Where We Are Wrong

We have come to believe that there actually exists a real work in which we actually exist. We call it the external world; we experience and know this world through our senses. This external world exists independently of our experience of it. Experience is subjective while the world is objective. The world has independent existence; we and our consciousness have emerged as a result of the natural processes inside this world. We see ourselves as this species called humans. We find existence a peculiar thing and struggle to make sense of it. Religion, science, and philosophy are the three traditions that have arisen in order to address this existential dilemma.

Where we are wrong is where we misunderstand consciousness and experience:

We think that the world exists independently of our experience of it; but this thought itself is part of our experience of the world.

We think consciousness is a product of nature; but nature is something always already known through consciousness.

We think we are beings inside an external world; but we derived the notion of external world from inside the contents of our consciousness.

The world that we think contains consciousness is a world itself always already contained and known in and through consciousness.

That we are human beings having an experience of a world is itself part of what is experienced. That there is a cosmos extending beyond the scope of human consciousness is itself the content of consciousness.

It doesn’t matter what acts of cognition are involved, whether theorizing, experimenting, speculating, inferring, etc. There is nothing but experience; even the very idea that this experience is a human experience inside a world is itself part of the experience. That a real world exists external to our consciousness is itself something known in and through consciousness.

There is nothing outside consciousness. If we claim that there is something outside consciousness we must see that the very knowledge “there is something outside consciousness” is something inside consciousness. The whole of human existence and its external reality are contents of consciousness.

Consciousness is not a human consciousness; humanity and its world are only contents of this consciousness. It is in principle, both theoretically and empirically, impossible to posit that something exists, or can exist, outside or independently of consciousness, for only a consciousness can know and say such a thing which entails it to be a content of consciousness, and hence immanent.

From this perspective there is no existential problem; there is no human dilemma; there is only experience; and we are in reality the absolute subject and not a human person, for to say that we are not the absolute subject entails that we are the absolute subject; only an absolute subject can say absolutely that it is not an absolute subject; how else could we possibly know that we are not! Only an absolute subject can deny itself; only god can be an atheist. All arguments, evidence, etc. are things experienced; it is pointless to use them to account for experience or its origin. Experience has no origin, for origin is itself a notion experienced. We are all that there is.