The Mystery of Consciousness
Mystics & philosophers have asked themselves, “Who am I?” By careful observation of our consciousness, we realize that our sense of a separate self is an illusion. This shift in consciousness happens if we are mindful of the present moment.
The Light of the Consciousness
One way of thinking about consciousness is to liken it to the light inside a film projector. At the heart of the projector, there is a source of white light. The light shines through the film and takes on the colors and forms of the film, and then an image appears on the screen. And what we're seeing is just shaped light. But we get so engrossed in the movie, the stories, the feelings we are having — the sadness, the horror, the excitement — that we forget it's all just a form that light has taken on.
A similar process happens in the mind. All I ever actually experience are the images appearing in my consciousness. But it doesn't seem that way. When I see a tree, it looks as if I’m seeing the tree directly, but science tells me something completely different is happening. Light enters the eye where it's absorbed by the retina, and it triggers electrical impulses which travel down neural fibers to the brain. The brain then analyzes the data, and from that, creates its picture of the world. I then have the experience of seeing a tree. What I am seeing is not the tree itself, but the image of a tree that appears in my mind. And this is true of everything I experience. Every sound, color, sensation, taste, smell, memory, thought — they are all just images appearing in my mind. It is all forms the consciousness is taking on.
Consciousness Is At the Centre of All Things
But where does consciousness itself come from? This is the great mystery. It may be that one day we’ll understand the brain so well, that we know the exact physical processes that go on when we have the experience of seeing a tree. But even when we do, the question remains, why is there consciousness in the first place? Why doesn't all this brain activity go on in the dark? How is it that something as unconscious as the matter of the brain can ever give rise to something as immaterial as an experience?
We are locked into the view that consciousness itself is somehow created by the brain, and people have tried various ways to explain this. Something to do with the processing of the brain as a whole, something to do with quantum effects inside nerve cells. But try as they may, no one has succeeded in explaining how any purely material process could ever give rise to an experience in the mind. And what is our basic assumption today? It is that matter is not conscious, that matter is devoid of the capacity for experience.
An alternative assumption, and one that's being taken seriously by a growing number of people, is that the capacity for experience is present to some degree in everything. Awareness itself isn't something that is created by the brain. It doesn't suddenly appear, as if by magic, out of nowhere once a particular arrangement of the nervous system has evolved. The capacity for experience is there all along.
This changes our view of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. It puts consciousness right back at the center of things. In this view, consciousness is not limited to creatures with nervous systems. Even a simple bacterium has a faint glimmer of awareness. Nothing like the rich experience we know. Nothing like a thought or a feeling, perhaps just the faintest sense of warmth or light. If numbers could be put to it, maybe a billionth of human consciousness, but not nothing at all.
The Sense Of a Separate & Individual Self Is Just an Illusion
With self-awareness came a sense of a self, of an “I” that is aware. But what exactly is the self? This feeling of I that we all know so well? This is the second great mystery of consciousness. We use the word I so much, you'd think we knew what we meant by it. But as soon as you try to define this thing we call I, you run into problems. Who am I? How do I define myself? Peter Russell? That's just my name. A writer? That's an activity from my past. A man? I have a male body, but I can imagine myself in a female body. I might have different perceptions, feelings, and values, but the I that has them would be the same. It's that same sense of I that has been there all my life. What is this I that is always there?
To know what the self is, we need to carefully observe our consciousness. This is the path that many spiritual seekers have explored. They've looked deep within their mind, trying to find the essence of self, and they all come up with the same answer: there’s nothing there. Nothing we can call the self. This sense of a unique, separate, individual self, turns out to be an illusion. Albeit, a very convincing illusion.
This feeling we call “I” is just the feeling of being conscious. Many experience it as simply a sense of being. But because we don't normally recognize that what we are is this inner quality of being, we keep looking for something we can call the self. And so we dress ourselves up in all these psychological clothes — things like the roles we play in life, the way people see us, the things we do, our personality, our character. But these are all images of the self. They're not the self in its true essence.
If we imagine ourselves to the various ideas we have of the self, then our sense of identity is always at the mercy of events in the world. If our circumstances change, if our roles change, if the way people see us changes, then our very sense of identity can be thrown. As a result of this, we spend a lot of time and energy trying to fend off threats to our identity, trying to bolster our self-image, buying things we don't need, and trying to be someone.
