Consciousness is fundamental?
In the Brahmajala Sutta, the Buddha outlines sixty or so errors, the kind which might constitute Wrong View. Right View is in contradistinction one of the Eight Noble Truths, without which, suffering remains on the menu, all served as different dishes.
These errors pertain generally to questions about life after death, nihilism versus eternalism, Self, and so on. Buddhism in the earliest texts presents Right View but does not dig deeply into doctrine at the formal level. There are any number of later thinkers who have explored the nature of mind analytically, starting with the Abhidhamma and continuing over the centuries. Writers like Vasubandhu dedicated his work to answering, among other things, questions about rebirth.
Parenthetically, I intend to post on why I don't read much extra-canonical Buddhist literature and will take this up while on the broader topic of via negativa.
The spirit of the Buddha's preaching was a call to the examination of suffering in one's life and the means to escape it. When it came to metaphysics and speculations on the mechanics of things like angels and rebirth, he was silent and did not encourage pursuing these as they were immaterial to the pressing question at hand – how is suffering ended? Naturally, his later putative followers sometimes became very absorbed in these very distractions. Monks will tread where the Buddha did not go.
The dhamma is not primarily about having a fulfilling life, or leading a better life with the best version of yourself, or spreading love, good cheer and so on. Some degree of these things may attend a life of dhamma, but these are not its concerns. Leaving behind suffering, disappointment, boredom, etc. is the concern, the only real object of a wise man. As the veils are lifted from the heart, the wholesome things manifest.
All other is just fluff for the true student of dhamma. The rest of us take morsels of dhamma where we can and yes, it does do the good things mentioned. Don't confuse the side-effects however with the purpose of the path.
It's the nature of great schools that more intellectual followers will want to unpack the founder's teachings and systematize them. Do these efforts actually lead to enlightenment/salvation/liberation for earnest disciples? I doubt it. There is the story of St. Thomas Aquinas having a vision towards the last days of his life in which he saw something so great, it led him to dismiss his own life's work as naught but straw. I'm not aware of anyone reading the Abhidhamma and finding enlightenment from it. Does it contribute as a factor thereof? I do not know. It's really dry material to slog through and I doubt Ajahns Chah or Sao pored over it.
The Brahmajala Sutta is, to me, a cheat sheet for practitioners who still need a few guide posts but are not inclined by disposition or vocation to spend years plumbing the depths of metaphysics. The sutta doesn't dig into the nitty gritty, being meant to generally outline – and I mean generally – the areas where people can fall into error and thus, end up prolonging suffering. If you believe that this life is all that there is and there is no karma, some future version of yourself will be left to wander through hills and valleys that could have been avoided by a pointer from a fully self-realized Buddha.
Buddhism in its earliest expression goes like this: You are a mouse trapped in a maze. You don't know you are in maze except on a really deep level. The mouse cum metaphysician can get lost trying to reverse engineer the maze, becoming more curious about the clever design and its creator. What is the purpose of this maze? Who created it and why? For the Buddha, the anxiety of being trapped in a maze with other mice, of being consumed in the view that the maze is ultimate reality, leads to being forever trapped. Parts of the maze have just enough tasty morsels to make it seem as though the maze is not all bad and that, if unraveled, will in fact lead to bliss. This part of the maze is heaven and if we can just get to it, everything is done.
There is this view especially in monotheism that the cosmos is a cloakroom for eternity and that we are given glimpses into something wonderful just beyond the veil of this world. "We see through a glass darkly," as one fervent Yahwist put it...
Consciousness is all the rage now, at least according to the YouTube algorithm which populates my feed. The consciousness is fundamental (CiF) movement has been picked up by thinkers like Rupert Sheldrake, who writes interesting books and posts thoughtful vlogs on topics related to his work in resonance fields. Sheldrake believes empirical research in parapsychology is possible with scientifically rigorous experimentation and points to the numerous reports of dying pets who say goodbye to their families, or pets who know when their parents are coming home.
I've had the experience of knowing someone was looking at me over a distance, turning to meet their gaze in a crowded space. These types of experiences are very common, so much so that we think nothing of them when they invalidate pure materialism. At least, I've nothing to explain the mechanics and science has no interest in it. The range of scientific interests are oddly connected to money and the getting thereof.
Other thinkers like Bernardo Kastrup take a different approach. His criticism of Western materialism, Why Materialism is Baloney, is a great way to have your views of reality shaken up. He's many interviews on YouTube and is a regular staple in the consciousness related discussions, although he doesn't pop up in debates with materialists. He doesn't meditate but many of his reflections sound as though they were influenced by dhamma. He has a positive theoretical system, Analytical Idealism, that I want to study. I still find it much easier to digest his thoughts through books. His interviews are okay and probably a better way to get to know him for most people.
