing any conclusions. Look at it this way: If we had no recollection of a yesterday or whatever events might have happened before we went to sleep, then each day would be a totally new experience, just like our dreams are new each night. Or, from the perspective of our dreams, if you suddenly started experiencing a specific dream (with the same beings and environments in it every time you came back) every time you went to sleep, to the point where you remembered the previous dreams like you remember yesterday here, you'd then start building a memory set from that dream reality, and with it a new identity would be constructed based on your new experiences in that reality. Then you would wake up from that dream, back into this one again, realize you'd just been sleeping and go on with your day, until you once again fell asleep here and continued in the other reality. In a short period of time existing in these two realities this human one, and the dream one you'd know with utter certainty that this human experience is no more real or unreal than the dreams you're having at night. They are all just different experiences had by consciousness (awareness and mind) in different realities. When this was realized, you'd next know that what you truly are (consciousness) cannot die, because no experienced reality is fundamentally real. All reality is dreamlike in nature. Except for the actual fundamental reality, consciousness. Why did we go through this, when we're actually talking about mind? Because a reality is an expression of mind, which is the aspect of consciousness processing information. Any reality, real or dream, is information. Everything that can be experienced is information. The one and only aspect of reality being informationless is the awareness aspect of consciousness, which we covered in the previous section. It is the being, while mind is everything else. Mind itself is the processor of information it itself is not information. The mind serves the function of being the analyzing and categorizing component of the entity that necessarily must exist in order for consciousness to be able to eperience itself in a complex reality, dealing with large amounts of perceptional and mental information. The mind is what processes the sense perceptions, the thought-processes, and analyzing and relating all the pieces of information to each other, making judgements and understanding. The mind is the computer, while awareness is the screen all computations appear in/on. Since consciousness is fundamental (like the computer screen in the video game analogy), it means that nothing you experience in a reality is real to you until you actually see it unfolding. As soon as the current scene has changed, the previous one is only reachable by way of memory, and is not real to you anymore. In the video game analogy, this would be the same as saying what you don't see on the screen, isn't being rendered by the computer. In other words, what isn't rendered isn't actualized information, only potential, and therefore not real in this moment. Mind only processes what's currently happening on all levels of existence that you happen to be aware in. The mind, being all potential and actual information in existence, is interesting, as it's split in two. It has two different levels of itself. The mind is

dualistic in nature, and consists of Light and Dark, Positive and Negative, Life and Death. Take a look at this figure, which illustrates my model of consciousness:

(This is just an illustration, of course. In reality, these layers exist superimposed on top of each other, and are weaved together like the tightest web you could imagine. So don't start believing that awareness lies next to the mind, and that the light and dark aspects of mind is placed beside each other. All the layers are ONE being. Different levels of the same Existence. And what's even more to the point: None of these layers actually exist; they are all simply processed information being experienced by awareness in this moment.) The Light aspect of mind is whatever is currently being experienced, which would be your Physical Experienced Reality, for short PER. This means what sensory information your senses are receiving. Anything you can see, hear, smell, touch, and even emotions (defined as activation in the central nervous system), lucid out-of-body experiences (OBE), vivid hallucinations and near-

death experiences (NDE) are all examples of what constitutes the Light part of mind. It refers to that which is manifest as your reality in this moment. It doesn't matter if it's a dream, a psychosis, or just normal everyday human life; if it's experienced as a physical reality, full of light and stuff moving around, then it's processed by the Light side of mind. Another thing worth mentioning is that the PER aspect of mind is thoughtless and selfless/identityless, just like awareness. It is not aware like awareness, however, because only awareness is the being part of existence. PER is thoughtless and selfless simply because it merely is the information about the physical reality awareness receives through the body's sensory organs. Next we have the Dark part of the mind. This includes everything that is not manifest as your physical reality in this moment, yet still existing in/as your reality, which would be the Mental Experienced Reality, or simply MER. This is the part of your reality consisting of thoughts, mental images and movies, memories and projections into the future are all examples of information being processed by the Dark side of mind. Thinking is taking place in your imagination, which exists in the darkness of your being. The only part of consciousness that can be said to have the potential to develop identity and thereby providing awareness with the opportunity of experiencing having a self, is this Dark aspect of mind. This, however, is only possible if consciousness forgets itself as the fundamental reality of Existence, and starts believing itself to be a single entity amongst many others. Both the Light and Dark aspects of mind deal with reality information, but they have their individual roles to play. The mind operates with Positive and Negative information. For example, you could say the Light side is positive, and the Dark aspect is negative. Just don't fall in the trap of judging negative as bad and positive as good. This would be utterly ridiculous, as everything is a mixture of both. If the negative didn't exist, it's opposite the positive wouldn't exist either. Think of a sink mixing cold and hot water in order to produce water of differing warmth and coolness. If you were to judge hot water as bad, and delete it from the equation, then what would happen? Imbalance in the system, leading to only ice cold water with no possibility of becoming any warmer. Balance is of the utmost significance for existence to function as effectively as possible. Operating with duality makes the mind change constantly. It switches from black to white, good to bad, happy to sad, loving to hateful, revengeful to grateful, and so on and on. It's never still. In fact, it doesn't know what still means, other than as the concept opposite of motion. This because the mind itself is motion, whether in manifest (experienced reality) or unmanifest form (mental reality), it moves and moves. If motion were to stop, the mind would become opaque like a pure mirror, and awareness would peer through like the moon perfectly reflected in still, clear water. The mind stands still as long as consciousness isn't identified with what it experiences. As soon as consciousness starts forgetting itself and begins

