Who Looks in the Mirror?: The Nature of Consciousness

An Eternal Now SG

A nice article I found about a week ago while browsing at Evergreen Buddhist bookshop, from a book 'A Wise Heart' by Jack Kornfield, and just managed to borrow it and type it out.

Who Looks in the Mirror?

The Nature of Consciousness

In its true state consciousness is naked, immaculate, clear, vacuous, transparent, timeless, beyond all conditions. O Nobly Born, remember the pure open sky of your true nature.

-- Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation

Luminous is consciousness, brightly shining is its nature, but it becomes clouded by the attachments that visit it.

-- Anguttara Nikaya

Dr. Rachel Remen, who trains physicians to attend to the heart and mind as well as the body, tells this story:

For the last ten years of his life, Tim’s father had Alzheimer’s disease. Despite the devoted care of Tim’s mother, he had slowly deteriorated until he had become a sort of walking vegetable. He was unable to speak and was fed, clothed, and cared for as if he were a very young child... One Sunday, while [Tim’s mother] was out doing the shopping, [Tim and his brother], then fifteen and seventeen, watched football as their father sat nearby in a chair. Suddenly, he slumped forward and fell to the floor. Both sons realized immediately that something was terribly wrong. His color was gray and his breath uneven and rasping. Frightened, Tim’s older brother told him to call 911. Before he could respond, a voice he had not heard in ten years, a voice he could barely remember, interrupted. “Don’t call 911, son. Tell your mother that I love her. Tell her that I am all right.” And Tim’s father died...

As a physician and scientist, Tim was confronted with the mystery of consciousness beyond the brain, beyond the body. Western science is just beginning to open to questions about the nature and origin of consciousness, even though Western philosophers have been concerned with such questions for centuries. Recent scientific studies of near-death and out-of-body experiences, along with experiments in remote viewing, allow us to glimpse other dimensions of consciousness. But what are we to make of them?

Buddhist psychology sends us directly into this mystery, to see for ourselves how consciousness works, independent of any object or content. It first describes consciousness as “that which knows,” that which experiences. To understand this, we can deliberately turn our attention to examine consciousness.

We can start very simply by looking in the mirror. When we do so we are often startled to notice that our body looks older, even though we don’t feel older. This is because the body exists in time, but the consciousness that perceives it is outside of time, never aging. We intuitively sense this. Instead of being caught up in spilled groceries, it’s as if we step back and see our experience with a timeless understanding.

Ordinarily we take consciousness for granted, ignoring it as a fish ignores water. And os we focus endlessly on the contents of experience: what is happening in our body, feelings, and thoughts. Yet each time we move, listen, think, or perceive, consciousness receives all that occurs. Unless we grasp the nature and function of consciousness, it is impossible to live wisely.

This is a third principle of Buddhist psychology:

3. When we shift attention from experience to the spacious consciousness that knows, wisdom arises.

The capacity to be mindful, to observe without being caught in our experience, is both remarkable and liberating. “Mindfulness is all helpful,” taught the Buddha. As we shall see, the transforming power of mindfulness underlies all of Buddhist psychology. To those who seek self-understanding, the Buddha teaches, “With the mind, to observe the mind.” The central tool for investigating consciousness is our own observation. With mindfulness, we can direct our attention to notice what is going on inside us, and study how our mind and experience operate.

What we ordinarily call the mind usually refers to the “thinking mind,” the ceaseless foundation of ideas, images, creativity, evaluation, and problem solving that spontaneously streams through our mind. But when we look closely, we discover that the mind is not just its thoughts, not just the ever-changing stream of ideas and images. It also includes a wide range of mind states or qualities around and below the thought process: feelings, moods, intuition, instincts. Even more important, though usually unnoticed, is the sheer fact of conscious awareness. This central capacity to be conscious is the essence of mind.