But let's step back for a moment: What is consciousness? In Buddhism, consciousness is a khanda. It's an aggregate, a heap, a compounded thing in an infinite cosmos of compounded things. In your head is a vast sea of mental objects which form streams of mostly garbage and noise. The vast majority of us are rather attached to these objects, be they memories of good or bad times, emotional tones related to music or people in our lives. Their nature is to be very repetitive and there is generally little that is novel or worthy of frequent recall, but we are deeply attached to them because they feel personal. Your childhood memories and present day attachments construct a personality, a Self view that seems solid and stable. We constantly narrate ourselves into existence, with stories about events and people which are largely inaccurate. That sea of garbage seems to have a few nuggets we especially like and the rest, well, we generally forget them or use them as words in narrating a story about ourselves.
Some people find this monotony in their inner life to be a call to hard work, service to people or building a business. I suspect many of the most dedicated artists, scientists and so on find a freedom in relinquishing the monotony of an all too familiar mental landscape for something that requires concentration and engagement, where one is guided step-by-step through a series of objects towards a goal, or for the pleasure of discovery. In meditation, we find concentration – absorption via breath usually – is a standard go-to and one encouraged by the Buddha in the early Pali texts. I believe the psychological drive to practice concentration is akin to the drive shown by people who are successful in any field of human activity. Introverts and extroverts alike are capable of deep levels of absorption in activity which can drown out the kilesas, or at least put them at arms length.
Consciousness always has an object. This brute fact leads CiFers sometimes to talk about a pure consciousness, which seems to refer to a feeling of openness to possibility, but with no object being held. Awareness is a synonym that is used to better signify that perspective of possibility, where there is no commitment to themes or design. There is an expansive wide open inner space, a receptivity to the possible which remains however distinct, separate and content to just be. This goes by as the witness or observer and can be experienced in meditation on a daily basis for people who practice with energy and right intent. The practice of concentration in meditation brings about a shift in perspective in which daily activities are performed as usual but are within the light of an observer who sees things not as a doer, but rather as a detached neutral party. This seems at least to be a teaching from the Thai Forest tradition's Ajahn Chah.
This kind of pure consciousness is to me more understandable, but I am reading my own thing into its meaning. CiF rests on ambiguity because conscious experience is, from its perspective, a strange thing. Qualia is brought forth as evidence of just how hard consciousness is. We don't know how physical reality gives us the sensation of red in a flower, or the taste of a good coffee. Materialists like John Searle liked to say that these only seemed mysterious but would be quickly sorted out by science in time. This I heard him say many years ago in an interview and did not find it convincing and since then, his prediction has so far not panned out. Instead, we have a proliferation of anecdotes – I would guess thousands – from people who have had Near Death Experiences (NDEs). Concomitantly, people like Sheldrake, Kastrup, Donald Hoffman and others have highlighted the great limitations of science to produce a comprehensive theory of reality which adequately locates consciousness. The mysterious of consciousness remains for many people the last frontier in a world that, thanks to science, has lost its mysterious, enchanting quality.
While these views are interesting, I go back to this: Consciousness is a khanda, a heap, an aggregate. It's compounded and a by-product of processes, as reckoned by Dependent Origination, which places it as the third link under the Pali term viññāṇa. What are the first two? Recall that ignorance is followed by the formations, or the accretions of karmic/volitional habits from lifetimes. The fundament of our conscious activities rests on a bundle of actions made in the "past." I use scare quotes to signal that time is very odd, not something that should be taken too literally when thinking about our dispositions. The topic is too broad and too advanced for mere mortals like me to pretend to understand. I just don't find time to be real when looked at in different ways.
Consciousness is third followed by nama/rupa and then the six sense bases. Here, it gets tricky because mind seems to be doing double duty in the great chain. I looked to AI for clarity since this is not a topic I've thought about in some time and yes, AI will make you lazy. Or, just willing to go deeper into topics than what a search engine can provide.
Number 3, viññāṇa, refers to the continuum, the substrate of consciousness between different lives. In contrast, consciousness as one of the sixth sense bases refers to the moment-to-moment experience of our senses as they interact with our environment before giving rise to thoughts like, "This music sounds good." Clinging/craving as well as aversion are experienced concretely in discrete interactions with the world. This consciousness is linked of course to the substrate, viññāṇa, resting on it as a precondition for its own operation. When viññāṇa ceases, then there is no Buddha. The stream has reached the endless ocean and merged with it. But the ocean is not some eternal deity, etc. It's just Ultimate Reality. Just.
