Friday 4 March 2011

A Conversation About Consciousness

You seem certain that consciousness is not our true nature.

Firstly, there are uses of the word which are interchangeable with Oneness or Reality etc. In these cases I'm sure that we are talking about the same thing.

But I do think that it's best to have a little caution regarding fixed descriptions of the nature of reality. The concept of an absolute transcendent witness - a dissociated eternal knower, can ultimately be found to be incoherent. What is beyond doubt is that there is 'something' as opposed to nothing - I've referred to this as Source or Reality - I think of consciousness as we know it as an emergent condition of that.

Surely it's the case that consciousness is the limitless knower of all that appears? Consciousness must be primary - nothing can be without it.

Well 'to be is to be perceived' is the mantra of the idealist. I have touched on the fallacy of this elsewhere but to summarize; all that the idealistic approach confirms is the tautology that things cannot be perceived to exist without them being perceived. As for the claim of limitless knowing? In my experience I have never met anyone coming to this teaching who didn't ask: if I am consciousness, why is it the case that only this first-person perspective of the organism (this specific sensory matrix) is ever evident? Now this seems a fair enough question given the claims about the all knowing nature of consciousness.

Hmm, but isn't it the case that in the absence of a self or separate entity, consciousness is left as that which sees, hears, thinks etc?

(For the moment I will go along with your use of consciousness for 'all that is' - bearing in mind that Reality or Source is preferable - as we go on it hopefully will become clear as to why.)

Consciousness (Reality) could indeed be said to be the actor, thinker, perceiver etc... but only via its shifting manifestations. For example, in order for consciousness to make a cup of tea, it plainly must manifest the components of that scenario; hands, cup, hot water, tea etc.

Similarly for consciousness (Reality) to actually taste the tea it would need to manifest sentience, sense perceptions, taste buds etc. We can go on to apply this understanding to other actions, perceptions, feelings and thoughts etc. In each case a host of complex conditions are required for said action, perception, feeling or thought to be manifest.

Ultimately we might come to see that the same approach must be applied to the phenomena that is consciousness (as we know it) itself. Consciousness becomes conscious as we know it via the manifestation of a constellation of complex conditions.

By this point we can see why the word consciousness is perhaps not the best designation for Ultimate Reality (not that there is ever a good designation.) Reality/Source manifests as ALL conditions including action, thinking, feeling, perceiving and consciousness.

I have to add here that I'm really not sure how worthwhile it is to work through this sort of stuff. We can never determine such a thing as an absolute identity. All such absolute identities, however we conceive them, are by default manifestations of the same indeterminable mystery.