One question that has always fascinated me is what exactly is “consciousness” and where does it fit into reality? I know that consciousness is the underlying ‘awareness’ that we all have within our minds and from which everything we experience arises. Smells, flavors, colors, emotions, thoughts.
Our attention, which arises from our awareness, determines everything we do: the direction of our lives and what we focus on. Have you ever wondered how much of your reality is experienced internally (subjectively) and how much is sensory perception of the external? It must be at least half and half, right? And yet we know next to nothing about what the consciousness is that does all this.
Are humans the only ones with consciousness? Our pets certainly seem to have a level of consciousness as well. Perhaps also the plants, the trees and the natural world, not conscious as we are, but conscious in a less developed sense. Something that allows for change and growth. Has consciousness evolved along the lines of Darwinian theory? And does this mean that it will continue to evolve beyond where humans are right now? It is the only thing we have that is with us permanently from birth to death throughout our lives. That sense of awareness that I am, a “me.” A “subject” that observes all the other “objects” in the world: people, places, things, etc. That “I” is the center of our own reality.
However, the funny thing about it is that most of the meditators, mystics or great philosophers like Aristotle, Plato or Plotinus, and also modern teachers like Eckart Tolle or Sadgaru, tell us that the time spent looking inside, directly at our own awareness, or doing any form of self-inquiry (“who am I”?) will eventually lead to that sense of “I” disappearing altogether. All that is left then is consciousness or pure awareness that can be shown to be “there” but has no physical qualities that we can describe.
Paradoxically, this process of disappearing oneself has the ability to produce happiness, peace and well-being. The health benefits of meditation are well documented. How strange is it that losing one’s sense of self can create such a feeling? And meanwhile, this experience is completely internal, completely subjective, invisible and unknown to anyone else. We know from history and ancient and modern writings that there is a kind of inner journey that you can take when you explore your own mind and consciousness. A series of steps that begin with the feelings of happiness that most of us can easily achieve in mediation. With more practice, this further deepens the sensations and feelings of being one with nature (“I was looking at the mountain and suddenly I ‘became’ the mountain”). The final stage of this process is a complete abandonment of all sense of subject and object (me and everything else) altogether. The “I” or the witness within your mind completely disappears, and yet awareness and knowledge still remain. I am no longer an ‘I’ or a ‘subject’ experiencing other ‘objects’. I am just pure consciousness. This seems to come with the unwavering knowledge for those who experience it, that everything and everyone is really just one thing! Sounds pretty ridiculous doesn’t it? And yet, this inner experience is well documented by many people throughout human history and across many cultures around the world.
What is all this? Eckart Tolle describes his own experience of this as a young man who was deeply unhappy and who, out of the blue, had what he called an “awakening” experience that involved his self-identity fading away to reveal what he describes as a internal non-dual reality. So we know that extreme suffering can trigger this state of human consciousness. We also know that deep meditators do.
It is also clear that this phenomenological (internal, personal, subjective) experience of expanded consciousness is not just limited to religion or spirituality as we understand those words. Dr. Martin Ball has done extensive study on the use of psychedelics, in particular 5 Meo DMT, which appears to switch off parts of the brain that create the sense of self, taking a person from normal consciousness to an experience of non-consciousness. dual. like the great mystics. As described by Buddha and Jesus.
Interestingly, we know that when the people asked Jesus about the time when God would come, he told them, “Look! (Look), the kingdom of heaven is within you.” When you remove the accumulated hardened religious dogma that has been built up over time and take a look at the founders of almost every religion in the world, most of them seem to have had one or more altered states of consciousness that started rolling in. All of this happened a long time ago, before the birth of modern science was available as a tool for understanding. Simply ignoring these experiences as modern deprives us of a piece of the puzzle of reality.
