"I"

Awareness is the witness to experience. It is like a projector screen. A constant stream of changing impressions arising from your objective and subjective experiences is being projected onto this screen. These impressions of reality appear, persist and change but the subjective projector screen is always a constant; it is always being “written on”. Your awareness has the essential property of wholeness. The center of this wholeness is your consciousness. This allows you to distinguish between YOU and THINGS that are NOT YOU. Things appear, persist for awhile and go through changes. However, this center is a constant background. Conscious awareness remains essentially unchanged while it constantly watches a constantly changing scenery of changing appearances.

Consciousness is not some supernatural entity foreign to material reality. It is a phenomenon rooted in objective reality. Let us compare consciousness to the hands. Your hands are material things interacting with other material things. As the hand feels out its world, it experiences a constant stream of impressions. These “feel” imprints, or experiences, come and go but they essentially leave the hand unchanged. The hand has all these experiences without losing its “HANDNESS”. That is, it remains itself as it continues to have constantly changing experiences. Theses marks made by it and on it come and go but your hand remains your hand.

The complexity of the brains of sentient beings is, unarguably, unsurpassed. The mind is an extremely subtle “organ” rooted in the material brains of conscious beings. Impressions made on our material organs of sight, hearing, feeling , smelling and touching are transformed via complex brain processes into mental perceptions. These external stimulations are transformed into the mental impulses of the mind. There are different levels of complexity of the mental, with our thoughts being the pinnacle of this complexity.

The mind has the property of wholeness. Your mind may appear to be a separate “body” from the brain but it emerged from it and remains deeply and firmly embedded in the brain at all times. Just as your hand “witnesses” constantly changing experiences and remains essentially unchanged by its worldly experiences, the impressions of reality coming through your material organs of sense (eyes, ears, etc) is projected onto the subjective screen that is the mind. Some of these perceptions become our thoughts. Thoughts are mind stuff. They come and go. Similarly to the hands, the mind’s center of conscious awareness witnesses these constant comings and goings but remains essentially unchanged.

Another name for your consciousness, or center of conscious awareness, is "I".