Rationalist Koan

Old Dude: (speaking slowly, with careful precision) The very condition of possibility for spatial perception is a non-spatial ground. Spatiality is phenomenologically embedded within non-spatial awareness, proven by the phenomenally inaccessible, non-locatable boundaries of our perceptual field.

 

Young Rationalist: (frowning skeptically) That’s a dense way to start. You’re saying the only reason we can perceive space is because something non-spatial underlies that perception? And you claim the boundaries of what we perceive can’t be located within perception, so awareness itself must be non-spatial? Honestly, that sounds counterintuitive. If we perceive space, how could the basis of that perception be something that isn’t spatial at all?

 

Old Dude: Consider your field of vision right now. You see the room around us—objects laid out in space. Now, try to locate the edge of your visual field. Can you see where your seeing stops?

 

Young Rationalist: (blinking, then squinting as if to “see” the edges of sight) The edge of seeing? I see to a limit… like there’s a widest angle I can see. But there isn’t a bright line marking an edge. It just… ends. My peripheral vision fades out at some point, but I don’t see a boundary as such. It’s not like a picture frame; it’s just that beyond a certain angle, I see nothing.

 

Old Dude: Exactly. The boundary of your visual field is phenomenologically invisible – you can’t see the edge of sight within sight. The limit is defined by the absence of sight beyond it, not by a visible border. This suggests that the context which allows you to see spatial things is not itself a spatial thing. It has no shape, no location that you can perceive. In other words, awareness — the condition that makes seeing possible — has no spatial form.

 

Young Rationalist: But hold on. We usually think our awareness is located somewhere. For example, common sense says my mind or awareness is in my head, behind my eyes. I feel like I’m here in space, looking out. How can you claim awareness isn’t spatial when I clearly experience myself as located in my body?

 

Old Dude: It seems that way on first glance, but let’s examine it carefully. You “feel” located behind your eyes – but what is that feeling, exactly? It’s composed of sensations: perhaps pressure or vision oriented forward. Those sensations occur in awareness. Do you observe your awareness being literally inside your head, or do you infer it based on the fact that your eyes are in your head?

 

Young Rationalist: I guess I infer it. I’ve never actually seen my own brain or something saying “this is where consciousness is.” I just assume I, as an observer, reside somewhere behind my face because that’s where my sensory organs are. Still, isn’t that a fair assumption? All evidence from neuroscience says the brain generates consciousness, and the brain is in the skull – a location in space. Doesn’t that tie awareness to a spatial spot?

 

Old Dude: Let’s stick to what can be directly observed or logically deduced from observation. You mentioned neuroscience – true, brains are correlated with experiences, but notice: our knowledge of brains and neuroscience also comes via our perception and awareness (microscopes, scans, reports – all appearing in consciousness). Conceptually, we place awareness in the brain, but phenomenologically, we never find an experienced “brain” producing awareness – we only ever know the idea of it.

 

Now, I’m not denying the usefulness of the brain concept, but I want you to notice a subtle point: everything we know about brains, heads, locations – all of that appears within our awareness as perceptions or thoughts. You have never experienced anything outside of your awareness. By definition, you can’t – if you experienced it, it’s in awareness. So to conclude awareness itself is a thing inside the brain is turning things backward; the brain itself is known within awareness.

 

Young Rationalist: So you’re flipping the perspective: instead of saying awareness is in the brain, you’re saying the brain is in awareness – at least the brain as I know it (through images, sensations, concepts) is something appearing in my field of consciousness. That is a strange inversion, but I follow the logic: whatever I know, I know through consciousness. I’ve never stepped outside my consciousness to verify anything. Fine. But couldn’t it be both? The brain produces consciousness, and consciousness experiences the brain – a kind of feedback loop?

