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Silicon Valley's Next Big Hack? Consciousness Itself
“Now it would be some kind of fool's errand to try and explain in a paragraph what has eluded some philosophers and sages for eons. If you're in the camp that believes consciousness to be nothing more than an illusion, then speaking of non-dual awareness will seem like an even larger flight of fancy. Even if you hold that what's experienced inside our heads is somehow "real," the notion that there is a different mode of consciousness will seem strange.
Non-dual awareness is, in certain traditions, the goal of meditative practice. It is synonymous with enlightenment, a loaded term that comes with mystic baggage. Siegel's own use of the term puts it into the context of belief systems: the battles that go on in both our culture and our heads.
Basically, we're all walking around with a model of reality in our heads, looking for facts that fit our belief systems. This is where confirmation bias and solipsistic systems like "The Secret" come from. Non-dual awareness turns the belief/reality dynamic on its head: putting our active experience of the world and not our conceptual representation of it in the driver's seat of perception.
"Arguably the reason we as western people suffer is because of our belief systems, it's because of our minds, not because of any actual circumstances that are around us," said Siegel. He asserts those beliefs end up shaping a lot more than just what's in our heads”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/turnstyle/silicon-valleys-next-big_b_6793910.html
(For a good primer on the debates over consciousness check out Oliver Burkeman's "Why can't the world's greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?" in the Guardian.)
“monkey chases butterfly, and fatigues its weary mind.” - zen aphorism
