Ch.4 - The Loss of Consciousness in a Life Without Spiritual Context
The Pinnacle of Individuality
But What Happens When we Die?
How do Each of us Relate to our Experience of Life?
What Role Does meditation Play in Connecting Us to a Higher Intelligence?
[This chapter investigates how the sense of self evolves over a life which lacks a spiritual context]
The Pinnacle of Individuality
The human life without a spiritual context has a certain evolutionary process of its own. The course of a human life evolves according to a certain way which we can just watch happening. The coming into being, the birth, the growth, the development of our idea of ourself, the emergence of our sense of ourself within the world, our experience of living within the world, the gradual decay and breaking apart of that towards the end of life, and finally death.
And without the spiritual context, what we appear to have is the expression of matter becoming conscious for a period and then unconscious, and that is really what life appears to represent. The human life would evolve to the point where, as it comes out of infancy, it starts to relate to its position in relation to those around it as separate. It identifies itself as one thing, identifies others as another, creates ideas of itself in a position amongst what it is a part of and creates a highly individualised sense of itself.
So our personality is a reflection of our efforts to convey or project our individualised sense of who we think we are out to the world. And then without any connection to a higher aspect of consciousness (be that through religious devotion or spiritual enquiry and meditation) we evolve that idea of ourselves to the best of our ability, informed by parents, friends at school and peer groups and our own ideas as we relate personally to the information and examples and influences and conditions that we meet. So we create this multi-layered sense of self that becomes highly individualised, and as far as we believe as humans at this time in history, highly evolved.
In the past few generations we have reached the pinnacle of individuality. If you look at the influences upon us now, everything is pointing towards trying to express ourselves as individually as possible. And everything is galvanised around the idea of me as the unit, what I can display to the world, and what kind of responses I can elicit. Social media today is a reflection of our obsession with this created idea of self and the need to feel that it is seen by others.
When we look at the way social media is organised, when we look at the way children relate to themselves at school, look at what their aspirations are as they grow up, their aspirations are to be better than the person next to them, to become the person who is going to elicit the most admiration from others. One who feels unable to do that might be prone to suffer from the sense of worthlessness, despair or depression.
This is the way the planet evolves over a very, very long period of time, and even at that level the human being appears to be the most evolved expression of life because most life evolves only to the point of being sexually aware, with that sexual polarity being the galvanizing energy behind life.
Even as humans the sexual energy and the desire to procreate is the strongest motivating energy in life. Even the desire to accumulate more possessions and status is largely governed by the fact that by being stronger or more elaborate in our display we will attract the best mate.
When we try to deconstruct life by merely observing the ways in which it expresses itself materially we tend to come to the belief that life is just a rare occurrence of matter becoming conscious under certain circumstances. It is all too easy to come to this view when we look out around us, because there is not much hinting at something beyond that. So it is understandable that we should come to the conclusions we do, and this is the basis of both materialist and nihilist views.
In a world such as this, here we are in our life working very hard to establish our position, vying for it, negotiating it, fighting for it, standing up for it, struggling to uphold it. We reach a stage around about twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine when we become mature as an adult and that process of growth reaches a peak. The vital forces have already peaked and our mental capacities have likewise started to reach a peak. We may choose to sit down and train them but the process of growing up is complete, and the process of ageing and decay begins.
But What Happens When we Die?
So we have created this idea of ourselves, and now there lies ahead of us the rest of our lives in which to express that idea of ourselves to the world, and off we go seeking friendships, partnerships, positions and so on, engaging in experiences that express and uphold this idea of me. And somewhere along the line it might dawn upon us: 'This expansive process that I've been utterly immersed in actually is now not expanding any more.’ And we might look forward and realise that there will be a time in the future when we are going to die.
Then we have an existential crisis as we look ahead and reflect upon the inevitability of that, but we still continue to try and hold this idea of ourselves together, even in our hospital bed when we are told we only have a month to live, desperately trying to hold this idea of ourselves together, trying to find a way out of the predicament we find ourselves in. The predicament we find ourselves in is the fact that everything we have invested our entire life in is about to be stripped away. And at that point, quite often, people start to pray or start to ask for spiritual guidance or open up in some way.
That is the way that life runs its course, and with it comes the gradual passing away. The gradual onset of old age brings a letting go because we cannot move physically as much as we used to, we cannot do as much as we used to, we cannot gather as much energy around us as we used to, we cannot project ourselves out into the world with as much force and dynamism as we used to. So there is a process of having to relinquish that creates something of a spiritual reflection on our apparent demise. We realise that this life is going to come to an end, inevitably.
What is going to come to an end? My idea of myself will come to an end, this personal and individual expression of life that I have spent my whole life orchestrating and developing is going to come to an end.
And so, without any spiritual context to our life at all, never having reflected upon whether there might be anything beyond this or having ignored or denied or refused to accept the possibility that there might be, we face our end.
The way the mind meets its death is like this. The consciousness withdraws from the sense doors, the same way it does when we go to sleep. It drops into unconsciousness and comes to rest in the heart, the same way as it does at night. And in the same way as we do when we dream, the unconscious impressions in what we shall for now just call our unconsciousness, or our memory, or what the Buddha called Bhavanga1, begin to surface and our unconscious plays itself out.
