Everything you know, and everything you can know, appears in consciousness. This is one of those too obvious to bother mentioning things that we often overlook. If it’s not in your consciousness, you can’t know it. That includes these words, which are appearing in your mind as thoughts in response to reading them, along with whatever other thoughts are floating around as sidecars to the main attraction. Of course, it also includes every thought you have. If your thoughts weren’t in your consciousness, in what sense would they even be thoughts in the first place?
Observations of the outside world, everything that arrives in your consciousness via your senses, likewise are objects in consciousness. It’s important to remember that the things that appear in your consciousness aren’t the things themselves. They can’t be. The sun isn’t inside you. The cars passing on the street outside your front door don’t exist as 4,000 pound lumps of metal and plastic inside your consciousness. They’re thoughts, just as much as these words are thoughts now, in your mind.
In this sense, the mind is like a mirror. There’s something out there, and it’s reflected in your consciousness for you to observe.
This gives rise to a couple questions that we can’t answer.
- Your observation of these reflections also appears in the mirror of your consciousness. What is it that is reflecting those reflections? What is it that is being reflected?
- Whatever it is that is you gazes upon this mirror. Where are you in this arrangement? You can’t be the mirror, because you’re looking at it. You can’t see the mirror unless you’re seeing it in the mirror. How many mirrors are there?