Thursday, October 19, 2006
BEYOND THE MIND - CONSCIOUSNESS
abhayji
In case you are accessing this blog for the first time you are advised to go to the first blog at the bottom of the page. Do not try to read through the entire blog in one go. Instead read one item at a time. Let some time elapse before you read the next item.
‘Earth , water, fire, air, space, mana, buddhi and ahamkaar,
altogether these eight constitute My differentiated material energies (Jad).
Beside these there is another, superior energy of mine, consciousness (Chetana),
with which I bear this entire world.” [Gita VII – 4 & 5]
We come to the most important aspect of our existence – consciousness, the Chetana.
In the above verse the Lord describes two aspects of His being, Jad and Chetan. All matter including mind is grouped under the category Jad and His second aspect, the chetana, with which He bears the matter.
We are not the body; it shall be cremated when prana leaves it. We are not the forever changing antahkarana, the manas – buddhi – ahamkaara, that we discussed so far through these blogs.
We are the consciousness.
So What Is Consciousness?
This is an important milestone, a threshold that demands some imagination. Electric energy running through the wires cannot be comprehended by a five year old. If you try to indicate it by switching on the light, the little girl is most likely to mistake the electricity to be the light of the bulb. The light of the bulb is because of electricity, but in itself it is not the electricity.
So how do we know this most subtle thing called the consciousness because of which everything is. We can move from the known to the unknown is a Vedantic principle. So we start our enquiry from the current absolute i.e. you. You are absolute because you never have a doubt about your own existence. At the manifest level consciousness is the Principle of Experiencing. A person in a coma cannot experience things the way you can, even though he may be clinically alive. It is because of consciousness that experiencing becomes a possibility. The capability, to experience a sensation, lies at the bottom of the consciousness spectrum.
The second aspect about consciousness is as a Principle of Creation. The ruling diety of consciousness is Shiva, hence Shakaracharya said , ‘Chido Hum, Shivo Hum’, Shiva and chid are same without any differentiation.
Everything is created by consciousness. All creation is nothing but your consciousness. If you wish to validate this statement through a most elementary experiment, close your eyes and you find that the world as you know - the room , the house, the trees, the sky, everything disappears. But they disappear only for you. Similary, when Shiva, the supreme deity of consciousness, opens His eyes the cosmos is created and when He closes His eyes the entire cosmos dissloves back into His consciousness. If you can raise your consciousness to the level of Shiva’s maybe the world would dissolve at the closing of your eyes!
Why Do We Miss Out The Consciousness?
Take a plane piece of paper and put a dot in its centre. Hold this paper to another person and ask him what he sees. You are bound to get the reply, ‘A dot’. No one will say that he sees ‘A paper with a dot on it’. No reference is ever made to the background. Likewise, while being outdoors when you look up on a clear night all you will see are the stars; and you miss out on the sky all together!
Our entire body is pervaded by consciousness, and it is because of its presence everywhere we miss out on it altogeter. While we are with things we become occupied by them and thus miss out on consciousness. Please recall the example of light of the bulb and electricity quoted above; so long the light is glowing you will not bother about electricity.
It can be safely concluded that so long as we occupy ourselves with material objects consciousness will continue to elude us.
The third aspect that contributes towards the confusion on this subject is that consciousness is a vast spectrum across space and time and even beyond the space and time. The incomprehensibility of consciousness to the Western mind would be evident from what a Nobel laureate had to say while speaking on ‘How to Win a Nobel Prize’. Tim Hunt of Cancer Research UK, who along with Paul Nurse won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2001 said, “……….. setting luck aside, there are ways of stacking the odds of landing the Nobel in your favour. One way is to take a chance on finding something no one is even close to discovering’. The best bet according to Hunt was to find just the right kind of experiment. ‘It is no good trying to understand consciousness, you’ll just flail away getting nowhere, and it’s no good wanting to know how your left foot goes in front of your right because anybody can do that. But somewhere in between is that land where you might make a really big difference and discover something really important. That’s where you want to focus your effort”.
