By God, while I was writing up a response here on this forum, a great idea dawned on me - is it possible for something to be fully aware of itself?
If something becomes fully aware of itself, then does it necessarily answer why it exists?
How can you become aware of yourself through thought, if you are, to a certain extent, thought? That is, how can thought become aware of itself?
For example, you are now aware of your breathing, but before reading that you were breathing automatically without the awareness. Similarly, something is doing the blinking, but then you become aware of it, and so are able to control it. Therefore, is it possible to become aware of, for example, your heart beats, and then be able to control them?
Is awareness of something necessarily mean you can control that something? If it is, then if you were aware of your thinking, then you would be able to control your thoughts.
“If something becomes fully aware of itself, then does it necessarily answer why it exists?”
It would need to define what “itself” is. Having done that it could then answer why it exits. For example, if it defined itself as a thumbtack, it could surmise that it exists to tack things down.
“Is awareness of something necessarily mean you can control that something?”
When you talk about awareness you need to determine what is aware, and what is it aware of. What does it mean to be aware? By god, that is a difficult question, but I will dare to try to answer, maybe in part.
If awareness means anything then it means the same thing as “I am”, since awareness should possess knowledge; if you do not know that you are, then you must be dead; you would not be asking the question then anyways. Who would consider a dead person aware? Therefore, awareness is a state a person must be in when he is alive. But, what is “alive”?
(A thought just came up, so I’ll write it down before I forget. This “alive” and “dead” is puzzling to me, since it is a kind of duality. Why does there have to be two extreme states? I am either alive, or dead. It is very odd to me, since it seems there should only be one state; if we presume nature is beautiful.)
Does awareness necessarily require thought? Of course not, or we would always be thinking; assuming that we don’t constantly switch between aware and non-aware states. (What if we are constantly switching between aware and unaware states, so as to produce a kind of mixed up state in-between awareness and death.) There is something in-between our thoughts that is not a thought; what is this? What is that which creates our thoughts? It cannot be a thought, because nothing can create an identical of itself by itself. It cannot be “I”, since “I” usually consists of the thoughts you are having right now. What is this that is behind all these thoughts?
A thought has just occured. What does the mind do with a thought? A thought arises and seems to, maybe, stay for awhile, and then ceases. What does the mind do with the thought in-between its arival and departure? It must be doing something other than thinking, since you cannot think in-between thoughts. I believe this must be answered before we can answer what awareness is.