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The Mystery of
Consciousness
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What
Is The True Nature Of Consciousness?
This question is asked by only a few, and of those,
few come to know some answer beyond opinion, that is verifiable
in experience. This is not so surprising; consciousness cannot be
objectified, because it is ever the subject. It is real yet neither
concrete nor abstract. We cannot be without it, but if it were gone,
we would not miss it. We cannot see it because it is the seer. It
being the knower, can it be known? Consciousness does not act nor
can it be acted upon. It is unitary (non-relational) because there
is no other subject. Consciousness has no qualities but possesses
a qualityless quality that can only be known when the mind is still
and awareness becomes simply the observer surveying itself.
Consciousness is... so it has being; and this beingness
has its own nature. Fundamentally it is the principle of illumination
by which all else is known and has the power to know itself. Consciousness
is the fundamental groundstate of all being and knowing. Understanding
this as a concept is simple, knowing the knower is a bit more challenging.
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Is
Consciousness Universal Or Only Local?
Our common experience of being conscious is indeed
a local event. However we have all had intuitions about things at
a distance or outside of time that can best be explained if we think
of consciousness as a field of infinite dimensions, unlimited by
time or space. There is good evidence that we can know events and
even communicate with others not in our immediate time and place
- not often, to be sure; but it happens.
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Why
Hasn't Science Investigated Consciousness?
Consciousness has no mass or volume, therefore cannot
be sampled, measured, analyzed, dissected, qualitated or quantitated.
It is a field with no charge, polarity, density or effect. It is
a state that cannot be observed, created or destroyed. In short:
to science, consciousness is a mystery. One science writer called
it, "The ghost in the machine."
The field of psychology is more a study of the mind
than an inquiry into the nature of consciousness. These are two
very different things. Consciousness is the observer of the mind,
so does not fall under the purview of psychology.
Philosophy perhaps comes a little closer, but still,
philosophy is more concerned with epistemology (ways of knowing)
rather than discerning the knower.
Mysticism, however, is the science
of consciousness. There is no higher goal in mysticism than to embrace
the thought-free conscious self-awareness that reveals the nectar
of equipoise and ecstasy inherent in pure consciousness. This mystical
union hides behind such rubrics as God, Buddha Nature, Zen Mind,
Brahman, Tao, etc. This is a sweeping conjecture, but consciousness
is immutable and eternal, all knowing and ever-present.
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Where
Does Consciousness Come From? ...And Go To?
All things that are compounded eventually will be
dispersed. It appears that consciousness is not compounded from
other things, so it may not readily disperse. All that exists is
either created or was always in existence. We all know that physics
generally holds that the material universe formed from an unknowable
event 15 billion years ago (or so, depending on your value for the
Hubble Constant) that gave birth to leptons (electrons, etc.), hadrons
(quarks -> protons, neutrons), bosons (photons, etc.) as well
as various forces from which our common objects are made. The seminal
event is said to be unknowable because of what some call the Planck
Epoch; a short period of time after the big bang in which the state
of the soon-to-be universe did not follow the rules of quantum mechanics.
None of this addresses the issue of consciousness, as it seems not
to have been formed with the rest of the known universe. Nor is
there evidence that it spontaneously emerged since then.
In the absence of other information we might speculate
that consciousness has always existed and may continue to exist,
simply as groundstate, independent of sentient creatures to address
it locally. I know, this is hard to imagine.
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Does
Consciousness Survive The Death Of The Body?
There is much heat and little light about this question.
There are many consistent reports about consciousness continuing
after all clinical signs of life cease. Therefore all those who
have not had this experience are left with only their opinions as
to whether death of the body is final to consciousness. The author
has had the memorable experience of an excellent and expanded awareness
for some time beyond clinical death after an episode of anaphylactic
shock. My experience says that consciousness does continue.... For
how long, I couldn't say; as time and space seemed not relevant
to the state. There is a boundary, or event horizon, beyond which
the laws of quantum mechanics do not apply; sort of a Planckian
Epoch.
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Can
Inert Matter Be Conscious?
Common sense would tell you that this could not be.
However...
In the 1930s Einstein (and Podolsky and Rosen) refuted
Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle that said, in part, that quantum
events must occur locally within the space-time continuum. In the
1980s John Bell and Alain Aspect proved Einstein right. In what
is called the Proof of Bell's Theorem, two photons from the valence
electron of a calcium ion are emitted with opposite polarities.
Using a polarization filter, Alain Aspect flipped the polarity of
one of the photons and monitored the paired photon. At that same
instant the paired photon spontaneously flipped its polarity to
maintain coherency. How did it know to do that? And how did one
photon communicate with its partner in no elapsed time? Physicists
call this a "non-local" effect. Ten years later, four different
physicists (Capra, Zukav, Goswami and Herbert) published books on
this event and suggested that consciousness is the universal (non-local,
transcendent) field that is not bound to the space-time continuum.
They further suggest that consciousness is the groundstate from
which all energy and matter arise, so that ultimately all matter
and energy is not different than consciousness itself. This is how
the paired electrons know to maintain coherent polarity: they are
simply vectors of consciousness itself.
Now; can inert matter be conscious? How can it not
be conscious? That is its nature!
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When
We Sleep Are We Still Conscious?
The mind is asleep, consciousness, the witness, is
awake (and never sleeps). While you are sleeping perhaps a noise
awakens you. Who was listening to the noise?
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Is
Consciousness The Same As, Or Different From The Mind?
The mind is local to the brain but consciousness is
non-local. When the brain dies, the mind dies; but consciousness,
the universal field, remains. The mind is a complex instrument of
perception that includes ego, memory and rationality. In the intimate
relationship between consciousness and the mind, consciousness is
the perceiver, the mind is the instrument of perceiving. Importantly,
consciousness can know the mind but the mind cannot know consciousness.
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