Chapter V
Consciousness
MICHIGAN
Chapter V
Consciousness
MICHIGAN
In 1980 a group of students and faculty at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo held a one-day retreat exploring views from various disciplines on the subject of consciousness. The organizers had a spiritual framework around which the retreat was planned, and Vivekananda Monastery at Ganges was invited to send a speaker. It was not a large gathering, but intimate and friendly and when it was finished I felt the session had gone as well as could be expected.
Vedanta considers its study of consciousness one of its most important contributions to human thought, and the question itself one of the most important we can raise. It is true that we do reach conclusions about it which differ from most others. I propose in this talk to make these as clear as possible. Although it may seem to you that we are begging the question, these conclusions, as will be explained later, are evidenced by direct experience.
Let us begin with what consciousness, in its essence, is not.
• It is not a "ghost," a chimera, as supposed by behaviorists and others.
• It is not a product or by-product of something else. This means that consciousness cannot be an epi-phenomenon, as many think it to be.
• It is not dependent on anything else; it is not a "relation."
• It does not belong to time. Therefore it is ineradicable, ineluctable.
• It does not belong to space. Therefore it is not finite.
• It is not substance, obviously, although we can speak of it that way in contrast to form, where all change takes place.
• It is not an object of knowledge or experience.
• It is not "life" (which is usually characterized as reactive, complex, purposive, unpredictable).
• It is not "mind" as that word is used by most Western thinkers and writers.
• It is not "the field of attention" of the psychoanalysts, which is only one aspect of consciousness. These points will be discussed below.
Then what in the world is it?
Nothing in the world, that is for sure. Vedanta makes the bold assertion that it cannot be a “what,” an object: Therefore even to ask “what is consciousness” is illogical. The cosmology of this system tells us that what we are perceiving in our present state of ignorance, through the mind and senses, is the supposed combination of spirit and matter. It is termed the chid/jada granthi, the knot tied between spirit or consciousness and the inert, or physical, matter. Now if you think well about this you I believe you too will reach the conclusion that such a knot could never be tied for they cannot in any way be put together.
Therefore, as Vedanta conceives it, our business or that of any spiritual aspirant, is to “untie” this alleged knot, to extricate, as it were, consciousness from its apparent accretions. We are to "rescue" our consciousness. (If this language seems self-contradictory—for we are speaking of it as an object—do not worry; the situation always seems paradoxical and contradictions crop up until the mind can begin to grasp its finer implications.)
Yoga tells us that we can stop all the changes which appear to be rippling the surface of consciousness.
A diagram by way of illustration
First, a word here about paradigms, formulas and diagrams. They can be useful pedagogic devices. We attempt, by symbol and objectification, to give approximations of the situation in ways such that our unenlightened mind can have some intuitive grasp of the truth which just now seems beyond it. It is true that an “entrapped“ consciousness can never solve its own problem; it has to see that it was never trapped; but this is not easy. The mistake made by “easy“ forms of spiritual advice, is in their failure to provide the stepping-stones we need to cross this river of ignorance and the impetus to make the leaps. This diagram is a stepping-stone. In this schema consciousness is shown as the Ultimate, the universal medium in which the entire universe is suspended, so to say. This may seem an unwarranted assumption, but we should be aware that we are making assumptions about ourselves all the time—“without the body I do not exist”, “my mind is separate from other minds” etc.
Let this sheet of paper represent pure consciousness.
The large circle is you—or me, any individual.
Thus do we circumscribe, as it were, that which is undivided and indivisible. Within this circle, representing the consciousness of our full twenty-four hours, we go through three principal phases, each quite different from the other: the waking state, the dream state and the state of dreamless sleep. Just as the space in each small circle is a portion of the space of the large circle, so is the consciousness attributed to the individual as a whole superimposed on the underlying universal Consciousness. (The Sanskrit word is turiya) This means that when I suppose that in dreamless sleep I am “unconscious,” this cannot really be true; there was a witness consciousness there, observing the absence of mentation. Otherwise how could I report on awakening, that I slept deeply, with no dreams, and am now refreshed? The Upanishads also argue that the reappearance, after deep sleep, of a dreaming and a waking world, along with the sense of one’s own ego, cannot have come from nothing.
Likewise, this “witness” consciousness underlies our dreaming, and our functioning in the waking state. We have chosen, over years—or lives—to ignore it, and come not to believe in its existence.
We can regain awareness of this witness-consciousness, Vedanta says, through meditation and other practices, and with persistence, recognize it as the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Brahman. The sages and seers have used the words “Being” and “Bliss” also, to indicate it.
How a jñani is to think
Above we spoke of meditation and “other practices.” Here are some examples of the sort of examination and discrimination employed by those who follow the path of jnana yoga, the knowledge or reason method for realizing this goal.