On the other hand, when we discover what we are when we discover this sense of being that's always there underneath, there comes a sense of liberation — the realization that we don’t need to do anything to be anybody. With that, the mind relaxes. There's a sense of deep relief.
Our True Purpose — Achieving a Higher State Of Consciousness
Underlying everything we do in life, everything we're looking for, everything we're chasing, there's one common desire, one universal purpose. That is, we want to feel better. We want to feel more satisfied, more fulfilled, more at ease. None of us wants to be in pain or suffering. We want to avoid that if we can. We all want to feel happy and have more joy in life. What this ultimately means is that what we're looking for is not things so much as a better state of mind, a more satisfying state of consciousness. This is the mind's bottom line. As the Dalai Lama put it, “In the final analysis, the hope of every person is simply peace of mind.”
There's nothing wrong with this. It's completely natural. Where we go wrong is in the ways we go about finding peace of mind. So we chase after wealth, possession, fashion, and fame, in the hope that if we just got enough, we'd finally be happy. Sometimes we do find what we're looking for, and we do feel happy again. But it's not happiness that lasts, so we start looking for something else to make us feel better. Many of us spend our whole lives just looking. Yet the truth is, it isn’t having the right things or experiences that make us happy. When we examine our minds closely, we find the very opposite. When we think something is missing, something we need to be happy, we create for ourselves a feeling of discontent. This, I often think, is a sad joke about human beings. We're so busy worrying about whether or not we're going to be at peace in the future, we never allow ourselves to be at ease in the present moment.
How To Achieve a Shift In Consciousness
How can we be more in the present? In itself, it's quite simple. It's just a matter of relaxing our attention and opening our awareness to what we're experiencing. Just noticing the actual sensations in your body — flowing of the breath, feeling in the hand. Just noticing what is, as it is, without thinking about it. Our experience of the body is always in the present moment. It's our thinking about it that takes us out of the present. The mind's been so deeply ingrained to think about what’s going on, that very easily it jumps in and off again on some train of thought. When you realize that has happened, just simply relax the attention again, and once more become aware of what is happening in the present moment. The practice itself is simple. Like any other practice, it's just a matter of repeating the process again and again. Gradually, it gets easier and easier.
The world's spiritual traditions do have some common underlying themes. They all see that we get caught in attitudes and beliefs that don't serve us well, that lead us to behave in ways that are harmful to others, and often, not even in our own best interests. Each spiritual tradition seeks, in its way — some through prayer, meditation, and devotion — to open to the inner world of the mind, the world of the spirit. They want to liberate our souls, to free our minds from self-centered attitudes and materialist attachments. They are urging us to discover who and what we are. In one way or another, they are talking about a shift in consciousness. Consider what happens when we find ourselves stuck in a traffic jam. The traffic jam only has the power to stop the traffic. It does not inject adrenaline into your bloodstream. If you're feeling upset, it’s because the voice in your head is telling you that you're going to be late, and if you're late, bad things may happen. You may miss the meeting. You may be late home. It's this that’s making you upset, the fear that you will not be happy sometime in the future.
Discovering Our Inner Space & Awakening Our Consciousness — The Next Great Frontier
We're probably more full of ourselves today than we've ever been. I think what we need today is an integration of our scientific understanding of the world with the wisdom that’s held in the world’s spiritual traditions. The origins of consciousness may remain a mystery, but how to awaken our consciousness, how to free ourselves from misguided attitudes and values, to discover who and what we are, is not a mystery. That is something that's been explored by spiritual teachers from around the world — people who’ve got deep within their minds and discovered the true nature of consciousness — and from that, how to live with joy and love in their hearts. And that's what we need today. We need to rediscover that wisdom for ourselves. The next great frontier is not outer space. It is the inner space, research into the nature of consciousness itself. The one thing we all know for sure, and the one thing we’ve not yet explored.
Source
“From Science to God — Exploring the Mystery of Consciousness” (2005). A Documentary by Peter Russell, mathematician, physicist, psychologist, author, researcher of Consciousness, and faculty of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.