Physicists since the time of Isaac Newton have studied the mysterious operation of gravity. They have described its laws and characteristics. Consciousness is like gravity, a central part of existence that can also be described, whose laws can be known, whose power, range, and function can be studied. But unfortunately, Western psychology has almost completely neglected the study of consciousness. Perhaps this is because the Western tradition has so emphasized pathology, or because there are no easy external ways to measure consciousness. In his later years, Francis crick, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, turned his attention to the central question of consciousness. Consciousness, he believed, is as central to understanding biological life as gravity is to physics, and he rued the way the scientific community had avoided this elephant in their midst: “For many years consciousness was taboo in American psychology... and even recently it has been ignored because it is too elusive to study.”

Western materialistic science describes consciousness and its contents as a product of the brain. Scientists can indeed show that when different parts of the brain are stimulated or damaged, they directly change the mood or content of our conscious experience. But these experiments give us only a partial picture. What of awareness itself? Is it merely an evolutionary “product” of the neurons of the brain? Or is our nervous system more like a television and DVD, the receiver and recorder of events but not the actual source of consciousness? Buddhist psychology posits that consciousness is the condition for life, and that the physical body interacts with consciousness but is not its source.

If you sit quietly and try to turn your attention to your own consciousness, it is hard to pinpoint or describe. You will experience that there is awareness, but it doesn’t have a color or location. At first this can feel frustrating and difficult to grasp. But the very transparent, unfixed, yet alive quality of consciousness is its nature, a bit like air around us. If you relax and allow this experience of unfixed knowing, you will discover what Buddhist writers call the clear open sky of awareness. It is empty like space, but unlike space it is sentient; it knows experience. In its true state, consciousness is simply this knowing – clear, open, awake, without color or form, containing all things, yet not limited by them. This open quality of consciousness is described as unconditioned. As with the sky, all kinds of clouds and weather conditions can appear in its, but they have no effect on the sky itself. Storms may appear or disappear, but the sky remains open, limitless, unaffected by all that arises. Consciousness is unaffected by experience, just like the sky.

Consciousness is also compared to a mirror. A mirror reflects all things, yet remains bright and shining, unchanged by whatever images, beautiful or terrible, may appear within it. A brief meditation can help you to understand. After you read the next three sentences, look up from the book. Sit quietly and try to stop being aware. Don’t be conscious of any sounds, any sights, any sensations, or any thoughts. Try it. Immediately you will discovery that you can’t do it. Sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts continue to be known by consciousness. Sense how you cannot stop this conscious awareness. Notice how consciousness knows the whole variety of experiences without closing off to one in favour of another. This is the mirror-like nature of consciousness: reflective, luminous, untarnished, and peaceful.

The Two Dimensions of Consciousness

But the mirror and the open sky represent only one aspect of consciousness. Through Buddhist analysis, consciousness, like light, is found to have two dimensions. Just as light can be described as both a wave and a particle, consciousness has an unbound wave or sky-like nature and it has particular particle-like aspects. In its sky-like function, consciousness is unchanging, like the sky or the mirror. In its particle-like function, consciousness is momentary. A single state of consciousness arises together with each moment of experience and is flavoured by that experience. With precise mindfulness training, meditators can experience this particle-like nature of consciousness arising and passing away like bubbles or grains of sand.

When the momentary aspect of consciousness receives an experience, it is colored by the experience, carried by it. In one Buddhist text, the particle-like quality of consciousness is described with 121 different flavours or states. There are joyful states of consciousness, fearful states, expanded and contracted ones, regretful states and loving ones. These states come with stories, feelings, perceptions, with beliefs and intentions. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes it this way: “The mind is like a television set with hundreds of channels. Which channel will you turn on?” Usually we are so focused on the dramatic story being told that we don’t notice that there is always consciousness that receives it.

Through mindfulness, we can learn to acknowledge which channel is playing. We can learn to change the channels, the stories and states, by recognizing that all states are simply appearances in consciousness. Most importantly, we can begin to understand the underlying nature of consciousness itself.

