MONDAY, 31 JANUARY 2005
I suspect, and have also suspected this in the past, that I get bored with the very idea of something.
One example: I notice in the English textbook I am currently using with a group of twelve-year-old students a picture of a family in a backyard. They’re busy barbequing. I look at the adults and think, “How fucking boring …”
The problem is, this boredom with the very idea of something registers as a serious thought in my mind, and it is included in my official Thoughts On Topic X!
I think I have been on a bitter campaign against things for a long time – in some cases nothing more than luck that I think I had missed out on earlier, or things that could have made me happy that had lost its glamour because I almost always associate it with anxiety and uncertainty.
I think it is just my inner nature – which is essentially good – that has prevented me from venting my feelings in other ways.
Which brings me back to the question of “inner nature” and/or “core personality”: they are givens, are they not? And crucial in the manufacturing of end result, right? How guilty then is Given, and how guilty Free Will?
[…]
I was just lying in bed. I was aware of my body. I was also aware of the idea that I was aware of my body. I could also remember that I have been aware of my body at other times, earlier times. I could also remember that I had also then thought, or knew, that I was aware of my body.
Consciousness develops; it is not just suddenly there. Yet, there must be a critical moment – a watershed moment in the development of self-consciousness.
Certainly there can be no doubt that a foetus has a consciousness after thirty weeks or so. The consciousness of the foetus and that of the new-born baby (including the first few months) is, however, unique in the history of the person’s consciousness: it is wordless.
Difference between wordless consciousness and consciousness where language comes into play …
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