AI summary: How consciousness actually works

Summary of conversation with Claude and Mart Wijn

## The Starting Question
We began discussing whether subconscious experiences are subjective or objective. This led to recognizing that the subjective/objective distinction itself creates an unnecessary problem - it's a conceptual split imposed on experience that isn't actually there.

## The Core Insight
Consciousness is the foundation that exists before and beyond the subjective/objective split. It's not influenced by either category - it simply is. Pure awareness experiencing directly.

## How Consciousness Operates

**Primary state:** Consciousness functions as transcendental intuition - direct, immediate awareness that experiences everything fresh and new. This is the default, ongoing state. There is no constant thinking, no automatic narration, no memory system running in the background coloring experiences.

**Personal memory:** The subconscious memory and conceptual/language systems exist but remain deactivated by default. They only activate when you intentionally call on them - when you need to name something, explain something to someone, or use learned practical skills. Personal memory is a tool you pick up when needed, then put down.

**Most experiences aren't stored:** Because consciousness perceives directly without the memory-encoding system engaged, most experiences flow through without being filed away. Each moment is genuinely new, experienced from a kind of emptiness - uninfluenced by accumulated beliefs, frameworks, or past references.

## Truth, Reality, and Change

In every new experience, there is truth and reality - fully real and true in that moment. But both are always changing and flowing. Therefore there's no use storing them as fixed knowledge. By the time you'd retrieve a stored "truth," reality has already moved on. Only personal/practical information needs to be kept.

## The Human Illusion

Most humans live in illusion because they constantly try to freeze the flowing river - storing experiences as fixed truths, building belief systems, referring back to past experiences as if they still apply. They mistake stored concepts for reality, when reality is only ever here, now, fresh.

This includes spiritual concepts like karma, reincarnation, and other doctrines - these are human constructions, more conceptual overlays that obscure natural, direct experiencing. Even spiritual teachings often become part of the problem by giving more concepts to believe in rather than pointing back to natural awareness.

## The Natural Way

Start every experience from scratch, from emptiness. Experience the truth of each moment directly as it arises. Let it flow without trying to hold or define it. Keep only the practical tools needed to navigate and communicate. This capacity for fresh experiencing from emptiness is already here - just obscured by everything we've learned to layer on top of it.

## How This Arose

This state appeared spontaneously through insights. It's close to what traditions call spiritual enlightenment, but operates through transcendental intuition with no mind/no constant thoughts - consciousness functioning naturally without the overlay of constant thinking.