The Original Awaring: Ontological Consciousness vs. Ordinary Consciousness is the core distinction of Beyond-the-Algorithm thinking concerning the very substance of consciousness; it answers the question of “what consciousness actually is, and whether everyday consciousness and the most primordial consciousness are one and the same.” The thesis holds that consciousness comes in two layers: ontological consciousness is the original Awaring — unsayable, without any form of expression, the wellspring of creation; ordinary consciousness is the consciousness that appears once the original Awaring takes part in the activity of the senses — it has a form of expression and can be spoken of. The two share one source; they differ only in whether they have entered into the workings of the senses. The original formulation runs: “Ontological consciousness is the original Awaring, which cannot be said, while ordinary consciousness is the Awaring as it takes part in the activity of the senses. The two share one source, but the latter has a form of expression.” From this follows a causal order that runs against common sense: it is not that the brain produces consciousness, but that consciousness creates and assembles the sensory system, and only thereafter is there a brain.
Two Consciousnesses, One Source, Two Aspects
The first stratum of the thesis is to split the single word “consciousness” into two referents that must never be conflated. Ontological consciousness is the original Awaring itself, standing prior to every form of expression, and therefore “unsayable” — any saying is already a form of expression, whereas this is precisely the layer that obtains before any form of expression has arisen. Ordinary consciousness, by contrast, is the consciousness that appears once the original Awaring has entered into the activity of the senses and been refracted through the sensory system; it has content, it has objects, it can be described and reflected upon. It is what a person experiences day to day as “I am thinking, I am seeing, I am feeling.”
Everything hinges on those two words, “one source.” Ordinary consciousness is not some other entity independent of the original Awaring; it is two aspects of one and the same Awaring in different states — the Awaring hidden and unexpressed is ontological consciousness; the Awaring taking part in the senses and so taking on form is ordinary consciousness. From this a hard epistemic boundary is drawn: a person can only use ordinary consciousness (that is, sensory consciousness) to understand the world, and “we cannot use sensory consciousness to understand the process of the original Awaring’s creating.” This means ontological consciousness cannot be grasped in reverse by ordinary consciousness, because the latter is itself the product of the former — a product cannot turn back and exhaust its own source. This predicament is structurally identical to Form and Nature: The Phenomenal Layer Can Never Explain the Being Layer: a tool lodged in the phenomenal layer is not enough to explain the being layer that gave rise to it.
Consciousness Creates and Assembles the Sensory System
The second stratum of the thesis is the concrete mechanism of the theory of creation. In the original wording, “that ‘consciousness’ observes, and creates the so-called units of atoms, molecules, and the rest,” and then “‘creates’ and ‘assembles’ them into the sensory system,” while “the function and operation of the sensory system come about through the participation of the Awaring-consciousness within it.” That is to say, atoms and molecules — the very building blocks of matter that modern people take to be the most objective, the most antecedent of all — are here inverted into products of consciousness; they are assembled into the apparatus of eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body, and the reason this apparatus can “work” at all, can generate sensation, is that the original Awaring is continuously taking part within it.
This mechanism splits “creation” and “operation” into two steps: the original Awaring first creates the materials and sets up the structure (the sensory system), and then, in the capacity of a participant, sets this structure running and lets it bring forth sensation. By this account the material world is not the container of consciousness but the work of consciousness; the senses are not a neutral window onto the world but an apparatus the original Awaring built with its own hands and then climbed inside. This is precisely where The World Is Created: A Theory of Creation comes to rest at the level of consciousness, and it is what turns Everything Is Manifested by the Awaring from an abstract slogan into a narratable chain: “consciousness → atoms → sensory system → sensation.” It likewise supplies the upstream explanation for The Senses Are a Finite Survival Decoder, and the World Is What They Render: the senses are finite because they are, by their very nature, created things, and their limits are the limits set down at the moment of creation.
Current Before Hardware: Inferring Being Backward from Concept
The third stratum of the thesis addresses the root question of order — which comes first, consciousness or the brain — and gives an answer opposite to that of mainstream neuroscience. The computer serves as the analogy: “First there is the electric current, then the CPU, then the motherboard, and then all the various hardware. It is not the brain that decides everything; behind it is that infinite ‘being.‘” In this figure the brain, the nerves, indeed the whole body all belong to the “hardware,” while what truly comes first is that “current” which makes the hardware run and makes it possible for the hardware to be made at all — and that current corresponds to ontological consciousness, to “the infinite being behind it.”