 

Old Dude: It could be, but notice that “produces” is an inference, not a direct experience. What do we actually experience? We experience thoughts, sensations, perceptions. Among those is the thought or perception of a body and head and brain. The production process itself is never witnessed. We assume it to make sense of correlations (like if someone’s head is injured, their consciousness content changes or stops, which we interpret as brain necessary for consciousness). But correlation doesn’t prove location or production in a straightforward way. It’s equally coherent, logically, to say: consciousness is fundamental and the brain is a feature that appears within it, representing how consciousness limits itself in our human experience. My key point is not to disprove neuroscience, but to show that from the first-person, immediate perspective, awareness has no location. You cannot find it as an object in space.

 

Young Rationalist: Let me try an experiment then. If I introspect right now, I see my laptop on this table; I hear your voice from my right side; I feel the chair under me. All these are located in space relative to “me.” When I look for this “me” that’s experiencing, I come to my body. I feel sensations in my body localized here. Isn’t that evidence my awareness is extended through my body’s sense organs, hence spatially distributed?

 

Old Dude: You feel sensations in the body, yes. Those sensations themselves are in awareness. But ask: where do you, the aware subject, actually experience yourself? You might say in the head, or behind the eyes, because vision and hearing seem to originate there. Yet if I ask you to pinpoint the “seer” or the “hearer,” what do you find? For example, you hear my voice. You can pinpoint my location (sitting across from you) in space. But can you pinpoint the listener? You might think the listener is in your head. But isn’t that just another perception (of your head or thoughts about your self-image) appearing in awareness?

 

Take a moment. Close your eyes if you want, and search for the precise location where your awareness is. Not where the body is, but where you as the one aware are located. Is it an object in the room? A point in space? Or is it “no-where” in the literal sense: it doesn’t occupy a place; it simply is aware?

 

Young Rationalist: (closes eyes briefly, furrows brow in concentration) When I remove visual reference and just attend to being aware… I can’t find a spot. There are sensations – pressure in my face, the feeling of air, heartbeat – and those are at points in space relative to the body. But the awareness of them… it doesn’t feel like it’s sitting at some coordinate. It’s more like an open arena in which things happen. Huh. I’ve always assumed the arena was the brain or inside the head, but I don’t actually experience a little control room or a center that’s “me” observing. The observing just happens, without a clear locus.

 

I’ll admit, that’s odd. It’s as if my point-of-view exists, but when I try to nail it down, it vanishes into just... viewpoint itself, with no shape or size. This is what you mean by a non-spatial awareness, I think.

 

Old Dude: Yes. The point-of-view is not itself a point in space. It’s point-of-view in the sense of perspective, but not a located dot you can find. It’s more like an open field in which spatial things appear. Awareness has no detectable size, shape, or location – it’s not in the left or right, not in or out. It’s the field in which those spatial distinctions show up. This field (if we call it that) doesn’t appear as an object, so it’s non-spatial in nature.

Are Space and Time Only Interpretations?

Young Rationalist: So you’re essentially saying consciousness or awareness is like a container with no form, and space is inside it. I think I follow. But then, what about time? You said “spatiality is embedded in awareness.” Would the same logic apply to time? We experience everything in time – one moment after another. Surely time isn’t just an interpretation, is it?

 

Old Dude: Good question. Let’s examine time in our direct experience. We have the impression of a flow of time, of past, present, future. But how do we actually experience past or future?

 

Young Rationalist: Through memory and anticipation. I remember what I did this morning, I anticipate what I’ll do later. And I see things change, which implies time passing.

 

Old Dude: Right. But a memory of this morning is something occurring now, isn’t it? It’s a present thought or image of a so-called past event. The past itself isn’t here to experience – only a present memory trace. Similarly, anticipation or planning for the future happens as a thought now. In direct experience, you never step out of the present moment of awareness. You have memories and predictions, but those are present contents (images, feelings, ideas).

 

Young Rationalist: Are you saying time isn’t real? Because that’s what it sounds like, and that’s a hard sell. My entire life is a sequence in time. I was a child, now I’m an adult – that’s real, not just an “interpretation.” If I burn my finger, a moment later I feel pain – cause and effect in time. How can those solid experiences be mere interpretations?

