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How Can I Know Anything Without Awareness?
A while back, a friend was attempting to persuade me that awareness is real. He told me that all the saints and sages have talked about Awareness or Consciousness as being primary. Until recently, I believed that to be true as well. I think he might have quoted people like Ramana Maharishi and Nisargadatta Maharaj. I don’t know much about those people, but I presume that they must have existed in the same reality as all of us.
After I demonstrated that I wasn’t willing to argue with concepts vaguely related to apparently dead people, my friend asked me, “Did you drink coffee this morning?” After I told him that I had, he claimed that this was evidence of awareness or consciousness.
To me, this sounds the same as arguing that if you tap a spoon on the edge of a plate and it makes a sound, then you can claim “Ah-ha, the plate knows that it was made on a potter’s wheel, from clay, and it is therefore conscious.” But the plate is just no-thing plating. In the story, the spoon and plate seem to make the sound because the plate (and spoon) were made, but they are not in themselves conscious of having been made. In reality, they were not even made. There is just unborn no-thing clinking. A human responding to a question is no different; just no-thing responding.