The difficulty in comprehending consciousness is compounded because, due to lack of real understanding of the complex reality, a single term, ‘consciousness’, is being used in English language. The Eastern mind has always known consciousness across the entire spectrum. In Sanskrit it is referred to differently, as Rtambhara Pragya, Pragya, Chetana, Chaitanya etc, depending upon the spectrum-band of consciousness being referred to.
In case you are accessing this blog for the first time you are advised to go to the first blog at the bottom of the page. Do not try to read through the entire blog in one go. Instead read one item at a time. Let some time elapse before you read the next item.
‘Earth , water, fire, air, space, mana, buddhi and ahamkaar,
altogether these eight constitute My differentiated material energies (Jad).
Beside these there is another, superior energy of mine, consciousness (Chetana),
with which I bear this entire world.” [Gita VII – 4 & 5]
We come to the most important aspect of our existence – consciousness, the Chetana.
In the above verse the Lord describes two aspects of His being, Jad and Chetan. All matter including mind is grouped under the category Jad and His second aspect, the chetana, with which He bears the matter.
We are not the body; it shall be cremated when prana leaves it. We are not the forever changing antahkarana, the manas – buddhi – ahamkaara, that we discussed so far through these blogs.
We are the consciousness.
So What Is Consciousness?
This is an important milestone, a threshold that demands some imagination. Electric energy running through the wires cannot be comprehended by a five year old. If you try to indicate it by switching on the light, the little girl is most likely to mistake the electricity to be the light of the bulb. The light of the bulb is because of electricity, but in itself it is not the electricity.
So how do we know this most subtle thing called the consciousness because of which everything is. We can move from the known to the unknown is a Vedantic principle. So we start our enquiry from the current absolute i.e. you. You are absolute because you never have a doubt about your own existence. At the manifest level consciousness is the Principle of Experiencing. A person in a coma cannot experience things the way you can, even though he may be clinically alive. It is because of consciousness that experiencing becomes a possibility. The capability, to experience a sensation, lies at the bottom of the consciousness spectrum.
The second aspect about consciousness is as a Principle of Creation. The ruling diety of consciousness is Shiva, hence Shakaracharya said , ‘Chido Hum, Shivo Hum’, Shiva and chid are same without any differentiation.
Everything is created by consciousness. All creation is nothing but your consciousness. If you wish to validate this statement through a most elementary experiment, close your eyes and you find that the world as you know - the room , the house, the trees, the sky, everything disappears. But they disappear only for you. Similary, when Shiva, the supreme deity of consciousness, opens His eyes the cosmos is created and when He closes His eyes the entire cosmos dissloves back into His consciousness. If you can raise your consciousness to the level of Shiva’s maybe the world would dissolve at the closing of your eyes!
Why Do We Miss Out The Consciousness?
Take a plane piece of paper and put a dot in its centre. Hold this paper to another person and ask him what he sees. You are bound to get the reply, ‘A dot’. No one will say that he sees ‘A paper with a dot on it’. No reference is ever made to the background. Likewise, while being outdoors when you look up on a clear night all you will see are the stars; and you miss out on the sky all together!
Our entire body is pervaded by consciousness, and it is because of its presence everywhere we miss out on it altogeter. While we are with things we become occupied by them and thus miss out on consciousness. Please recall the example of light of the bulb and electricity quoted above; so long the light is glowing you will not bother about electricity.
It can be safely concluded that so long as we occupy ourselves with material objects consciousness will continue to elude us.
The third aspect that contributes towards the confusion on this subject is that consciousness is a vast spectrum across space and time and even beyond the space and time. The incomprehensibility of consciousness to the Western mind would be evident from what a Nobel laureate had to say while speaking on ‘How to Win a Nobel Prize’. Tim Hunt of Cancer Research UK, who along with Paul Nurse won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2001 said, “……….. setting luck aside, there are ways of stacking the odds of landing the Nobel in your favour. One way is to take a chance on finding something no one is even close to discovering’. The best bet according to Hunt was to find just the right kind of experiment. ‘It is no good trying to understand consciousness, you’ll just flail away getting nowhere, and it’s no good wanting to know how your left foot goes in front of your right because anybody can do that. But somewhere in between is that land where you might make a really big difference and discover something really important. That’s where you want to focus your effort”.