creating attachments to certain things in its experience, then an identity will blossom out of it. When this happens the mind starts moving. Now it knows something better, something worse all related to its newly found identity, which is experienced as a self. This self has wants, needs, desires, fears and so on attached to its specific set of experiential data. There's no problem as long as consciousness knows that it isn't this illusory self, but as soon as it begins believing in this illusion, it gets in trouble. Consciousness and Identity As we have seen, the mind is an information processing tool, not a self or identity. Awareness is simply an alive and awake no-thing, not a self or an identity. Consciousness, which is the total of these two aspects, is not a self or identity either. Identity is what has the potential to appear when consciousness forgets itself in its own created experiences, and becomes a habitual way of expressing itself based on how it learns to view itself through the interaction with, and reflection of itself in, the perceived others, consciously or unconsciously, while having a continuous experience of a more or less stable reality. If you keep experiencing the same reality over and over, you'll start believing it has substance, objectivity and reality, and the you you perceive yourself to be, based on the interactions in this reality, will form ideas and beliefs about who you think you are while operating in that specific reality. In this situation, forgetting itself, consciousness then starts identifying with what it experiences, and starts believing itself to be a little piece of the puzzle (which is called a self), when it in reality is The Dreamer of the entire thing, and is, therefore, the entire puzzle (which is called no-self). Again, the computer screen is everything in the video game reality happening on it, which means the screen is The Dreamer of the video game reality and all the beings and things in it. But remember, the dreamer isn't an identity; it's completely identity less. One could maybe say that its identity would be whatever is happening right now. This moment's current configuration of sense perceptions and mental processing in its totality would be the identity. But then again, the current flow of sense perceptions, always changing every nano-split-second, means there wouldn't be any more stable identity there than there exists stable cloud formations. This means there will be nothing left to identify with if you actually realized yourself to be the one dreaming your existence into being. If you are everything, then what are you not? What can everything identify itself with that is not already itself? An identity exists because perceived boundaries between me and other exists, but when those boundaries are seen as illusory and not actually real, then both me and other dissolves and only THIS remains. What is this? Consciousness/Life/Existence Itself. It perhaps sounds poetic, fluffy or ambiguous, but it's truly fitting and experientially on point. *** This is the end of the current version of my model of Consciousness. I chose

to publish it at this early stage because it already contains what I view to be the most important parts in order to get an idea of how the different aspects of Consciousness are related, and completely intertwined, from a fundamental, pre-physical point of view. However, a lot more will necessarily have to be added as time goes on. I will update this version every time something new is added to the theory. I'm also open to suggestions as to what ideas and concepts to include in newer versions, what to explain better, or whatever else you might want to discuss. Feel free to email me at truthdreaminglife@gmail.com ### Discover other titles by Ben Ormstad at Smashwords.com: Non-fiction: Meditation is Your Fundamental Self - Free Theoretical Model of Consciousness - Free "Life is Freedom - Pointers to Enlightenment" - Free When the Void Awakens - $2.99 Fiction: "You've Just Been Busted" - Free Agent X13 Death and the Devil - Free Fresh Human - Free "A Report on Humanity by an Alien" - Free "Utskudd" (A norwegian novel) $4.99/30,5 NOK