 

Old Dude: I’m not denying the experience of temporal sequence. Events appear to unfold. What I’m saying is that the structuring of experience into “past, present, future” is something our mind does within consciousness. We interpret the world as processes in time, but time-as-such is not something you ever perceive directly; it’s a conceptual framework applied to changing experiences.

 

Take your example: you burn your finger and later feel pain. Two events: contact with flame, then pain sensation. They’re related by memory (you remember one came before the other) and by inference (heat causes pain with a short delay). Both events happened in the present of their respective moments, and only through memory and thought do you connect them into a timeline. That timeline isn’t an observed entity; it’s a mental narrative stitching together present moments and their contents.

 

Young Rationalist: But the consistency of these connections – that’s what makes time feel objectively real. If time were purely an interpretation, why is it so consistent? Everyone agrees on the general ordering of events, we have clocks, we can measure time. It behaves like a real dimension, not just a private idea.

 

Old Dude: We measure change with clocks, and we all sync on those measurements, which indeed suggests an underlying order. However, consider what a clock provides: a regular cyclical change (say, the hands moving or digits changing) that we use as a reference. We’re still comparing experiences within awareness. We create a standardized reference for the sequence of events, which is useful and consistent because we all have similar sense apparatus and inhabit what appears as a shared environment. None of that contradicts the fact that all you ever have access to are experiences in the now. The consistency just means the rules by which experiences unfold are stable – which is fine. It doesn’t make time an object that exists independently of awareness; it makes it a stable interpretive structure of consciousness.

 

Think of it this way: in a dream, you might also experience a sequence of events that follow a kind of time logic (even if warped). Within the dream, you could measure durations or recall a past dream event. It’s only when you wake up that you realize that timeline was entirely generated by the mind. I’m not saying our waking life is just a dream, but the analogy shows how time can be a constructed framework that orders experiences. The crucial point is: whether or not an external time “out there” exists, we never experience time directly. We experience moments, and we weave them into a timeline with memory and expectation.

 

Young Rationalist: Hmm, so you’re putting space and time in the same basket: they are part of how consciousness structures experience, rather than independent things. Space is like the layout within awareness, and time is like the sequence within awareness. Both are, in a sense, generated or at least interpreted by the mind. That does align with some philosophical viewpoints I’ve heard (though you’re not naming any). But it also dangerously edges toward solipsism or idealism: the notion that everything is “all in the mind.” And as a rationalist, I have to protest: there is a real world we all share, with real spatial and temporal facts. You can’t reduce everything to just my awareness’s interpretations. That undermines science, common sense, everything!

 

Old Dude: I understand the concern. It sounds like I’m stripping away the reality of the world. But note, I’m not saying the world isn’t real; I’m saying our knowledge of it is unavoidably filtered through consciousness. The structure of space and time could be rooted in an external reality – but we only ever encounter that reality through the lens of our perception.

 

We are not discarding the consistency and shared nature of experience. If you and I both see a table in the room, that intersubjective agreement is an important datum. But how do I know you see the table?

 

Young Rationalist: Because you ask me and I say “yes, I see it,” or we can both touch it and agree on its size and shape. That’s intersubjectivity – our experiences align, suggesting the table is objectively there.

 

Old Dude: Right, we communicate and compare notes, which happens through language, gestures, etc. But consider: your awareness receives my words or sees my actions. Within your experience, you form the notion “this other person also sees the table.” That notion appears as a thought or an image of me confirming the table. All of that – my voice, your hearing of it, your interpretation of my speech – occurs within your field of consciousness. The verification process of intersubjective reality is still something that happens inside your experience.

 

This doesn’t make the table unreal; it simply highlights a fact: you cannot escape your awareness to check reality from an external standpoint. Even the fact “the world is shared by many observers” is, for you, a belief formed by interpreting perceptions (like hearing others report their experiences). It’s a reasonable belief, but it’s still constructed within your mind.

