21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

that subjective thought and meaning are paramount in our view of reality and thus various forms of what can loosely be termed ‘new age’ belief have been spawned.

However, a thought arising in consciousness is after all a phenomenon and therefore, in order to be consistent with the noumenon-phenomena split, it would be necessary to discard the notion that conscious thoughts can be directly attributed to the noumenon. A less direct approach is called for, as described below.

One of the most famous statements in philosophy is of course the ‘Ergo Sum’: ‘I think, therefore I am’. Whilst not entirely new in Western thought, René Descartes’ exposition of the idea really became the decisive point at which the subject/object split was adopted wholesale in Western thought. Being a subject moreover was not considered a complex issue. A thinking being was simply ‘clear and precise’. Jean Paul Sartre, when commenting on the ergo sum, observed that the one doing the thinking is not necessarily the one observing the thought. He did not however comment further on this matter, but actually he hit the nail on the head with that observation. To help us to understand further we must turn to Eastern thought and the idea of the ‘witness’.

In meditation, the process often known as ‘the witness’ is simply to stand back and to observe thoughts arising in the mind. A similar experience occurs when we find ourselves waking up in a strange place. The bed and immediate surroundings and sensations are brought into consciousness, but the unfamiliarity

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