If we experience greed and act up on that greed, it leads to a certain kind of karmic formation, especially when done habitually. Rain water that follows the same path down a hill will eventually form a stream bed, carving out a formation through the same repetitive action. Karma is action where what is signified is the volition, the choice to want this or to hate that.
To sum up, consciousness as used in the early Buddhist texts is a conditioned thing however it is used. It's compounded whether we refer to the substrate (#3) between lifetimes or the personal consciousness of this lifetime, tied as it is to sense organs and their contact with environmental stimuli. The modern interest in mind/consciousness reaches a reification not found in early Buddhist texts. The Buddha didn't spend time talking about the mystery of consciousness, etc. since he saw consciousness, whether as the stream running between lives or as the heap of mental phenomena in this one, as Not Self. Consciousness is Not Self. It is not me, it is not mine, it is not myself. It is not some hidden gateway to paradise. It is not even worthy of being considered Self.
Is this true? The mind is constantly fabricating ideas, notions, feelings, sentiments. The training of the mind was linked in perhaps the earliest text, the Dhammapada, to the level of suffering to be found in life. The untrained mind is compared to a fish flopping around on dry land, buffeted inwardly by forces which leave it helpless. Sharpened perception is linked by the same text to the bounty of final freedom and liberation from the cosmos. Perceive the world as bubble, perceive the world as mirage – if you can see the world in this way, you render the Lord of Death powerless.
It's incomplete to say that consciousness is simply a heap like the body. It is, but it's also the tool which, when developed, leads to a happier life now and enlightenment in the future. People who meditate and practice mindfulness find there is a separation between ordinary consciousness and all that this entails. Yes, I'm positing a dualist notion here because words fail, but this is the witness/observer distinction.
The witness sees consciousness and all its innumerable folds of identity-making – I'm a man, my family is from Hungary, I am traditional in my outlook, etc. – as fabrications. Conventionally these are true, but ephemeral objectively as are all things, including the witness. If I hitch my horse to these objects such that I come to believe them about myself, they become real when truly, they aren't. They feed the delusion. If I sharpen my mind the way a fletcher shapes and sharpens an arrow, then I begin to see what I am not. I am not this, this is not me, this is not myself. The trained mind filters out the noise and discovers that it's all noise, even its own physical death or the death of a friend or parent.
Think of the jet airliner that is buffeted at high altitude by a fierce thunderstorm before suddenly breaking above the clouds into an azure sea of clear, steady, light.
In Buddhism however, the analogy fails because the ego will grasp onto the light and say, "Oh, I'm the light! I'm consciousness itself! I'm the Atman!" The real dark night of the spiritual life is accepting that we ourselves look for ways to substitute one "solid" concept like dark, rain-laden clouds with clear light. We rummage around in consciousness for words, concepts and handles to the true reality of our situation, which is forever influx. When no single object fished out from the pond of consciousness will do, we step back and just say, "It's the whole pond! That's the secret!" But this is not true. The pond is just a compounded thing holding other compounded things in an infinite space of innumerable things. The mechanics of the brain is not relevant to whether one becomes an enlightened being or not and no amount of conflating brain activity or the purpose of the brain – is it a radio receiver of Mind, the cause of Mind or a delusional secondary side-effect of blind, random biological forces? – will make enlightenment come any sooner.
The problem with the so-called higher states of consciousness is that they remain consciousness no matter how subtle or refined they may become. We are warned in the Brahmajala Sutta that certain sages have achieved the most refined states of awareness and seen their own past lives, from high estate to low, and concluded wrongly that they were the Atman, the Self – eternal. Pure awareness, intimacy with formlessness and the most rarefied states of consciousness lead spiritual adepts into Hinduism if these become a Real Thing. The Buddha did not preach an esoteric doctrine of proto-Hinduism, a via negativa backdoor to the same endpoint of later Indian spiritual traditions. In the modern world, within the consciousness is fundamental community, this view prevails and it lives and thrives in modern Buddhism.
I think the Pali texts are pretty clear that pure consciousness is an error, probably one of the most difficult to shake since it is seductive for seasoned meditators, intellectuals and spiritual seekers burnt out on materialism. Recall that some of the Buddha's acquaintances had achieved the highest level of formless jhana, convincing themselves that they had at last achieved liberation. They had not. This is something which should give pause to those who give consciousness a primacy in the spiritual life that it doesn't deserve. The brahmas of the brahma realm know a bliss that is beyond the experience of human or angel and it is a prison of silk knots and sweetest perfume. The scriptures tell us so.
In the East, there are various lineages from different systems and many place a great weight on the place of meditation for the devotee. Householders were not devotees, they had not gone beyond the chores and demands of daily life to pursue a spiritual course with an absolute goal.