 

Young Rationalist: You’re walking a fine line. It’s like you’re saying “I can’t prove anything outside my own consciousness,” which is true in a solipsistic sense. But practically, I act as if there is a world that doesn’t depend on my awareness. If I leave the room and come back, the furniture is still there. It doesn’t blink out when I stop perceiving it. How does that fit into your consciousness-centered view?

 

Old Dude: It fits as another experience: you remember leaving, you see the furniture again when you return. The continuity of objects when unperceived is an inference we make to explain the stability of experiences. I’m not claiming the inference is false; I’m saying it’s an inference, not something you directly know via experience. Maybe the world exists continuously “out there,” or maybe it’s more like a computer simulation that generates the room whenever you look. Either way, from your first-person stance, what you have is a sequence of perceptions that are very consistent, which you summarize as “the furniture stayed in place even when I wasn’t looking.” That’s a perfectly fine interpretation and it works. But it’s still happening in the theater of your awareness as a thought.

 

The key is: spatial and temporal distinctions are interpretive projections within awareness. They could correspond to something real outside, but we never get outside awareness to check. We operate under the projections because they’re reliable. Yet when we examine experience itself, we see that space and time are features of how things appear to us. They’re part of the form of awareness.

 

Young Rationalist: It’s quite hard to accept that what I take as the fundamental backdrop of reality – space extending infinitely out there, and time flowing with or without me – might be just forms of consciousness. You’re nudging me to concede that, at least methodologically, I only ever deal with my awareness’s contents. Fine. Let’s say I accept, provisionally, that space and time as I know them live in consciousness. Where does this lead us? Are we heading to the idea that consciousness has no spatiotemporal location at all? That it’s like… floating outside the physical universe?

Locating Consciousness (or Not)

Old Dude: You’ve anticipated it. Yes – consciousness has no spatiotemporal location (at least none that we can find within experience or through pure reasoning). We touched on this with the point-of-view exercise. But let’s dig deeper, because the consequences are profound and can be a bit unsettling.

 

You mentioned “floating outside the physical universe.” That’s an image – a picture of some ghostly mind hovering in space. But that’s not quite right, because if it’s outside physical space, we shouldn’t picture it spatially at all. When we try to imagine “consciousness with no location,” the rational mind struggles, because every thing we know is usually somewhere and sometime. Instead, think of consciousness as the context in which the ideas of “somewhere” and “sometime” appear.

 

Young Rationalist: Can you give me a more concrete analogy? This is getting abstract.

 

Old Dude: Consider a movie screen. Characters in the movie move about in their space, they have a timeline of events. Now, the screen itself is not in the movie’s world – it’s the support that lets that world appear. But even a screen has a location in our physical world, so let’s refine the analogy: Consider space itself. We usually think of objects in space. But space, as physics describes, is not located inside any object; objects are in it. If consciousness is like space in this analogy, it would mean experiences are inside consciousness, and consciousness isn’t inside any particular experience or location. However, even physical space is part of the universe and has coordinates; consciousness doesn’t.

 

Perhaps a better analogy is your field of vision again: things are located at various points in your field of vision, but the field itself doesn’t have a position within the scene. The field isn’t an object you can find at point (x,y) in the picture; it’s the entire display framework. Similarly, your awareness isn’t an object in the world – the world (as you know it) is an object or content within your awareness.

 

Young Rationalist: So you’d say: from my perspective, my awareness is the frame in which the world exists, rather than my awareness existing in the world. It certainly feels that way when I introspect – the world shows up for me, and I don’t find “me” as a thing in the world. But again, is that just perspective bias? After all, from your perspective, your consciousness is the frame and I as an object (your image of me) exist in your frame. We can’t both be the sole frame containing everything… unless you’re going to claim there is actually just one consciousness underpinning everyone?

