On Consciousness

Sometimes it seems to Pretty Lady that no matter how simply she explains herself, her ontological epistemology is chronically misunderstood. At any rate, whenever she brings it up, in however flowery or truncated a form, the more college-educated of her friends generally respond with the standard collegiate Cartesian Sum-Up, and subsequent dismissal. They utterly fail to perceive that the contents of Pretty lady's consciousness are anything but Cartesian; Pretty Lady does not exist because she thinks, and nobody else does either. Dear René missed the point entirely.

In fact, this business of 'belief,' in Pretty Lady's view, is an enormous Red Herring which, over literally millennia, has been tested in the empirical laboratory of the Human Mind and found wanting. For, as ought to be perfectly obvious, the contents of consciousness have nothing to do with the substance, or existence, of consciousness itself.

This is quite a relief, as if Pretty Lady were to be assessed by her beliefs, nobody would know what to make of her. Beliefs, in Pretty Lady's world, are little more than tools for consciousness-testing. She has been known to believe twelve impossible and mutually exclusive things before breakfast, without batting an eyelash, just for the fun of it. What interests her about beliefs is not so much their objective veracity, as she more than suspects that 'objectivity' is a fundamentally untenable concept (the reason why will be discussed presently), but their results, when applied in a puckishly sincere manner.

No, Pretty Lady's serious endeavors in the matter of consciousness consist in the experiment she makes, when she temporarily attempts to cease thinking entirely. As the sages attest, this is by no means an easy experiment. Try as she might, thoughts will arise. At the very least she may observe these thoughts, and simultaneously note that a thought which may be observed is not the Observer.

For, as she said, the contents of consciousness are not consciousness itself. To get to the bottom of what consciousness is, then, we must remove those contents, and see what's left.

And Pretty Lady is very pleased to report that on the very few occasions when her experiment appears to have succeeded, she was able to confirm what millennia of sages have attested. The fundamental nature of consciousness is:

1) Infinite.

2) Undivided.

3) Loving.

It is most important that it be understood that belief has nothing to do with this; Pretty Lady is speaking of direct experience. You are perfectly free to believe whatever you like regarding her experience, including that she is a batty fruitcake of a lady who took too much acid in college; you would of course be wrong, since Pretty Lady was renowned for her distressing conservatism at that point in her life. But she has no real objection to your beliefs, as they are mere temporal whims in any case.