Thread: Self awareness
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Old 04-01-2005, 10:45 AM   #4
Anders Bjonback
Dojo: Boulder Aikikai
Location: Boulder, CO
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 129
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Re: Self awareness

It means that, like a flame that illuminates itself, the mind is conscious of itself. The self-aware mind is a subject that is debated about by Buddhists.
Take this example from a text, the Bodhicharyavatara, which refutes the Mind Only school, which believes that whatever we see is none other than the mind or substratum of consciousness itself, onto which we impose the duality of subject and object:

But if the mirage is the mind itself,
What, then is perceived by what?
The Guardian of the World [the Buddha] himself has said
That mind cannot be seen by mind.

In Just the same way, he has said,
The sword's edge cannot cut the sword.
'But,' you say, 'it's like the flame
That perfectly illuminates itself.'

The flame, in fact, can never light itself.
And why? Because the darkness never dims it!
'The blueness of a blue thing,' you will say,
'Depends, unlike a crystal, on no other thing.

'Likewise some perceptions
Come from other things, while some do not.'
But what is blue has never of itself imposed
A blueness on its non-blue self.

The phrase 'the lamp illuminates itself'
The mind can know and formulate.
But what is there to know and say
That 'mind is self-illuminating'

The mind, indeede, is never seen by anyone.
And, therefore, whether it can know, or cannot know itself
Is, like the beauty of a barren woman's daughter,
The subject of a pointless conversation.

'But if,' you ask, 'the mind is not self-knowing,
How does it remember what it knew?'
We say tht like the poison of the water rat,
It's from the link with outer things that memory occurs.

'In certain cases,' you will say, 'the mind
Can see the minds of others, how then not itself?'
But through the application of a magic balm,
The eye may see the treasure, but the salve it does not see.

"For peace and happiness are presences, not objects we can grasp and hold onto."
--Lilian Smith
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