 

Old Dude: Ah, you’re bringing up the classic question of multiple minds. From a strictly first-person point of view, you only ever experience one field of awareness – your own. You infer I have one too, by analogy: I act like you, so you guess I’m conscious. I do the same inference about you. Now, if we assume both of us are conscious, we have two consciousnesses – but notice, I have no direct access to yours, nor you to mine. They’re separate from the perspective of each of us.

 

Young Rationalist: Right, I can’t directly experience your awareness, only infer it. So how do we reconcile that with your earlier suggestion that maybe consciousness is fundamental and singular? It seems we have many separate consciousness bubbles if we go by individual experience.

 

Old Dude: This is indeed a puzzle. Let’s tread carefully: If we avoid any speculative metaphysics, we’d say: “I know of one consciousness for sure – mine. I strongly believe others have their own, but I know them only through communication in my awareness.” That’s a fair agnostic stance. However, logically, it’s also possible that what we think of as “many consciousnesses” are actually manifestations or localizations of a single field of awareness. I’m not asking you to accept that as truth blindly – just consider it as a possibility that fits our observations: we never observe multiple awarenesses at once, only ever our own, and we observe multiplicity of objects within one awareness.

 

Imagine many characters in a dream arguing whether each has their own mind, when in fact all are dreamed by one mind. From within the dream, each character can’t directly see the dreamer mind; they each assume their consciousness is private. This analogy suggests how one awareness could play as many without them realizing it.

 

Young Rationalist: It’s an intriguing idea, but it still sounds like speculation beyond the data. There’s no way to verify if ultimately there’s one awareness or many; from where I stand I have mine, and you have yours, apparently separate.

 

Old Dude: I agree – we can’t empirically verify a single shared consciousness from within our individual viewpoint. So let’s not claim it as certain. Instead, what we can say with certainty is that within your experience, all apparent multiplicity of objects, people, and events shows up in one indivisible field – your field of awareness. Whether that field is ultimately one universal field or one per person is a metaphysical question we don’t need to solve to proceed with our phenomenological investigation.

 

The crucial insight remains: anything you consider “separate” – different objects, different people – when they are experienced by you, they’re all contents in the single space of your awareness. You don’t experience two awarenesses at once. Even if you imagine another person’s perspective, that imagination is happening in your mind. So from the standpoint of your direct knowledge, reality is effectively a unified field of consciousness containing various forms or appearances that you interpret as separate entities.

 

Young Rationalist: Let me paraphrase to see if I got it: For me, everything I know – my own body, other people, the room, even abstract ideas – appear within one awareness. I can’t split my awareness into parts; it always functions as a single continuum where things arise. The divisions I see (my body here, your body there, the lamp over there) are real as relationships in space, but that whole spatial scene is in my one awareness. If I switch context – say I go outside – I have a different set of perceptions, but still one awareness containing them. The content changes, the field remains single. Yes, that seems right. I’ve never noticed any “break” in my awareness where two totally separate fields coexist; it’s always one field of experience at a time.

 

Old Dude: Exactly. The unity of consciousness is a well-known feature of experience: you experience a multi-sensory world in a coherent single awareness, not disjointed bits. Now, taking that seriously: all multiplicity (many things) are appearing as parts or aspects of a single awareness field. The boundaries between things are part of how consciousness structures the experience – like drawing lines in a painting. But the entire painting is one canvas.

 

And importantly, consciousness itself has no plurality within it. You can’t cut your awareness into pieces. If you try to imagine having two separate awarenesses at once, you can’t – at best you alternate or fragment attention, but it’s still one “you” observing the attempt. So we could say all apparent multiplicity is a structured interpretation within an indivisible awareness.