Dr. Ball also reports that when subjects struggle with the experience of the journey, they are usually still able to hold on to their own sense of self and normal consciousness, suggesting that there is an element of personal desire, will, or surrender involved in these experiences. subjective experiences. However, the point I want to make here is that it seems that this state of consciousness is latent in all human beings, an undiscovered aspect of our consciousness. A glimpse into our evolutionary future. Religion has attempted to interpret these experiences. Perhaps they are part of a reality yet to be discovered. Something we haven’t fully explored yet because access involves turning inward, emptying the mind of all surface activity and chatter. Something that is difficult for us to do. Furthermore, our formidable gaze has been focused primarily for the past 300 years on the outside world.
The current state of science is purely external examination of the world (with no subjectivity involved) and this has worked very successfully to date by considering only observable physical phenomena. Science cannot easily study consciousness because it is an internal subjective matter. Our current scientific tools are not designed to study subjective consciousness. This is why some scientists tell us that consciousness can’t actually be ‘real’ because it doesn’t fit within that scientific model (i.e. it can’t be directly studied or observed, therefore it can’t actually exist except as an inexplicable by-product of physical matter). But look closely: this is just one more magical thought for something we can’t explain.
Neuroscience can now map certain neural synaptic correlates in the brain with certain states of consciousness, such as hunger. And this is very valuable information but again completely external data. We’re not getting close to that yet. This is quite different from “knowing” what consciousness is. We don’t know if these correlations are a cause or an effect. We don’t have a clear scientific model or explanation of what consciousness is. We cannot find any direct “cause” of consciousness anywhere in the physical brain itself. Scientists call this “the hard problem” of science. It is the new frontier.
Another interesting question is that in quantum physics, science has stumbled upon the fact that at the smallest level of reality, consciousness appears to play a role in the physical outcome (Schrödinger’s cat experiment). Our consciousness appears to be controlling an external outcome in this thought experiment! We also don’t really know what matter is made of at the smallest level. We know how the smallest particles behave (what they do), their spin, mass, volume, etc. observing them but not what they are. We also know that, like everything else in our world, they are mostly made up of empty space or “nothing”. Not unlike perhaps the non-dual ‘nothingness’ of the deepest inner meditative experience.
This is not a nothingness as we understand that word to mean, but rather a nothingness that has ‘potential’. A nothing that seems to be a container of everything, just as our own consciousness is the nothing from which all our personal experience arises. We know that without this ‘nothing’, there would be no conscious person even here to observe anything. That means that this ‘nothing’ is somehow fundamental to reality.
So sitting right in the heart of physics, it’s this unknown nothingness that we know nothing about! We just talk about fundamental particles or strings and leave it at that. Is it possible that consciousness and matter are two aspects of the same thing and that this ‘not-thing’ found inside atoms, molecules and quarks has something to do with it? I’m going to ask if this nothing could actually be outside of space-time as we understand it. Those people who have had a non-dual experience describe it as being outside the concept of space and time.
A deeper understanding of a human state of consciousness that collapses into non-duality can produce a clear link between the subjective and objective aspects of reality. In other words, expose a link between the human individual and everything else. That knowledge would completely change the way we see and understand reality, other people, other things. It would change the way we see the world and handle problems. Right now, we run around believing that we are all separate beings, separate units of matter that have somehow developed self-awareness. That’s where we are with the current world view.
But this is not what the great mystics of the world or many of the great thinkers and philosophers have said about the true nature of reality. It doesn’t hurt for us as modernists to stop for a minute and remember that all of science, all of knowledge, all of our achievements have ultimately sprung directly from the unobservable conscious subjective realm of the human mind.
I am not suggesting that we go back in time to magical thinking or to the pre-enlightenment days when we believed in a loving or wrathful God to explain reality. But rather an advance. A process of inclusion but also transcendence of previous ideas. Including the gains in knowledge and at the same time overcoming the need for everything to fall within current concepts (ie only objectively observed data is real, only rational thought can solve problems). We have cut off at least half of our own experienced reality with the current approach.
We are now beginning to direct our gaze into the uncharted inner subjective world of pure awareness. That will create tools to understand how the subjective realm of consciousness fits into reality. We ourselves are made of a subjective and an objective component (a physical body and a non-physical consciousness). Doesn’t it make sense that ultimate reality is like that too?