Here is a description of the two fundamental aspects of consciousness:

Consciousness in its Sky-Like Nature

Open

Transparent

Timeless

Cognizant

Pure

Wave-like, unbounded

Unborn, undying

Consciousness in its Particle-Like Nature

Momentary

Impersonal

Registering a sense experience

Flavored by mental states

Conditioned

Rapid

Ephemeral

Awakening to Pure Consciousness: The Sky

Develop a mind that is vast like space, where experiences both pleasant and unpleasant can appear and disappear without conflict, struggle, or harm.

~ Majjhima Nikaya

While studying Buddhism in college, I tried a little meditation on my own. But I was unsuccessful because I didn’t know what I was doing. It wasn’t that I was afraid of silence or of some terrible darkness that I would find inside, though these are common misunderstandings of meditation. It was that my body would get uncomfortable and my mind would spin out in a million directions. When I heard Ajahn Chah’s teaching, the practice became gradually clearer. He taught me to relax and feel my breath carefully, which helped focus and quiet my mind. Then he taught me just to mindfully notice the stream of thoughts and sensations without reacting to them as a problem. This took some practice.

Finally he taught the most important lesson, to rest in consciousness itself. As his own teacher Ajahn Mun explains, “We can notice the distinction between consciousness and all the transient states and experiences that arise and pass away within it. When we do not understand this point, we take each of the passing states to be real. But when changing conditions such as happiness and unhappiness are seen for what they are, we find the way to peace. If we can rest in the knowing, the pure consciousness, there’s not much more to do.”

Does resting in consciousness mean we are simply checking out of the world or withdrawing into navel gazing? Not at all. Resting in the knowing is not the same as detachment. When I look back at my own life I can see my own struggles to discover this truth. Because of the conflict and unpredictable violence in my family, there were many times I wanted to run away but couldn’t. To cope with the trauma, at times I became depressed, angry, or cynical. But as a primary protection, I developed the capacity to detach myself from what was happening. Detachment came naturally to me. I used it to become peaceful within myself and to try to calm those around me. Of course, these patterns persist, and I do it for a living.

So when I first tried to meditate, I confused it with my familiar strategy of detachment. Gradually I discovered how wrong I was. My detachment had been a withdrawal from the pain and conflict into a protective shell. It was more like indifference. In Buddhist psychology indifference is called the “near enemy” of true openness and equanimity, a misguided imitation. To rest in consciousness, I had to unlearn this defensive detachment and learn to feel everything. I had to allow myself to recognize and experience the feelings and thoughts, the conflicts, the unpredictability of life in order to learn that I could trust the openness of consciousness itself. To rest in consciousness we become unafraid of the changing conditions of life.

In the monastery Ajahn Chah would often notice when we were caught up in a state of worry, anger, doubt, or sorrow. He would smile with amusement and urge us to inquire, “Who is doubting? Who is angry? Can you rest in the consciousness that is aware of these states?” Sometimes he would instruct us to sit at the side of a person who was dying, to be particularly aware of the mysterious moment when consciousness leaves and a person full of life turns into a lifeless corpse. Sometimes he would say, “If you are lost in the forest, that is not really being lost. You are really lost if you forget who you are.”

This knowing or pure consciousness is called by many names, all of which points to our timeless essence. Ajahn Chah and the forest monks of Thailand speak of it as the “Original Mind” or the “One Who Knows.”In Tibetan Buddhism it is referred to as rigpa, silent and intelligent. In Zen it is called the “mind ground” or “mind essence”. Hindu yogis speak of the “timeless witness”. While these teachings may sound abstract, they are quite practical. To understand them we can simply notice the two distinct dimensions to our life: the ever-changing flow of experiences, and that which knows the experiences.

Perhaps we can better understand this through a story of a Palestinian named Salam, one of my good friends. I met Salam when I was doing some teaching for the hospices of the Bay Area. He was able to sit with the dying because he had no fear of death. In the late 1960s and 1970s Salam had lived in Jerusalem as an activist and a journalist. Because he was writing about creating a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and the establishment of a Palestinian state, he was regularly arrested. He spent nearly six years in Israeli prisons. He was frequently interrogated and periodically beaten and tortured. This happens on every side in war.