The Challenge of Intersubjectivity and Identity

Young Rationalist: I see your point from the individual perspective. But I have to challenge this with intersubjectivity again, because it’s a cornerstone of rational understanding: if everything I know is in my field of consciousness, how do I know we’re not stuck in completely isolated bubbles, or that I’m not the only consciousness (solipsism)? The very fact we can have this dialogue and seemingly exchange ideas suggests our experiences connect somehow. Doesn’t that imply a world outside of us where our two streams meet? And doesn’t that weaken the “one field” idea?

 

Old Dude: Our two streams meet via communication – sound waves, written words, etc., which are perceived in each of our fields. It implies there’s some common source or cause (like the physical environment) coordinating what we experience. I accept that. But we must be careful to distinguish: coordination of experiences (what you call intersubjective agreement) does not necessitate that consciousness itself is located in a shared space. It only necessitates that there is consistency in the content that appears separately to you and to me.

 

For example, suppose there is an external physical world (as science assumes) – that world would serve as the common source that makes your experiences and mine correspond (we both see the same table because the table exists outside us and reflects light to both our eyes). That framework is fine. It still doesn’t locate awareness in that physical world; it just explains the parallel between different persons’ experience contents.

 

Now, suppose instead that reality is fundamentally one consciousness dreaming up multiple viewpoints (just a hypothesis). In that case, the consistency of our experiences is ensured because behind-the-scenes it’s one mind playing all roles, so of course it keeps things consistent for coherence of the story. That could also explain intersubjectivity. But again, that’s speculative. The point is: whether the ultimate cause is physical or a single awareness or something else, for the purpose of phenomenology, you are still stuck knowing only what shows up for you. The structure of that showing-up is what we’re examining.

 

Young Rationalist: Alright. You’re basically sidestepping the metaphysical question and focusing on what experience tells us directly. Experience tells me that I have one unified awareness where everything appears. It tells me that this awareness doesn’t present itself as something located in space or time – rather it’s the backdrop for space and time. And it tells me that within my awareness, I can perceive patterns that correspond with what others report (so I infer an external world or shared reality). But I never perceive this “external world” except as how it appears to me.

 

It’s a bit humbling – it’s like admitting the only reality I can be absolutely sure of is the reality of my own consciousness and its contents. I usually take for granted that there’s a whole universe out there independent of me, but if I’m stringent about evidence, I can’t escape that all I have is my perspective.

 

Old Dude: That’s exactly the epistemic humility we arrive at. It doesn’t mean dismiss the external world – it means acknowledge that all knowledge is through the lens of awareness. So we turn to examine that awareness itself, since it’s our one given.

 

You mentioned identity earlier – that you were a child and now you’re grown, implying a self that persists in time. Let’s touch on that, because it’s related to how memory and time create a narrative. You identify as the same person over decades, yet what is that identity made of? Memories, personality traits, a body that changes… all are content in consciousness that evolve. But the witness of those changes – has “that which is aware” aged or changed inherently?

 

Young Rationalist: I feel different than I did as a child. My thoughts, knowledge, even personality are different. In many ways my identity has changed. Are you suggesting there is some constant “awareness self” that was the same then as now?

 

Old Dude: Not a personal self with traits, but the basic sense of being aware – that has been a constant background, hasn’t it? The experiences have all changed: childhood perceptions, teenage ideas, adult feelings – none of those stuck around unchanged. But each was witnessed by the same faculty of knowing. If you try to remember being a child, you recall certain scenes or feelings (those are images now). The remembrance happens now in your awareness. You, as awareness, were present to those experiences then (otherwise you’d not recall anything) and you are present to the memories now. The contents of “you” have changed, but the fundamental awareness-of-content is continuous.

 

In that sense, your true identity at the level of being the experiencer is timeless. It doesn’t age. The concept of “who I am” certainly evolves (that’s the narrative self, the story), but the fact “I am aware” doesn’t become stronger or weaker with years; it’s just there whenever experiences happen. We often overlook that because we focus on the content of self (body, mind) rather than the context (consciousness itself).

