We have made an ascent of taut assent. We have arrived at a resting place of clarity. What has come before has been necessary, established by the logic of being. It cannot be otherwise. It is and it is known. We know that awareness is being and we have made explicit such properties and circumstances of awareness to give that fundamental statement substantial content.
Besides the priority of awareness itself perhaps our next most important result has been to establish the essential core of unitary awareness. The pure unity of awareness gives much cause for reflection but let us now consider the possibilities for thought which arise from breaking that unity. As a minimal encroachment upon unity let us draw a distinction. The problem is to draw a distinction upon the hide of unitary awareness. Unitary awareness can be reached as the endpoint of refining forms and philosophical reflection. In order to go beyond unitary awareness it is necessary to draw distinctions such as subject and object, that which is aware and that which it is aware of; how can we do this?
Drawing such a distinction is not entirely intrinsic to the nature of awareness. I look at the furnishings of my study: a wooden chest of drawers, bookcases, pictures, computer, stones and crystals arranged upon a white cloth, an African marimba. These visual images appear to exist prior to any distinction between object and self. I do not gain a higher priority of assent by making such a distinction but instead appear to be lowering thought to a more derived and arbitrary separation.
What is between separates and also connects. A window separates the inside from the outside but also allows the connection of light and, in summer, of air. Recall that we first approached the unity of awareness by the metaphor of boundary between observer and observed. That approach to the boundary gives a sharpness to awareness which we can now use to draw a distinction. When you draw a fine line and then a finer line and then finer still, eventually the line can no longer be seen and, unseen, becomes indefinite in its location. A similar situation happens in thought; when you focus on a thought with sharp intent it clarifies and stands out from the general background of consciousness but when you focus still more intently, looking closer and closer for the core and central meaning of the thought, then that thought eventually transforms itself, even sometimes into a question or in its very sharpness of definition and boundary it becomes mobile in meaning, in its place in the mind, in its relation to other thoughts. Try this with any thought, say with watching present time flow or the concept of a straight line. In a similar way the sharpness of the boundary of distinction makes it mobile.
Let us apply this to being. When we watch the clouds form and combine, grow and dissolve in a blue summer sky, we imagine that there are smaller clouds beyond our perception. Cloud watchers will know that this is true. As with those clouds born so quietly, distilling into the edge of vision, fading out and then returning as the distant air shifts its currents of a summer day, let us move the boundary of awareness to the edge of being; implicitly defined is that which is beyond the edge, beyond observation, beyond being. Beyond observation and beyond being can be given the names of unknown and void, not quite the same but clearly related.
There is also a more elementary approach to drawing distinctions out of unitary awareness. We originally approached unitary awareness from the common ground of experience in which a self is considered to be aware of something; we can also draw distinctions by simply relaxing back into the common dualities of self and other, of observer and observed, of that which is aware and that which it is aware of.
Whether you accept the mobility of distinction induced by the sharpness of unitary awareness or prefer dualities arising from our common understanding, we now have the tool of distinction which allows us to discriminate between one thing and another.
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One distinction we can draw upon unitary awareness is the content of awareness. If, in common terms, I am seeing a gate then from the unitary point of view there is an awareness whose content is visual perception of the gate. To the whole content of awareness we give the name 'being'. It is clear that in formulating our concept of being we have not abridged the unitary priority of awareness; the being which we have defined is unitary; in historical terms one could say that we have confirmed Parmenides' report of the completeness and perfection of being.
Returning to unitary awareness we can draw other distinctions upon it. Again from the common perspective, awareness is often seen as two sided, such as in a perception where there is the perceiver and the perceived. Drawing such a distinction upon awareness divides awareness into a duality which we name 'subject' and 'object'. This distinction may be drawn directly upon unitary awareness, independently of the distinction of content called being.
The subject object distinction occurs on two levels which we might call local and global. If, in a single flash of awareness we distinguish that which is aware from that of which it is aware then we could call this local subject object distinction. If we collect, in concept, a large amount of awareness and correspondingly collect that which is aware into one item and also collect that which it is aware of into another item, then we approach a global subject object distinction.
If we draw both the essentially unitary distinction of content or being and the dualistic distinction of subject and object, then we can name the intersection of global subject and content by the name 'self' and we can name the intersection of object and content by the name 'other'. Obviously the terms local and global are approximate, besides there occurring every ratio between them there is also no discernable limit either to the localness, no final minimum of awareness, nor to the global some ultimate end and totality which could be caught or bound by any more than a concept or name, say, all.
It is possible to make a distinction between the central fact of awareness and the content of awareness which does not yet involve a distinction between subject and object. In this case an awareness of self would be one form of the content of awareness, along with visual perception, hearing and other sense perceptions, thought and other emanations of consciousness as well as any other forms which might be discriminated out of the flux of awareness.
Simple distinctions upon unitary awareness give rise to the concept of self. How does one proceed to establish the existence of other selves, other minds alive? Part of the object of awareness is the perceived self whereas the experienced self is associated with the subject of awareness. In that part of the object of awareness which is not primarily the perceived self draw a distinction between that which is like the perceived self and that which is not. That part of the object of awareness which is not the perceived self but which is like the perceived self may reasonably be taken to be other living minds, other selves. These distinctions provide a sound ontological foundation for other selves without drawing too exact boundaries between the self and other selves and between the other selves and non mind parts of the object of awareness. Such boundaries appear real and strong but, as far as present knowledge goes, they may be porous.
When distinctions are drawn upon unitary awareness it may or may not be that the content circumscribed by the distinction is the complete content of unitary awareness. For example, if we draw the dualistic distinction of self and other it may be that we include all of the content of awareness, of being, within the two forms of self and other. It is also possible that there is other content of awareness which is included in neither self nor other. Indeed pure awareness itself is the boundary between self and other and thus is either not strictly part of self nor other or again it might be considered part of both. Having found unitary awareness we are now in a position to make conceptual room for other forms than are usually included in our common dualities; there may be other awareness, other being, than the self or the other; we have already seen that in the boundary between self and other. There may be other awareness than subject and object, whether at and in the boundary between them or in some other content of unitary awareness not circumscribed by the duality of subject and object. Drawing distinctions does not change the fact of awareness but rather gives different names and perspectives to the experiences of awareness.