All sense data are to be scrutinized. The senses are reckoned as five, in East as well as West, and no doubt you know how in Western philosophy the discrimination is made between the primary qualities of an object and the secondary ones. Here, in Vedanta, we mentally eliminate not only these, but all, qualities from the object: on one level its form, on another, its name. What remains when all name and form has been subtracted is the “thing in itself”, so familiar to us through Emanuel Kant—except that Kant failed to realize that the thing-in-itself is the same as “me-in-mySelf,” a fact which can be discovered only by personal experience. By continually separating the subject from every perception in the objective field, we are not long in discovering that our own body, sense and motor organs, even our mind—belong to the field of object, not subject. When every aspect and function of the mental operation also has been separated out, Pure Consciousness alone remains as subject—or better, beyond all subject-object relationship—and I am That. In our diagram above this is what we have called the sheet of paper.
In this waking state where we try so hard to satisfy our needs and desires, somehow we come up short; the senses tire, the mind too, and we say the body and mind need rest in sleep.
What can we learn from the dream state?
In dream we do not know that we are dreaming; for Vedanta, this defines it; otherwise it moves into lucid dreaming, which is another story. Not only do we not know that we are dreaming, but all judgments about our dreams are made upon waking up, and from the waking state. Such is the biological-fatigue theory, the Freudian wish-fulfillment explanations and the Jungian system of symbolized message and so on. The Vedantic theory too is enunciated by persons in the waking state, but what it says is that we dream in order to escape the (ego-imposed) limitations of consciousness which we experience in the waking state due to identification with the body. The latter is simply not adequate to give us the play we need, to express the freedom we crave so much.
Who has not, in dreams, jumped from heights without injury, traveled miles under water, made enemies evaporate, accomplished unimagined and unbelievable feats—in short, everything we cannot do here, awake. Waking, we call dreams nonsense (or hidden messages) but we did not do so at the time of the dream. So far as our awareness was concerned, the world we roamed in was real at that time, or we neglected to enquire if it was real. This is important to remember when we come to our analytic conclusions. I have a friend who told me that he was examining his dream world, and a doubt crept into his mind: “Is this a dream or not? No, everything here is quite reasonable, logical, not incongruous: it has to be no dream.” Then he awoke, remembering what he had dreamt, and saw it had all been most unreasonable. This was his waking judgment. One moment of “lucidity” had come and the rest followed.
It will be clear to you, then, that in this Vedantic study of consciousness the philosophical and psychological significance of the dreaming and waking phases is of more import than the content of dreams.
And from dreamless sleep?
Let us turn to sleep without dreams, sushupti, the Sanskrit word for deep sleep. If, as we just said, our mind is baffled by trying to satisfy itself through the organs of the waking state, and attempts (and succeeds) through dreams in gaining greater scope for the ego and the sense of freedom, it is also true that eventually it tires of this also. Like a bird at the close of day, weary of beating its wings, settles down toward its nest, say the Upanishads, so does our mind let go of its dream world and the ego lapses into a condition where self-awareness seems to be absent. According to Vedanta, this is where we make a mistake. There is really no un-consciousness. If our diagram has been clear to you, this should be also: in that state Consciousness remains—the eternal under girder of all its “phases”. This turiya is the light that can never go out. Yes, the curtain has fallen in the theatre, no more drama today on the stage; but you the Witness are sitting there in the empty theatre, “seeing” the (temporary) absence of thoughts, knowledge, mind, ego. And so you think, “I was unconscious.” Yes, that which says “I,” thinks “I,” was not in play. But what the Upanishads say is that this residual basic consciousness, where mind, intellect and ego have disappeared, is the Atman, our true Self.
What glory is there in that, you say? It is darkness; no one is there! At present it is darkness to us, because ego and all our other personal faculties are in abeyance and will return and bring us once more to dream and to waking, and to the fundamental ignorance which shadows our life. The large circle still defines our individuality. Until that line is dissolved, through meditation and other spiritual exercises, we shall not be able to experience the Witness Consciousness as Light. Nevertheless, Vedanta assures us that just as a person may walk every day over a buried treasure of gold and not know it, so do we enter into the embrace of the Supernal Light and, through our ignorance, call it dreamless sleep.
Now a final point: turiya, the “fourth," the consciousness which transcends, underlies and permeates the three phases of our day and night, can be looked at from the limited standpoint of one or more of those states; we can also understand, a little, how it must look to itself: no small circles, no margins, no limitations, no shadows or superimpositions; to itself it is all-pervading, always without ignorance, the essence of freedom; it is in fact, not different from Brahman the Ultimate Reality.
Summary
We took up the controversial (some may call it the delicate) subject of Consciousness, and we have put out in clear terms exactly how it is regarded in the tradition of the Vedas: as ultimate, primeval, ineluctable, unchanging, infinite, undivided, full of light and bliss. Vedanta boldly declares it as non-different from the Godhead and inseparable from us through every moment of our existence.
We began by distinguishing what consciousness is not; then proceeded to analyze its unvarying presence in and under the superimpositions of body and mind and by this means to get us to arrive at an intellectual grasp of the matter, at least, if not a breakthrough into experiencing It as It truly is. Through devoted meditation and persistent discrimination we make that glimpse a firm and permanent experience.
Interesting as they are, such presentations to university students rarely brought any inquirers to the Center. Students move on and live in other places, and one can only hope that “something rubbed off.” The same subject is, however, covered in the discourses we give at the Center’s services. In this chapter such additional material has been integrated with the original talk.
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