Indian Philosophy and Meditation

Perspectives on Consciousness

Rahul Banerjee, Amita Chatterjee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138308978
• eBook ISBN: 9781351389280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

India has a rich tradition of meditative practices designed to study the phenomenon of consciousness. From the distant past to the present, India has evolved a unique psychological culture with grand unifying themes and universal modes of meditative practice.

This book provides a detailed analysis of classical and modern Indian views on consciousness along with their related meditative methods. It offers a critical analysis of three distinct trends of Indian thought, viz., a dualistic mode of understanding and realizing consciousness in Hindu S??khya, an interactive mode in early Buddhist abhidhamma, and the evolutionary transformational mode in the teachings of the twentieth-century sage Sri Aurobindo. This book explores the unifying features in Indian first person practices with regard to consciousness and the importance of these applied psychological practices and their associated understanding of our conscious inner lives. The most striking feature of the work is that side by side theoretical exposition of consciousness, it includes a number of worksheets which explain how to use meditation to achieve relaxation as well as cognitive 'maps' of the different levels of conscious states and instruction and how one can traverse from one state to another. The final chapter explores Sri Aurobindo who introduced new and decisive Indian spiritual thought and practice to India in the form of Integral Yoga.

This innovative book will be of interest to scholars studying Indian philosophy, Indian religion and the emerging field of contemplation studies.

1
Introduction

1.1 What do we mean by consciousness?

India has a rich tradition of meditative practices designed to study the phenomenon of consciousness. Currently referred to as ‘first-person methods’, these meditative techniques involve a systematic study of our inner subjective conscious states. Although both the meditative methods and their associated conceptual models appear to diverge into several distinct philosophical schools, yet from the distant past to the present, India has evolved a distinct psychological culture with grand unifying themes and some universal modes of meditative practice. We intend to explore some of these unifying features in Indian first-person practices and their related theories with regard to consciousness. In the current social milieu racked by violence and the chaotic surge of unregulated desires, the importance of these applied psychological practices and their associated understanding of our conscious inner lives cannot be overestimated.

By the term consciousness we usually refer to the inner, qualitative, subjective ‘feel’ associated with some experience or the other. It is perhaps impossible to give an exact definition of consciousness (rather like matter), yet consciousness invariably appears to involve experience associated with an inner qualitative subjective state. The view of a pleasant scenery, the sound of music, the touch of breeze on our skin, the taste of mangoes or the smell of fresh roses all involve the first-person experience of a characteristic qualitative feeling. Further, we can also experience the feeling associated with specific emotions such as anger, greed, envy, joy, or trains of abstract thought expressed in words and symbols. With a little practice it is also possible to experience an ‘I’ sense (Aham Vṛtti) within ourselves. Thus, the universal feature associated with most forms of consciousness appears to be the first-person experience (or that which experiences) of an inner, qualitative subjective state. But all this emphasises only the phenomenal aspect of consciousness.

Generally, we can assume for most practical purposes that the subjective states under consideration have two invariant characteristics – opacity and transience. Opacity simply means that each cognitive agent has exclusive access to the experience of his or her own subjective states which will be opaque to everyone else (privileged access). The subjective state is thus an ‘internal’ state with exclusive first-person access given only to a unique cognitive agent. Henceforth, we will refer to a qualitative subjective state simply as an internal state. Secondly, internal states are intrinsically dynamic, characterised by either a flow or a rapid succession of discrete states. This way of defining the internal state probably assumes that all such states are intrinsically conscious and their content and conditioning factors are wholly transparent to the cognitive agent. By mental content is meant the feelings, perceptions, emotional formations, attention, thoughts, and images which constitute the state. Whether all such mental factors are invariably the immediate objects of consciousness in every internal state then becomes an issue.

1.2 Western conception of internal states

In terms of western philosophy, it was Rene Descartes¹ who considered all mental states to be phenomenal and thus conscious. From a series of intense meditations, he realised that whatever he could doubt, he could not possibly doubt his own self-existence, hence the famous dictum ‘cogito ergo sum’ (I think therefore I am). Whatever the nature of the thought or argument, it must be placed before an ‘I’ or in other words the ‘I’ must be the invariable conscious centre amidst vortices of transient thoughts, whether true or false. Descartes viewed the ‘I’ to be immaterial (lacking in extension) and possessed of intellect and will, making it substantially different from matter which could have size, weight, shape, and motion. The problem was that the internal states composed of an ‘I’ with its associated intellection and will does interact with the body, as the volitions of our mind are indeed translated into verbal and physical actions. In Descartes’ view the site of interaction between the conscious mind and body was in the pineal gland situated in the brain, though the process by which conscious intentions get transduced into physical actions via the pineal gland doesn’t seem to be very clear. In any case it was due to the remarkable clarity and genius of Descartes that a clear distinction was recognised between internal subjective conscious states on one hand and physical states of the body on the other and an attempt was made to explain how these two substantially distinct ontological realities could interact with each other (interactionism). The fact that the latter explanation was found wanting does not belittle the Cartesian achievement.