 

Young Rationalist: If I take that seriously: the real “I” is the one that is aware of all these life experiences, and that “I” hasn’t itself moved in time; it’s always just here, watching time happen to the body-mind. That resonates in a way I can’t easily articulate. It’s like there’s a depth to me that indeed feels unchanging – I usually call it just “me,” without analysis. But you’re pointing out that this basic sense of presence, of being the one who knows, is constant and doesn’t exist as an object in the timeline.

 

This is quite a twist: it implies “I” – at least as consciousness – am not a thing in time at all. Time happens within me, or to my experiences, but not to me as the aware being.

 

Old Dude: Well said. We’ve come to a critical insight: the awareness that you are has no age, no location, and no dividing lines. It doesn’t live in the world; the world lives in it (from your perspective). It doesn’t move through time; time moves through it (as experiences change). Recognizing this is not mystical; it’s a logical and observational conclusion from everything we’ve discussed.

The Halting Point: Recognition of Groundless Awareness

Young Rationalist: This is a lot to take in. So far, you’ve systematically dismantled my default assumptions: space as an external container, time as a universal flow, consciousness as brain-bound, self as a time-bound entity. You replaced them with: space and time are forms within consciousness, consciousness itself has no form or location, and the true “self” (as consciousness) doesn’t age or fragment.

 

My “rational” mind is almost looking for a loophole, some flaw in this reasoning. (He pauses, thinking hard, eyebrows knit.)

 

Let me examine if any contradictions arise: If everything is within consciousness, why do we have the appearance that consciousness is so small (just in our heads) and the world so big? That appearance itself is an experience – correct. And in that experience, we find no actual evidence of consciousness being small or large; those are comparisons we make about objects. Consciousness isn’t an object, so size doesn’t apply. Okay.

 

What about the dependency: if I get hit on the head and black out, consciousness as I know it stops. Doesn’t that prove the physical can shut off the awareness? It shows a link between brain state and content of consciousness (including the presence or absence of conscious experience that I can later remember). But from the inside, all I know is one moment I had awareness with content, next moment content disappears (as far as memory reports) until I wake up. I don’t actually experience unconsciousness; I infer it later. So I can’t even say I experienced “no consciousness,” only that I have a gap in memory, which from a third-person view corresponds to being unconscious. This is tricky, but it doesn’t necessarily disprove the primacy of awareness; it just shows the contents can vanish or restart, and we assume awareness wasn’t operating in between because no memory. Yet, that assumption might be wrong – awareness could have been present in some state we don’t recall. Hard to say. At least, not a knock-down argument against what you’re saying.

 

And intersubjectivity we covered: it doesn’t defeat the logic, it just adds a layer of unknown about how multiple perspectives work.

 

It’s unsettling because I feel my mind reaching its conceptual limits. I can’t find an intellectual escape route from these conclusions, but they upend how I usually think about reality.

 

Old Dude: (quietly, with empathy) It’s okay to feel unsettled. We are effectively pointing out that the ground we usually stand on – the taken-for-granted world of space, time, and separate things – is not the ultimate ground. When you really follow the thread, you find that our experience is grounded in something that isn’t a “thing” at all: this aware no-thing that allows all things to appear.

 

You called it an inversion earlier, and it is. It’s a kind of gestalt flip: realizing consciousness is the context, not an item within context. This realization isn’t just an idea; it can become an actual shift in how you sense reality. But even as an idea, it already can stop the mind in its tracks a bit.

 

Young Rationalist: (slowly, with a new tone of wonder mixed with confusion) I have to admit, every time I try to articulate a counter-argument, it collapses when I inspect it in light of direct experience. You have been relentlessly logical – you didn’t ask me to believe anything without checking it. And checking my own experience at each step, I find you’re correct: I can’t find a dividing line in my awareness, I can’t find a location of the observer, I can’t find the past or future except as thoughts now, I can’t find an actual boundary where “my consciousness” ends and something else begins – because I’ve never been outside it.

