The "Aware" in "Aware, Away, Awry" is the collection of innumerable and interminably-appearing jolts, shocks, disturbances, or what-have-you's that attend all of the self's exposure to information. Nothing in the life of the mind comes smoothly, and even our contemplations of spectra or scales in ideation must be drawn up by us consciously, as momentary constructs that dissolve as soon as our attention is drawn to any particular of experience. Information is introduced to our attentions, and information bit-by-bit is tossed and batted about by our faculties of contemplation.
Nothing about this need be alarming to the religious thinker. "Thought" itself can be understood by us only as a process, as "this meaning that" or "this leading to that" or "this bringing to mind that." The germ of this in the Abrahamic conceptualization is the description of the thought-processes of God as between a speaker and a listener--"Let there be light," for example, or "Let us." Of course, in these idealized instances of the thought-processes of God, there is understood to be perfect communication in perfect efficiency, such that that which is spoken is perfectly related, and related as though it were already known. There are no shocks.
Our thought processes, on the other hand, are characterized by disturbances, from the most minimal to the most disruptive. Indeed, the very notion of thought processes presupposes a locus of consciousness at work--and for each of us the inception of the locus' workings is by definition rooted in a beginning we cannot recall or understand. This is the primordial shock. To the experiencer, the phenomenon of experiencing is effectively uncaused. Moreso in perplexity, and infinitely remote to each person's understanding, is the existence (even in the most mundane of interactions) of other conscious beings.
Do other persons experience existence as we do? Even if ourselves and others can be characterized as thinking persons of perhaps divided attentions and perhaps warring impulses, can we escape the notion that being a conscious entity must be a binary proposition? Either an entity is conscious or not--and being deprived of an outwardly-assessable criterion by which to determine consciousness or not, we can state that nerve activity and the physical displays attributed to nerve activity are supported--caused, we will say--by myriad natural factors, but we cannot say that consciousness is caused if we cannot say (absent error-laden assessment of the thought-outworkings of the subject) when--and therefore under what conditions--consciousness is "caused". We exist as conscious entities because we exist as conscious entities, and we credit the existence of other conscious entities because we credit the existence of other conscious entities.
I say this primarily with attention to the "First Cause" argument for God's existence. The ancients could watch billiard balls (or their ancient equivalents) knock against each other, and idealize what is of course the most "commonsense" of observations: things cause things. The conscientious religious observer (as well as the conscientious non-religious observer) to the First Cause argument can usually make two salient observations. First, extrapolation of everyday experience (or even of strenuously-collected experience recordings) is just that--extrapolation, which, if it is applied as though it were some kind of "law", would neither more nor less rule out an "uncaused" Big Bang singularity (or pulsing of singularities) than it would rule out an "uncaused" Creator. Second, which is of rather more "religious" quality than the first observation, is the inescapable fact that the "First Cause" proponent has thrown all into the basket of "everything has a cause," when (particularly in the Abrahamic conceit) what is being argued for finally is the existence of a miracle-making (and therefore "uncaused"-phenomenon-making) deity.
"Aware, Away, Awry," in this instance, delves simply further into this latter inconsistency. "Awareness," insofar as it is experienced, is at bottom uncaused, for the simple fact that "awareness" is a facet (realized only when something is bounced off of it) of the uncaused consciousness. Of course, in this analysis "uncaused" is a proposition of philosophical conjecture, used by this perplexed writer to describe the ineffable quality of consciousness (appraisable only by the bearer and translatable only by imperfect communication) which might in substantially equal parts be conjectured as wholly natural in origin or wholly supernatural in origin. In this analysis, not only is it held to be silly that "First Cause" might be used as an argument for a God who vigorously defies the naturalist's contention that "everything has a cause," it is held to be even more silly that conjecture about the "First Cause" of everything ought to be the province of loci of consciousness that know nothing about their own origins and know as little about the origins of their fellows.
I am concerned about the First Cause Argument (as I am concerned about many other things) on the basis of the violence it does to the listener, especially the novice and the young. People make contentions about things like the First Cause because those people (to whom I do not want to attribute raw or reprehensible fault) are comfortable with making (either overt or implicit) assertions about what it is to have a thought life. The merest moment of reflection (which is no small feat when beset by societal disincentives) will inform the human being that he or she arose--as Jesus describes--from a mist of inception, and that he or she is comprised--as Jesus describes--of warring or at least jostling components. The undivided, foundationally-secure self directing undivided attention to some philosophical contention is a monster of the philosopher's invention.
Similarly, the philosopher of religion is all too apt to get up a counterfeit of real human thought--as I have said, a counterfeit, anti-Jesus intellectual monster of the philosopher's conceit, a monster that thinks it knows itself at bottom and that thinks it knows or feels or experiences or does anything as a perfectly singular locus of consciousness. Invariably, the "God" that this philosopher conjures up is a monster--equally so if this version of God is one of incomparable benevolence or incomparable wrath (just to show one breadth of comparison.) Whether the "God" that the philosopher champions to his audience is an attractive one or a forbidding one is of little consequence, since what is really going on is a process of the pontificator attracting the audience to a nifty, ultimately unenduring version of their thought-lives, and forbidding the audience to level with themselves about how their thought-lives really present themselves.
A perfect example, as I understand it, is to be found in the lamentable pattern of adults hounding misbehaving children to explain "why" they did something they ought not to have done--when quite often those children simply do not know why they did this or that. Terrified at being in trouble, and not wanting to seem further disobedient by challenging the adult who maintains that surely the act was done for some describable reason, the child will rather make something up--perhaps even some alarming fake motivation. This torment is bad enough, but the child left to his or her own thought life after the fact is likely to convince himself or herself that the invented, simple motivation wrung by them from the adult is the single way that the child "really" is.
And so the adult human being, wishing--as so often we do--to have an internal and external presentation as a single, coherent consciousness-possessor, is liable neither to address the fundamental experiential issue of being "uncaused," nor to address the perpetual pressures to seem single and coherent throughout life--to the person's detriment. One is reminded of Jesus' admonition (that the denominations have never been able really to address) that a person apparently cleansed of demons--as though that pristine state could ever be attained other than in self-delusion--is liable to end up with more and worse demons than before.
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