[MD] cognitive awareness

[Andy Skelton]

MarshaV wrote:
> Anyway, there does seem to be a cognitive agent(individual) involved, but not one I would designate a consistent, central controller.

Isn't this "agent" a result of the subject/object dichotomy? This is
one of the most interesting (to me) problems: how to understand
individual awareness in the light of MoQ rather than the reverse.

(That word "individual" grabs me. Something which cannot be divided. Can't it?

I am sometimes aware, in retrospect, that my awareness has momentarily
become dominated by my biological aspect. My precious intellectual
patterns are subverted, my social patterns are barely within reach,
and I act according to the base biological patterns required to keep
my body alive. This happens in dire physical emergencies.

Sometimes I see this in others. When my wife was in labor with our
child, her awareness was almost completely dominated by her biological
aspect. She had almost no contact with her intellectual beliefs and
her social inhibitions and use of language were severely attenuated.
Her being was dominated for several hours by the prehistoric patterns
of biology.

Each aspect of our dynamic being, corresponding to Pirsig's levels,
rises to meet the needs of moment. So perhaps "individual" is a poor
word for the human being. I always flinch a little when I use it.)

Marsha, you mentioned unpatterned experience and cognitive agents. I
think cognition is essentially pattern recognition. The agent of
cognition is concerned with patterns previously recognized and
patterns newly recognized. This almost fits with your "two flavors".

I fail to see how an agent can have unpatterned experience. "Awareness
of" is what you get *after* the Quality event. How can awareness take
place before Quality has created values? That would permit Quality to
be *seen* but that's impossible; only values can be seen. We know
about Quality because we see everything that it creates; we don't see
Quality itself.

My experiences in meditation and psychedelia may have fooled me into
believing that I could do that. I don't believe it anymore. I think
what happened was a temporary inaccessibility of most previously
recognized patterns. As mysterious and wonderful and terrible as it
was, that experience was not unpatterned. It was far less rigidly
patterned than the experience to which I had become accustomed, so
less static and closer to DQ, but not quite there.

Andy