Impersonal consciousness

[Guest guest]

Namaste,

 

A member of our e-group sent me an off-line message raising the

question of how consciousness can be impersonal. In case there are

others interested in this question, what reply I could manage is

reproduced below.

 

The problem here is that we habitually think of knowing as a

personal activity. We habitually identify our knowing with a variety

of personal actions: which are done by our partial bodies, through

their perceiving senses and their conceiving minds.

 

For example, suppose some friends are having a refreshing drink

together. They see the drink poured out into glasses, they hear it

being stirred, smell the aroma that it gives off, feel the glasses

in which it is served, and they taste the drink as they sip it down.

 

In these varying perceptions, what exactly is it that we call

'knowing'? At first, from force of long-ingrained habit, we may take

our knowing to be the various personal acts of seeing sights,

hearing sounds, smelling odours, tasting flavours and feeling

sensations of touch. But a little reflection shows that this habit

is mistaken.

 

An act of seeing does not know. It only produces a seeming sight,

which appears in mind. And this appearance is personal. One same

glass of drink is differently seen, through different appearances,

by different persons. Our sense-perceptions are thus actions that

produce a variety of differing appearances, in a variety of

personally differing minds.

 

This sensual production of appearance is not knowing in itself. It

produces in our minds a variety of sensual appearances; but these

appearances have to be interpreted, in order to understand just what

it is that they each show. But how is this interpretation made, as

our various senses bring their differing perceptions into mind?

 

We are thus led to examine our experiences of mind. In every

person's mind, each moment brings a passing state. Each

sense-perception appears in such a mental state, which replaces

previous states that have gone by and are no longer present. As time

proceeds in mind, there is a succession of passing states, each one

of them a perceived or a thought or a felt appearance.

 

It's through this succession that the mind interprets perceptions

and thus conceives a world. But how is this succession known, as

changing appearances succeed each other in our minds?

 

Again we are driven, by ingrained habit, to take it for granted that

the knowing in our minds is made up of various personal acts. We

take it here that as we conceive of perceptions, thoughts and

feelings in our minds, these various acts are knowing in themselves.

 

But again, a little reflection shows that this habitual assumption

is mistaken. Our acts of conception are not knowing in themselves.

They only produce a successive stream of changing appearances, which

come and go in mind.

 

At any moment in the mind, how is it known that previous appearances

have passed, so as to have become replaced by the appearance present

now? In order to contrast or to compare the past and the present, a

knowing must have stayed present through the change of time. That

knowing must be shared in common by past and present states.

 

That knowing is called 'consciousness'. It is the knowing principle

which is shared in common by the changing states that come and go in

mind. Thus shared in common, no change can ever be experienced in

that consciousness, by anyone. If anyone experienced such a change

in it, it would not be common to the past and present and it could

not be consciousness itself.

 

Because no change can be experienced in it, it cannot be

differentiated in different personalities. As actually experienced,

by anyone, it's that which underlies all changes and all differences

in any personality. So there's no telling it apart, from one person

to another. It is completely impersonal, the common basis on which

all different people can understand each other and communicate.

 

But this description of a common consciousness should not be

followed as a mere assertion. Instead, it needs to be investigated

as a continued questioning: about what knowing truly is, beneath our

confused assumptions about it.

 

In short, true knowing can be investigated by asking what persists

through the change of mental states, from one moment to another in

the mind. This change is so drastic that no differentiation of form

or name or quality survives. Nor does any change or variation of

personality and world. All that continues is undifferentiated and

unchanging consciousness, which is utterly impartial and impersonal.

 

That consciousness is found unmixed in deep sleep, and in the

timeless gap between two moments. These are thus further ways of

questioning towards it. And they too must raise perplexities, so

long as our mistaken assumptions are not cleared.

 

Ananda