Lucid Waking: The Answer to the Problem of Consciousness (The Dream Series, #4) / The Dream Series (ePub)

There is no problem more baffling to the academic world than the problem of consciousness. It's fair to say that no academic has any clue at all about what consciousness is. In fact, academics have totally confused it with something radically different, namely sentience. The problem that faces the academic world is the insurmountable one of how you get lifeless, mindless, purposeless objects (material atoms) to manifest subjectivity. It's a category error to imagine that matter can provide any answers to the foundational issues of mind.

Academics believe that to answer the problem of subjectivity is thereby to solve the "hard problem" of consciousness. In fact, the problem of subjectivity (sentience) is totally different from the problem of consciousness. To understand why, simply ponder all of the following statements: 1) animals are sentient but not conscious; 2) human babies are sentient but not conscious; 3) humans who never encountered another human are sentient but not conscious; 4) sleepwalking humans are sentient but not conscious. The problem of sentience is drastically different from the problem of consciousness and if you conflate the two you have immediately set yourself an impossible task, especially if you make any attempt to solve these problems within the framework of materialism (i.e., the ideology of anti-mind).

To understand what consciousness actually is, it's essential to understand the difference, in the world of sleep, between dreaming and lucid dreaming. Exactly the same dichotomy is present in the waking world. A sleepwalker is a person who can do complex tasks - such as riding a motorbike for half an hour - without any consciousness. A conscious version of a sleepwalker engages in what we refer to as "lucid waking". Lucid waking is the key to consciousness.

The fact is that consciousness is not an inherent property of human individuals. It's not built into them. It's acquired, just as some people acquire the ability to become lucid dreamers. Since sleepwalkers could do many of the same things as conscious individuals, the question is invited of why consciousness is required at all.

If you don't know what consciousness is, how can you expand your consciousness to the maximum? Wouldn't you like to be maximally conscious? Think of the power you would have.