One afternoon after he had been badly beaten, his body was lying on the floor of the prison and he was being kicked by a particularly cruel guard. Blood poured out of his mouth, and as the police report later stated, the authorities believed he had died.

He remembers the pain of being beaten. Then, as if often reported by accident and torture victims, he felt his consciousness leave his body and float up to the ceiling. At first it was peaceful and still, like in a silent movie, as he watched his own body lying below being kicked. It was so peaceful he didn’t know what all the fuss was about. And when Salam described how, in a remarkable way, his consciousness expanded further. He knew it was his body lying below, but now he felt he was also the boot kicking the body. He was also the peeling green paint on the prison walls, the goat whose bleat could be heard outside, the dirt under the guard’s fingernails – he was life, all of it and the eternal consciousness of it all, with no separation. Being everything, he could never die. All his fears vanished. He realized that death was an illusion. A well-being and joy beyond description opened in him. And then a spontaneous compassion arose for the astonishing folly of humans, believing we are separate, clinging to nations and making war.

Two days later, as Salam describes it, he came back to consciousness in a bruise and beaten body on the floor of a cell, without fear or remorse, just amazement. His experience changed his whole sense of life and death. He refused to continue to participate in any form of conflict. When he was released, he married a Jewish woman and had Palestinian-Jewish children. That, he said, was his answer to the misguided madness of the world.

Turning Toward Our Essence

“Who are we, really?” the Zen koans demand. “Who is dragging this body around?” or “What was your original face before your parents were born?” These questions force us to look directly at the consciousness that inhabits our body. Ajahn Chah asked us to “be the Knowing.” Tibetan teachers instruct their students to direct their gaze inside to see who or what is doing the looking. Ajahn Jumnian, a Thai forest master, tells his students to witness all experience as if from the “Third eye” in the center of the forehead. In each of these practices we turn toward and rest in consciousness itself.

It is as if we were in a movie theatre, completely lost in whatever film – romance, adventure, comedy ,or tragedy – is currently starring ourselves. Then we are told to look behind us, to find the source. Turning our heads, we recognize for the first time that the entire drama arises from a series of changing images projected by a beam of light onto the screen. The light, clear and shining, is colored by the various forms on the film, yet its essential nature is pure and unchanging.

At some moments there are also gaps in the action; the show gets a bit slow, even boring. We might shift in our seats, notice the people eating popcorn around us, remember we’re in a movie. In the same way we can notice that there are gaps between our thoughts, gaps in the whole sense of our self. Instead of being lost in ideas and the problems in front of us, creating the whole drama of ourself, there are moments when we sense the space around our experience, let go, and relax. “These gaps,” says the meditation master Chogyam Trungpa, “are extremely good news.” They remind us that we can always rest in awareness, that freedom is always possible.

We do not require special meditative circumstances or a near death experience like Salam’s to return to awareness. A boy in school suddenly notices a sunbeam illuminating the dust and he is no longer the earnest fifth grader struggling with math. He smiles as he senses the ever-present mystery and his whole building and schoolboy drama are held in a silent, free awareness. A woman walking down the street thinks of a distant friend and for a moment forgets her errands, feeling eternity and her own small life passing through it. In an argument we stop, laugh, let go, and become silent. Each of these moments offers a taste of freedom.

As we have seen, when we first turn to investigate who is being aware, we may feel confused, like a fish looking for water. We discover that there’s nothing solid, no one who is perceiving. This is a wonderful discovery. Awareness has no shape or color. It is beyond presence or absence, coming or going. Instead there is only a clear space of knowing, of consciousness, which is empty and yet cognizant at the same time. As you hold this book, consciousness is reading the words and reflecting about the nature of consciousness. Turn and ask who is reading. Your first answer may be “I can’t sense anything there, it’s just empty.” Stay with this knowing, this empty openness. Learn to trust it. It is consciousness without limitation, reflecting all that appears, yet untouched y it all.

