So We Have Heard from the Wise

Chapter IV of All Things are Full of Gods simply defines some terms which everyone already understands -- such as consciousness -- so we'll skip ahead to chapter V, The Rise of Mechanism.

Slow your roll, son. Everyone already agrees on the meaning of consciousness?

I know what I mean by it, but it is -- like the word "experience" -- impossible to define without assuming it: to define something is already to objectify it, but subjects are precisely what can never be reduced to objects. Subjects can define objects, but objects can never define the subject.

For Hart, consciousness is "subjective experience, immediate awareness, existing in an entirely private and incommunicable way." 

For me it's much more primordial, something like luminous interiority, the crack in the cosmos where everything gets in. It is not and cannot be derived from anything less than itself. 

I would add that it is intrinsically intersubjective, so it is not private, full stop; if it were, we could never enter and share in the intersubjective space where humanness takes place, so to speak. Rather, we would be isolated monads cut off from one another. (This feature of intersubjectivity is grounded in the Trinity, but we'll leave that aside for now.)

The Kena Upanishad speaks for me: call it what you want, but there is an "ear of the ear, mind of the mind, speech of the speech," also a "breath of the breath, and eye of the eye":

Him the eye does not see, nor the tongue express, nor the mind grasp.... Different is he from the known, and also different is he from the unknown. So we have heard from the wise.

Or, put it this way: "That which is not heard by the ear but by which the ear hears -- know that to be Brahman." And if you think you know what that is, well, "know that you know little":

He among us knows him best who understands the spirit of the words: "Nor do I know that I know him not."

"He who truly knows Brahman" 

knows him as beyond knowledge; he who thinks that he knows, knows not. The ignorant think that Brahman is known, but the wise know him to be beyond knowledge.  

For Brahman one could substitute Tao, and both can be easily trancelighted into Eckhart's Ground, which would require a whole post to describe, but for now let's just say it is

the protean term everywhere at the center of Eckhart's mysticism, which, paradoxically, vanishes from our grasp when we try to contain it in a definable scheme, or circumference, of speculation (McGinn).

It is simultaneously employed to indicate origin, cause, beginning, reason, and "what is inmost, hidden, most proper to a being -- that is, its essence." It is both "the innermost of the soul" and "the hidden depths of God."

Atman is Brahman?

Close enough for blogging. McGinn suggests that

We are indeed "like" God insofar as God bears his "like" in me (i.e., the Son).

If the Father is in the Son and the Son assumes human nature, do the myth.

Now, to think that a mechanistic metaphysic is adequate to the task of conceptualizing the Ground is a blunderstatement. But 

our metaphysics is often nothing other than our method, mistaken for the very truth it's supposed to help us seek (Hart).  

In short, it is a rookie move to conflate method and ontology. The body and even mind can be treated like machines. But this is not to say they are literally machines. Again, rookie error. Or so we have heard from the wise.

A machine has only exterior relations, i.e., it is composed of parts that are externally related to one one another. 

Not so for organisms, which feature interior relations, not to mention the mind, which is intersubjective right down to its (triune) ground. Let those with ears hear: I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 

Or in the words of John, I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

"For the truly inquiring scientific intellect, any ultimate ground of explanation must be one that unites all dimensions of being in a simpler, more conceptually parsimonious principle" (Hart).

"[T]he object of knowledge and the mind itself both together belong to one and the same source of intelligibility and being underlying all things, so that the knowing mind and the known are, at their ground, always already one (ibid.).