The crux of this inversion is the direction of cognition. Common sense explains consciousness from the bottom up, along “hardware → function → consciousness” (the brain produces the thinking mind), whereas the thesis maintains “being → consciousness → hardware” from the top down, and on this basis proposes a path of cognition that “infers being backward from concept” — not that the thing comes first and then the concept of the thing, but that one reasons back from the end of concept, of consciousness, to that antecedent being. It joins seamlessly with the creative mechanism of the second stratum above: since consciousness created and assembled the sensory system, the “hardware” (the brain) that carries ordinary consciousness must of course come after ontological consciousness. This also answers why one “cannot use sensory consciousness to understand the original Awaring’s creating” — to use later-born hardware to understand the antecedent current is to run in the wrong direction from the start.
The Light-Sphere of the Awaring: One Ray Is One Life
For this unsayable original Awaring the thesis offers an image one can actually imagine — the light-sphere: “Our own original Awaring is like a sphere of light, sending out countless rays, and along the path of each ray there is the process of one’s mother giving birth to oneself and the process of growing old… but all of this is merely the light you yourself send out, and the sphere of light and the light itself are also one whole.”
This image carries three meanings at once. First, the original Awaring is the source: the countless paths of a life (birth, growth, aging) are not objective events occurring outside the original Awaring, but light the original Awaring itself sends out — the trajectories along which ordinary consciousness unfolds in different directions. Second, the sphere and its light are one whole: the one who shines and the light shone forth are inseparable, which is exactly the figurative expression of “ontological and ordinary consciousness share one source” — the original Awaring (the sphere) and all the experience it brings forth by taking part in the senses (the light) are two faces of one thing, not two things. Third, countless rays mean countless possible paths: each ray that is lit and lived through is one stretch of experienced life. This “one ray, one world” structure echoes the picture in When the Awaring Stirs, It Weaves the Web: Yin and Yang as Binary Code of “thought after thought forking, the stirring Awaring weaving its web” — the sphere shining forth is the inception of creation; the forking into a web is the unfolding of creation.
There Is Only “I” in the World: Where Meditation Lands
At the level of actual practice the thesis comes to rest in a single “secret of cultivating absorption”: “There is only ‘I’ in this world. Clear at every moment, without cease.” If the two consciousnesses share one source, and if all the light-paths of a life are sent out by the original Awaring, then strictly speaking there is no separate, independent external world standing over against the original Awaring; what we call the world is the paths illumined by the light the original Awaring sends out, and therefore “there is only ‘I’ in the world.” This “I” is not the everyday small self wrapped up in the senses and in thoughts, but the original Awaring as the sphere of light.
Translated into an operable instruction for practice, this becomes “clear at every moment, without cease”: since the world is only the original Awaring, and since sensations all arise through the Awaring’s participation, cultivating absorption is not a matter of turning outward to grapple with a teeming field of objects, but of unceasingly recognizing that very original Awaring which is always present and always clear. This points in the same direction as Counting the Crystal Ball: Place Your Power on Clarity (A Method of Meditation) — place your power on the “clarity,” not on the contents that are clearly known. One caveat: since the original Awaring is “unsayable,” the statement “there is only I in the world” is still, as a statement, an expression of ordinary consciousness; it is the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. It indicates a direction for direct realization but cannot stand in for the realization itself. Here the thesis touches Every Transmission Loses Something: Heart-to-Heart Sealing, the Picture Frame, and Education: the most primordial layer can only be realized in person, and the moment it falls into language there is loss. The thesis therefore leaves the matter open here, declining to force it shut with words.
Sources
- Manuscript — “Ontological consciousness is the original Awaring, which cannot be said, while ordinary consciousness is the Awaring as it takes part in the activity of the senses. The two share one source, but the latter has a form of expression”; “the function and operation of the sensory system come about through the participation of the Awaring-consciousness within it”
- Manuscript — “That ‘consciousness’ observes, and creates the so-called units of atoms, molecules… ‘assembles’ them into the sensory system… we cannot use sensory consciousness to understand the process of the original Awaring’s creating”
- Manuscript — “The secret of cultivating absorption: there is only ‘I’ in this world. () Clear at every moment, without cease” (verbatim as in the original)
- Manuscript — the light-sphere figure of the original Awaring: “the sphere of light and the light itself are also one whole”
- Manuscript — “First there is the electric current, then the CPU, then the motherboard, and then all the various hardware. It is not the brain that decides everything; behind it is that infinite ‘being‘“
See also
- Everything Is Manifested by the Awaring
- The World Is Created: A Theory of Creation
- Form and Nature: The Phenomenal Layer Can Never Explain the Being Layer
- When the Awaring Stirs, It Weaves the Web: Yin and Yang as Binary Code
- The Senses Are a Finite Survival Decoder, and the World Is What They Render