The View from Everywhere

April 15th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Centre, Consciousness, Nagel, Thomas, Space, Up |

Normal waking consciousness is a located phenomenon supported/created by sensory organs which orient the normal conscious mind as a point or body in 3-dimensional space. This is particularly evident when considering the visual sense, which transparently places the individual at the centre of space and arranges the furniture of the world in relation to that central location, (although it is likely that the proprioceptive sense is even more potent in this positioning of consciousness).

A common feature of the experience of ‘enlightenment’ is a weakening of this sense of a located consciousness such that one feels oneself distributed across, and in some cases in union with, a wider environment than a point or body.

A more everyday version of this extension of the located self, which gives a suggestion of the phenomenological changes which take place in moments of enlightenment, can be found in the experience of binocular vision. The distinct difference between a two dimensional image and a 3-D space parallels, in a small way, that between 3-D space and the expanded field of consciousness experienced by the enlightened mind.

Nagel writes about ‘the view from nowhere’ in his critique of empirical objectivity, seeming to indicate a visual metaphor in which knowledge which is assumed to have a viewpoint is accorded the unique distinction of seeing everywhere and everything, like a giant omniscient eye hovering over the otherwise horizontal plane of usual (viewpointed, perspectival) knowing.