Consciousness as the foundation of psychology
author: Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: December 1969

section 1
What is consciousness? An introduction

Consciousness is hard to define

The differences between mainstream psychology and the various Indian approaches to psychology center around consciousness and its role in the manifestation. So it will be helpful to have a look at what different people actually mean when they use the word consciousness. Consciousness is notoriously difficult to define, and dictionaries tend to become self-referential when they try. The New Oxford Dictionary of English (Pearsall, 1998), for example, defines consciousness in terms of awareness, awareness in terms of perception and perception again in terms of consciousness. Professional dictionaries hardly fare better: the Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy (Mautner, 2005) escapes the problem by simply omitting the term. This ostrich-like behaviour is, strangely enough, not an isolated phenomenon: to ignore consciousness has been the general policy of science for much of the 20^th century (Guzeldere, 1995). During the last 30 years or so, consciousness has again become a legitimate subject of scientific enquiry, but if one looks a little more closely, it becomes clear that most of this research has not been about consciousness itself, but about its physical correlates, which is what mainstream science knows how to research. It is only in recent years that we see consciousness more frequently described in terms of lived experience. Most of this work is, however, still in an early stage of development and, from an Indian viewpoint, surprisingly naive.

Why physicalist reductionism is not enough

The inability of science to deal in a meaningful way with consciousness is tragic since consciousness is central to our existence as human beings. Though some hard-core physicalists continue to trivialize consciousness as a more or less incidental side-effect of the complexity of our brains, it is good to realize that without consciousness, not only beauty, love, experience, and truth would lose their meaning, but even knowledge itself would not exist. Without consciousness we would neither know ourselves, nor the world. Nothing would make any sense, and it is not clear whether or in what manner anything could exist. There is an Upanishad which expresses it well:

"Matter or object is related to spirit or subject, and the subject or spirit is equally related to the object or matter. If there were no object, there would be no subject, and if there were no subject, there would be no object, for on either side alone nothing could be achieved."

Kaushitaki Upanishad, III, 8.

A common sense approach

While it is difficult (and perhaps impossible) to define consciousness in a fully satisfactory manner, most people still feel that they know what it is, even if only in a somewhat implicit manner. Our consciousness is what gives us our awareness of the world as well as of ourselves, and since it is so close to the very core of all we know and all we are, people tend to feel that whatever they happen to think about consciousness must be what it actually is. This is, however, only very partially true. One reason is that in the ordinary waking state, our consciousness is transparent to us. Just as we normally see the outside world but not the interior of our own eyes, we are aware of many things in great detail, but of our own consciousness we only know the simple fact that it exists. What is more, in our ordinary waking state we tend to identify with the activities of the brain, and so we confuse our consciousness with whatever our brain does, things like thinking, sensing and modelling our surrounding. As different people do these things in different ways, they end up having different ideas on what consciousness is, and when, in the beginning of last century, science realised it had no "objective" means to choose between these different ideas, it gave up on consciousness and all that happens "inside of it". As we'll see, the Indian tradition has figured out ways to study the subjective inner domain rigorously, ¹ but before we get to that, I'd like to start with a simple, common sense exploration of the issues involved.

So, what then is consciousness?

Though science did not get very far with it in the beginning of last century, it actually makes sense to start with looking at what consciousness might be in ourselves, as human beings. In us, consciousness is the subjective half of reality. It is the center from where we deal with ourselves and the world around us. In this sense, consciousness has been described as the light within which everything we are aware of takes place, or as the pool in which the Moon is reflected. Though these are catching images that appear at first sight to be right, they do not tell the whole story.