Later developments in western psychology deviated sharply from this view, initiated perhaps by Freud² who upheld that there could be unconscious mental states influencing behaviour. This move was further accentuated by Gilbert Ryle³ who proposed that the entire domain of the ‘mental’ could be characterised strictly and comprehensively in behavioural terms. The difficulties in psychological theories associated with this approach are well known. Briefly, we generally assume that behaviour arises as a causal consequence of an internal state, but if the internal state itself is simply reduced to a behavioural disposition, then one fails to see how this causal scheme could be accomplished. Secondly, it is at times impossible to establish a unique correspondence between an internal state and a specific behavioural pattern. To remedy these defects, it was proposed that the sole significance of an internal state lies entirely in its status as a causal determinant of behaviour and as assigning a causal role to consciousness is disputable, the fact whether internal states are conscious or not appears to be a matter of relatively minor significance. Thus, an internal state may or may not be conscious but by its very definition will invariably have a causal role in the cognitive economy. This appears to be the dominant paradigm adopted by cognitive neuroscience to date.⁴

Possibly, Ryle wanted to construct a psychological science purged of all subjective elements, rather in the nature of physics and chemistry where all the relevant facts would be in the objective ‘public’ domain, facts which can be measured and reproduced in repeated measurements. However, such an attitude can only be productive of a gross injustice to the phenomena purported to be studied. The vast panorama of human action and behaviour arises as a consequence of immediately experienced subjective factors such as love and hatred, likes and dislikes, the whole spectrum of our consciously experienced emotions and above all our endeavour to give our egos (I’s) an identity. All these mental factors (constitutive of a subjective internal state) can neither be measured nor publicly accessed, as indeed privileged access to a unique cognitive agent is the very essence of subjectivity. If the standard methods of empirical science cannot be applied directly to these elements which constitute our subjective inner lives then other means should be sought to study our subjective states, rather than deny their importance outright or pretend they don’t really exist. Some philosophers have argued that it is possible to meaningfully conceive of a zombie world, wherein all human behaviour will remain as it is sans consciousness, and thereby apparently nothing would change. It is difficult to sympathise with point of view as this is not how the system works at all. The drama of human action and behaviour arises from the matrix of our rich inner lives composed of conscious emotions, perceptions, thoughts, and volitions and if these subjective mental factors are removed from consideration then of course everything will change. Or rather the proposed situation is so incomprehensibly and palpably absurd that there will be nothing left to change!

A departure from the strictly behaviourist point of view can be found in the approach adopted by Francis Crick, one of the founding fathers of the discipline of structural biology. Crick proposed that the procedures of western empirical science (evident from the resounding success and progress of structural biology) were now sufficiently evolved and powerful enough to enquire into the nature of consciousness or the entire domain of subjective experience. As all living processes can finally be reduced to the structure, function, and integrated activity of the plethora of molecules found in biological systems, similar procedures could in principle also be applied to resolve the problem of conscious experience. In his own words,

“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You are nothing but a pack of neurons”. This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can be called truly astonishing.⁵

Thus, in Crick’s view, the same reductionist approach which had been so successfully applied to almost all biological problems could also be extended to the study of consciousness. When our knowledge of the brain, the nervous system and their constitutive neurons will be sufficiently advanced, we will find that the entire field of our subjective existence is in fact and actuality nothing but some aspect of neuronal activity (presumably) associated with the brain. What this aspect could be is, of course, the scientific problem waiting to be solved. The way forward would be to study the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’ (NCC), correspondences between internal states and brain states by means of experimentally valid and repeatable scientific procedures.

Whether such a research agenda will eventually arrive at the goal (as envisaged by Crick) time alone will tell. However, in the entire domain of structural biology such a problem has no precedent and under no circumstances can it be treated as just another biological problem. Firstly, the research paradigm works best when the physical behaviour of a larger physical aggregate is sought to be explained in terms of a dynamic network of interactions between its constituent physical parts, which could be cells, cellular organelles, or molecules. For example, the chemotactic movement of a bacterial cell can be reductively explained in terms of physical states and interactions between a specific set of protein molecules found within it. The research paradigm proposed by Crick appears to be ideally suited to explain the physically observable functional states of the brain (in terms of neuronal cells and their interactions) rather than subjective states, as it would be absurd to suppose that hatred, love, and jealousy are actually constituted by neuronal cells or molecules. Again, one fails to see how the experience of an emotional formation could be wholly reduced to and be nothing other than specific activity of either neuronal cells or their associated molecular assemblies. Of course, this is not to deny the mutual correspondence and conditioning between internal states and their physical substrates either in the brain or sense bases in the body. There is a possibility that such an ‘astonishing’ conclusion rests on a category error between internal states and physical states of the body, and there could be reasons to suppose (discussed in detail in subsequent sections) that prima facie internal states and physical states are two distinct ontological realities and under normal circumstances one cannot be reduced to or confounded with each other. The general strategy being adopted here appears to redefine or pass over the essential conception of an internal state and morph it into just another physical state.