 

It’s as if my conceptual engine is sputtering – it wants to keep asserting something solid ‘out there’ or some final objection, but it’s running out of fuel. Each objection gets answered by “look again at what is evident.” And what’s evident is only what shows up to me, here, now, in this awareness.

 

(The Young Rationalist falls silent, his eyes drifting as if gazing inward. A long pause ensues.)

 

Old Dude: (softly, after a silence) What’s happening for you right now?

 

Young Rationalist: (with a faint, thoughtful smile) I’m noticing… an unusual quiet. My mind isn’t jumping as much. I feel a bit like a rug was pulled from under my usual understanding, and instead of falling, I’m just… here. My usual rush of thoughts is paused by this stark truth that I can’t deny: Consciousness – this aware presence – is kind of groundless. I can’t find a floor beneath it. And yet, it’s clearly here; it’s the one self-evident thing.

 

“Groundless” in that I find no cause or location for it, and self-disclosing in that I only know it by it being itself. I mean, the only proof of consciousness is the experience of being conscious. It shows itself by the very act of revealing everything else. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? (He looks at Old Dude, eyes clearer now)

 

Old Dude: (smiling warmly) You’ve put it perfectly. Groundless, self-disclosing awareness – that’s the discovery. It’s not reached by mystical revelation or authority’s teaching, but by pure logical investigation and direct observation. You see now that all the structures (space, time, objects, persons) are appearances in the one thing that never appears as an object: consciousness itself. And that consciousness – what you call “I” at the deepest level – cannot be found as a thing among things. It’s empty of form, yet full of the potential for forms. It is evident not by being seen, but by being the seer of everything.

 

Young Rationalist: This really is like a koan – a riddle that my analytic mind worked on so hard that it just… gave up, and in that giving up, something clicked. I don’t feel tricked; I feel clarified, though also a bit tender, like I need to sit with this. It’s a radical shift from how I usually think, and I want to resist falling into some romantic or “spiritual” interpretation of it. You’ve kept it very grounded in logic and experience, which I appreciate.

 

I have no clever rebuttal left. Just a kind of awe, and admittedly, a quiet peace that comes from stopping the frantic search for an ultimate explanation out there. I think I understand now – not just intellectually, but I see what you’re pointing to.

 

Old Dude: And how would you put what I was pointing to, in your own words?

 

Young Rationalist: I’d say: awareness is the context for everything I experience, and it isn’t itself a thing in the world. Space and time exist in the way things appear to me, but my awareness has no dimensions or duration – it’s always just here, now, as the knowing of whatever is happening. I can divide the contents of experience into many, but I can’t divide the awareness — it’s singular, indivisible. I can trace events to causes within the world, but when I trace the knowing of it all back, I find no cause or boundary for awareness itself. It’s just a given – the ultimate given. It knows itself by being present; there’s nothing outside it that needs to reveal it.

 

Something like that.

 

Old Dude: That’s an excellent summary. (He reaches out and pats the Young Rationalist’s shoulder affectionately.) And importantly, this isn’t the end of inquiry, but a halting point for the purely conceptual, skeptical mind. It’s the point where logic has done its duty and kind of bows to what is self-evident. Further questions might arise – they always do – but now you know where the groundless ground is. You can always reorient to this: that no matter what you question or doubt, the doubting and questioning are happening in an aware presence that you cannot deny, and which itself has no story, no form – it just is.

 

Young Rationalist: (quietly) It’s strange. I feel both a bit exposed (since the usual mental furnishings have been cleared out) and also supported by something very simple and profound – the fact of being aware itself. It truly is self-disclosing; I didn’t need anything outside to find it, just needed to look. And there it always was, in the background of every experience.

 

I think… I think I’ll stay with this feeling for a while, if you don’t mind. (He closes his eyes gently, breathing steadily.)

 

Old Dude: (softly) Not at all. This recognition speaks louder than any more words. (He too falls silent, and for a time, both sit quietly, awareness resting in awareness, with nothing left to prove.)