The reason is that consciousness is not only awareness. As we have already alluded to, consciousness is, at least in us, also the very core of our identity. In a very deep and essential sense, consciousness is simply what we are, and what we are has a passive and an active side to it. On the passive side, consciousness is, indeed awareness, and it is this which has been captured beautifully in the images of the light and the pool. But we are also active, creative creatures. We are not only into being, but we are also into doing and creating things. This dynamism is part of the ordinary "common sense" view of our own human existence, but in mainstream science there are many who think that this is an illusion. They hold that the physical world is a causally closed system and thus that consciousness has to be "epiphenomenal". In other words, they hold that it is only awareness and that it can have no influence on anything in the physical world. Amongst the later Indian traditions too, there are some which hold that consciousness is by definition only awareness. But in the more integral and comprehensive understanding of reality of the older texts, like the Rg Veda, we find the idea that consciousness is not only awareness but also power.As Sri Aurobindo says:

Consciousness is not only power of awareness of self and things, it is or has also a dynamic and creative energy. It can determine its own reactions or abstain from reactions; it can not only answer to forces, but create or put out from itself forces. Consciousness is Chit [awareness] but also Chit Shakti [conscious force].

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga – I, p. 15

Though many in the Indian tradition accept the dynamic, power aspect of consciousness only on the level of the divine consciousness that created the word, Sri Aurobindo holds that even on our small human scale, our consciousness is not only the passive witness, but also the sanctioner, and ultimately the initiator and master of all we do. In a somewhat more complex image, consciousness is then like the stage on which our lives are played out. In this more comprehensive image, the active side is represented by the actors and — behind the scenes — by the stage director and the author of the play.

But still, all this is not enough: we cannot even begin to understand consciousness as long as we hold it to be limited to the peculiar and rather limited variety we humans happen to have. As we will see shortly, to understand how consciousness works, we have to accept that it is an essential constituent of the very stuff of existence, and that it is not a simple yes/no phenomenon but rather a hierarchy ranging from the apparent lack of consciousness in matter below, to the seemingly superconscient Spirit above.

The role of consciousness in reality as a whole

As we already saw, to think of a completely unconscious universe is incoherent because without consciousness there would be nobody around to do that thinking. To think of a largely unconscious universe in which conscious beings like us are the exception, is logically conceivable (and at present it might well be the majority view in the field of Consciousness Studies), but it is still not very convincing. It is hard to imagine how a huge, unconscious, and thus inherently meaningless, dead machine suddenly, after billions of years, in an almost inconceivably tiny corner of itself, could produce not only consciousness, but embedded in it, truth, love, and beauty — qualities that in spite of our own puny size and life span, never fail to give us a sense of eternity, of infinity, of connectedness. One of the great strengths of modern science is that it presumes that its laws and constants are universal and unchanging throughout the entire immensity of space and time. It is hard to conceive why comparatively small and unimportant details like most of the known physical laws and constants would be universal, while the fundamentals of truth, love, and beauty would suddenly pop-up ("emerge") out of nowhere in an otherwise chance-driven universe due to nothing more than the complexity of our tiny, fragile, and exceedingly short-lived human brains.

Though perhaps not entirely impossible, the prevailing view which limits consciousness to human brains, or at most to those of a few other mammals and/or human-made machines looks suspiciously like the flat-earth theory in medieval astronomy. Just as the flat-earth view took the little patch of land on which we stand as the centre of the physical universe, so the mainstream, medical² view of consciousness presumes that consciousness is dependent on (and limited to) how it occurs in a functioning human brain. And just as the geocentric understanding of the solar system stood in the way of understanding the physical cosmos, so the anthropocentric view of consciousness stands in the way of our understanding of consciousness, and with that, of our selves, of who we are in our deepest essence, and in fact of our very existence.

It is worth noting that the anthropocentric idea that consciousness is a product of a working brain — and as such limited to humans and at most a few other animal species — is a relatively new development. Virtually all other civilizations, and even the vast majority of pre-modern Western philosophers, took it for granted that consciousness exists throughout the manifestation as well as beyond it. For our present discussion of consciousness, we'll focus on two broad streams that developed within the Indian civilisation: an exclusive one, which holds that consciousness is only an unchanging, passive awareness, and an integral one, which holds that consciousness is also active and as such changing or at least contributing to change.

In the next two sections we will look in some more detail at these three concepts of consciousness: the modern physicalist and the Indian exclusive and integral views.

Endnotes

 

References