Fairly, recently David Chalmers⁶ has proposed that a clear distinction be drawn between the phenomenal aspect of an internal state involving consciousness and its (state’s) causal role in a cognitive situation. With Chalmers we see an attempt to reinstate consciousness within the conceptual framework of an internal state. Even though consciousness arises from neuronal activity in the brain (‘the brain entails consciousness’), yet complete reduction of consciousness to biophysical brain activity is denied (natural dualism). Based on his assumption that the physical world is causally closed by the four known forces of physics, it follows that consciousness per se has no causal function in living material forms. Such a position appears to support the possibility of unconscious internal states imbued with causal power to intervene in a cognitive situation. As the causal role of consciousness remains a topic of much dispute in the West, currently the only consensus appears to be that the internal states could be either conscious or unconscious and unconscious internal states could definitely be causally effective. The research paradigm of reducing internal states to physical states appears to be more facile in case of unconscious internal states than conscious ones.

1.3 Temporal scales associated with consciousness

At the heart of Indian views with regard to the character of internal states, lies its understanding of the temporal scales associated with conscious experience. Similar to matter, consciousness actually covers an extended range of phenomena. An atom and a cluster of galaxies are both material and thus physical objects can be found continuously all along a spatial scale running into several orders of magnitude. Likewise, there is also a temporal scale associated with conscious experience. Typically, episodes of our immediate conscious experiences play out in minutes and seconds. We extend our notions to the milli- or micro-second time domains by means of inference rather than direct experience and it is generally assumed that below a certain threshold either the ‘internal/mental state’ or the cognitive process becomes unconscious. However, this restriction of our conscious experience within the limits of a temporal regime is neither rigidly fixed nor fundamental but is a matter of self-willed ignorance which can be remedied by appropriate psychological procedures. These meditative methods can extend the temporal range of consciousness to relatively shorter time scales such that what was once considered ‘unconscious’ could be brought within the ambit of consciousness. Secondly, this can also result in the integration of scales such that it can be directly ‘seen’ and understood as to why all the rapid cognitive events (which are now being consciously experienced) either do or do not mature into full blown objects to be experienced at the slower end of the temporal ladder. Here we only stress the Indian view that every internal state can be made conscious and not to do so is to persist in ignorance. Seen in this light, meditative practice serves the dual role of firstly extending the temporal range of consciousness and secondly to coherently integrate experiences from all temporal levels. In any case the unanimous view of all Indic systems appears to be that all internal states are by default conscious states, or can be made conscious states and they only appear unconscious to us by virtue of the fact that we have not acquired the necessary technique to penetrate, assimilate and bring them within the ambit of consciousness. In the final analysis, an unconscious mental state is either a contradiction in terms or merely a state of ignorance.

We can further extend the analogy of spatial scales in our understanding of mental states. There are some physical properties such as mass, charge, energy, and momentum which are relevant at all levels (or at least across several orders of spatial scales) whereas there can be others (for example, ferromagnetism) which are pertinent only within well defined (spatial) limits as it involves atomic aggregates. To speak of the ferromagnetic property of a single atom is simply absurd. We can thus classify properties into ‘fundamental’ which are relevant across all scales and ‘derived’ as those pertinent within a circumscribed temporal regime. Thus, (as per the Abhidhamma or Buddhist sources)⁷ consciousness (viññāna), volition (cetanā), psychic energy (jīvitindriya), feeling (vedanā), perception (saññā), emotional formation (sankhāra) and attention (manasikāra) are fundamental universal properties of all internal mental states regardless of the duration for which they exist, while other derived ‘macroscopic’ attributes such as notions of self (‘I’) or ego, full blown perceptual objects, thoughts by way of words and images only appear within certain temporal limits. Here the Indian terms have deliberately been given in parentheses as their corresponding western equivalents do not have an identical definition. This goes to clarify several sources of confusion in Indian systems. For example, when Buddha uses the term anātman ‘no self’, it does not mean that categorically and absolutely there is no such thing as an ‘I’ or ego. This would indeed make a travesty of even our everyday experiences which are definitely centered about an ‘I’. It simply means that Buddha is describing a conscious cognitive process at a temporal level which is no longer supportive of an experience of ‘self’ and all such notions of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ have lost all practical relevance.

1.4 Consciousness as the citta, Puruṣa, and the Indian model of the internal state

One possible view, at ‘normal’ time scales of everyday conscious experience could be that consciousness has only a phenomenal character which is distinct and perhaps separable from the other mental factors such as attention, perception and will. Thus, we can have a science of perception without any recourse to phenomenal consciousness. In such a representation of an internal state, consciousness may or may not be a component of the state, and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Glossary of Indian terms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Dualism-Sāńkhya
• 3 Interactionism – the Abhidhamma
• 4 Monism – Sri Aurobindo
• Appendix 1: the Upaniṣads and self-enquiry
• Appendix 2: Jaina views on consciousness and Preksha meditation
• Appendix 3: the bridging relations
• Appendix 4: Śakti and Sri Ramakrishna
• Index