The difficulty in comprehending consciousness is compounded because, due to lack of real understanding of the complex reality, a single term, ‘consciousness’, is being used in English language. The Eastern mind has always known consciousness across the entire spectrum. In Sanskrit it is referred to differently, as Rtambhara Pragya, Pragya, Chetana, Chaitanya etc, depending upon the spectrum-band of consciousness being referred to.
- Consciousness and Time
Our consciousness with respect to time, past, present and future, is called differently. The terms used for consciousness with respect to time are consciousness, subconsciousness and unconsciousness.
The experience in the present is called awareness or being conscious of a thing or an event. Our current awareness at the next instant becomes our subconsciousness, a storehouse of our memories. In other words, the experience that has passed through our consciousness constitutes our subconsciousness. The third aspect, that which exists but has not been experienced by us yet lies in the realm of our unconsciousness.
The unconscious spectrum is the largest. We are not aware of so many things that are happening right here inside our bodies let aside in the universe, but they are happening all the same with perfect precision. Be it the heart beating rhythmically or the planets going around the Sun in their respective orbits. The unconscious dimension is obviously full of higher intelligence that makes things happen as per a grand design. Our subconscious is the next, a rather narrow spectrum containg our experiences of this lifetime only. Our consciousness is just a point, whatever we experience at this instant, Now, is our consciousness.
Consciousness and Space
There are three states of consciousness in space we have all experienced. These are the awake, dream and sleep states. In the awake state the entire machinary of our body and mind is pervaded by consciousness. While being awake we are so occupied with the external environment that there is never a free moment to experience the background that consciouness is. In the dream state the sense- consciousness, i.e. the consciousness that exists between the mind and senses, is withdrawn, but the mind remains occupied with the subconscious and the unconscious aspects of consciousness – time spectrum. In sleep state the consciousness is totally withdrawn from the mind also and consciousness rests in itself.
This brings us to a rather interesting next dimension of consciousness. You will recall that when we wake up after a good nights’ rest we often proclaim, “I had a wonderful sleep’. Who is it that knows that you slept well even when you were nearly comatose? The consciousness which knows this truth, that which was present even when the mind-consciousness had been withdrawn, is called the pragya. This is the non-reacting consciousness, an aspect capable of pure experiencing. This consciousness-state, pragya, can be experienced even in our waking state if we can learn the simple art of restraining our impulsive reactions that emanate from the auto-mind; yogis practice becoming pragya through meditation. Meditation is thus also loosely called wakeful-sleep. It is the state of consciousness being aware of itself.
Beyond the pragya lie other dimensions like medha, intuition etc. At the top of the consciousness spectrum is the Rtambhara pragya. It is the state when an individual starts living as consciousness. Beyond this state is when consciousness loses all differentiation and becomes one with the divine consciousness.
Consciousness Summarised - Sense-consciousness, whereby the senses become capable of experiencing the objects.
- Mind-consciousness, whereby experience through the senses becomes a possibilty .
- Consciousness which pervades the entire antahkarana at all times. This is the realm of self-consciousness, a consciousness that reacts based on a notion how the world perceives us. It is a self-consciousness that shapes our personality; it makes us do things so that they are acceptable to the world.
- Pragya, the consciousness that knows that you slept well. It is the ever-present consciousness that exists in space but beyond time.
ü Pragya being conscious of its own state, is chid. This is a state beyond space-time; existing as unmanifest, ever present irrespective of the environment and the individual; this is a state when a person can proclaim Chido Hum, Shivo Hum. - That which experiences chid has to be yet higher consciousness. This dimension is represented by the reigning diety of consciousness, Shiva. This dimension can be compared to all consciousness collapsing to a single point, something like the Ganges recoiling in its entirety from the mouth of the delta back to Gangotri.
- The highest state is Krishna-consciousness, Rtambhara Pragya, when consciousness loses its own identity. It is the moment of the drop merging with the ocean and becoming one with it, forever resting in the paramdham.
Prajananam Brahma - Rig Veda
[Pure consciousness is Brahma]
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# posted by Abhay Gupta @ 10:07 AM 