As you work with this inquiry regularly, you can gradually develop the capacity to distinguish between the events and experiences of life and the consciousness that is knowing. You learn to rest in the knowing, unperturbed, to settle back in the midst of any circumstance, even those that are difficult or confusing.

This resting, settling, is quite different from the sort of pathological detachment that I learned as a child. Out of fear, I split my experience, protecting myself through the subtle distance of my role as witness. When we truly rest in awareness, our experience is spacious and intimate, without defences. With it arises compassion; we feel our heart’s natural connection with life.

One meditation practitioner, Maria, works as a nurse in the emergency room of al local hospital. She describes how she has learned to use the art of resting in awareness: “Sometimes it’s not too busy and I can work on automatic, heck on a patient or do the paperwork while my mind drifts off to think about a million other things. Then we might get a whole crowd of incoming patients: accidents, heart attacks, asthma emergencies. I do my part, but I’m also tuned in to the whole of what’s going on. I’ve learned to open the awareness. It’s as if my mind gets spacious and still, present, sensitive to what is needed and yet kind of detached at the same time. I guess it’s like the flow state that athletes talk about. I’m in the middle, doing all the right things, yet some part of me is just watching it all, silent.

“It happens more these days, not just at work. When I do my meditation practice it gets stronger. I had a big fight with my son and in the middle of it I could feel my body tightening, how right I thought my view was. Just feeling that, I relaxed and shift to the space of awareness, and things opened up. I was saying no, but I could also feel all the love underneath and how these were just our roles and we had to play them well and behind it, it was all spacious, all OK.”

When we learn to rest in awareness, there’s both caring and silence. There is listening for what’s the next thing to do and awareness of all that’s happening, a big space and a connected feeling of love. When there is enough space, our whole being can both apprehend the situation and be at ease. We can see the dance of life, we dance beautifully, yet we’re not caught in it. In any situation, we can open up, relax, and return to the sky-like nature of consciousness.

Practice: The River of Sound

Sit comfortably and at ease. Close your eyes. Let your body be at rest and your breathing be natural. Begin to listen to the play of sounds around you. Notice those that are loud or soft, far and near. Notice how sounds arise and vanish on their own, leaving no trace. After you have listened for a few minutes, let yourself sense, feel or imagine that your mind is not limited to your head. Sense that your mind is expanding to be open like the sky – clear, vast like space. Feel that your mind extends outward beyond the most distant sounds. Imagine there are no boundaries to your mind, no inside or outside. Let the awareness of your mind extend in every direction like the open sky.

Relax in this openness and just listen. Now every sound you hear – people, cars, wind, soft sounds – will arise and pass away like a cloud in the open space of your own mind. Let the sounds come and go, whether loud or soft, far or near, let them be clouds in the vast sky of your own awareness, appearing and disappearing without resistance. As you rest in this open awareness for a time, notice how thoughts and feelings also arise and vanish alike sounds in the open space of mind. Let the thoughts and feelings come and go without struggle or resistance. Pleasant and unpleasant thoughts, pictures, words, joys, and sorrows – let them all come and go like clouds in the clear sky of mind.

Then, in this spacious awareness also notice how you experience the body. The mind is not in the body . the body sensations float and change in the open sky of mind. The breath breathes itself; it moves like a breeze. If you observe carefully, the body is not solid. It reveals itself as areas of hardness and softness, pressure and tingling, warm and cool sensation, all floating in the space of awareness.

Relax. Rest in this openness. Let sensations float and change. Allow thoughts and images, feelings and sounds to come and go like clouds in the clear, open space of awareness. As you do, pay attention to the consciousness itself. Notice how the open space of awareness is clear, transparent, timeless, and without conflict – allowing for all things but not limited by them .This is your own true nature. Rest in it. Trust it. It is home.