Now your conscious mind, lacking any spiritual context, will have become organised around your idea of yourself, and death brings the sudden realisation that that is now being stripped away. So what happens as we die is that our attention fixates upon the strongest impressions we are holding in our conscious or unconscious memory and desperately tries to grasp and hold onto the things we are most attached to. Of all the impressions we have accumulated in our memory throughout the life there are two types that pull us most strongly in the dying process. It tends either to be a single experience that has left a very strong reaction or weighty impression in our memory, or a habitual reaction that has gone on in the mind many, many times. Those single impressions that have left an extremely strong impact pull upon us as we go through the dying process. These impressions will be either of attachment and grasping or aversion and rejecting, or in the case of positive mental states very strong impressions of love, appreciative joy and gratitude. Eventually the mind will latch on to the one single impression which has left the strongest impact and around which we carry the strongest charge. We then pass away with this impression in our consciousness. It is the quality and nature of that impression, be it wholesome or unwholesome, that we latch onto during this dying process that determines what happens next.
Now, at this point I understand I am explaining a process that is not in any way obvious to our ordinary field of perception. We cannot observe with the naked eye what happens to consciousness after the moment of death. All we can do is observe that it no longer continues to appear within the body. If we have reached the conclusion that that consciousness was produced by the body as a sign of life, then now that the body is not living any more, we assume that consciousness itself must have ceased without remainder.
One of the first things we learn to investigate once we have developed concentration capable of breaking down the apparent compactness of our experience is the nature of material and mental processes and their causes. If we are in any way going to break free of the materialist paradigm and come to understand what the Buddha was trying to show us, or what many of the other spiritual traditions throughout history have tried to show us, which is that consciousness does not come to cessation with the stopping of the heart, then we will need to develop the capacity to break down this appearance of compactness to witness the causal process or creative principles at work behind it.
What comes to cessation at death is the subtle material support for the arising of consciousness within the body. This is what I have called the software system. The hardware (the body) is no longer capable of running the software package (consciousness), and so consciousness stops appearing within the body.
One of the milestones in spiritual insight comes through our meditation practice when we witness for ourselves that it is not the body (or matter) that is producing consciousness but consciousness that is producing matter. We witness this happening. There is no way I can convince anyone of this in a book, and it is not my intention to do so. It is one of the processes that the Buddha himself acknowledged was deep and both hard to perceive and hard to grasp.
Normally we pass on at the end of the life with the quality of the mind that we have effectively been most fixated upon, which is our idea of ourself that we have spent our life creating. And of course it is only at that point that one who has never deeply investigated this process will come to know what actually happens.
So this is the human life without a spiritual context and it might be very convenient to come to the conclusion that, ‘Yes, none of my actions have any real consequences because I’m here for just a brief time, and when I’m gone, I’m gone.’ It is the perfect invitation to selfishness and so we indulge ourselves in the pursuit of everything we personally want, hoping that it is just curtains and no remembrance when we die. And if that was the case then it would be fine; to spend this life entirely invested in ourselves and in the expression of ourselves to the world and then to give it all up with our final breath.
But even if that were the case, we have to ask ourselves, 'What would the world look like inhabited largely by beings who took that position?' Well, basically, we would have a world pretty much as we see it now.
In spite of the fact that we can observe clearly the effects of our actions upon others and the world around us at a macro level, in spite of the fact that we know categorically that we have been taking out more than we put in at alarming rates, the pull of the pursuit of our desires and the continued projection of ourselves out to the world prompts us to pretend to ourselves at both an individual and group level that we have not seen what we have seen, in order to justify our continued pursuits.
It is not that we lack intelligence. We are intelligent. But the Buddha did not claim that suffering was caused by stupidity, but by ignorance. Ignorance is not paying attention to how things are. That is the real cause of suffering.
The point is that consciousness does not just tend towards the selfish projection of ourselves upon the world. There are deeper human feelings that arise within us such as love, compassion and empathy that are anything but selfish responses to the world, and they are all prompted by a deep feeling of connectedness to something that is beyond this idea of myself.
How do Each of us Relate to our Experience of Life?
The Buddha used to talk of two kinds of beings, those who are view-rooted, who relate their experience to their ideas of the world and themselves within it, and those who are experience-rooted, who relate to their experience through how it feels directly.
When one who is view-rooted looks out upon a material universe and witnesses things like love and compassion, he might come to the view that they are the response of beings trying to make sense of their life, or add meaning to their personal perspective.
Likewise they would argue that our ideas of a creative intelligence behind life are ideas we create in our mind that serve the purpose of trying to make life feel meaningful when it is not inherently so.
But the truth is that love is not simply an idea that arises in our mind. It is a deeply felt, embodied experience and it arises almost universally as a response to being open to life in a way that transcends the mind and its ideas.
Those of us who are experience-rooted feel what is happening within us and what is happening to those around us, recognising that we are all sharing a common experience, the experience of being alive. We likewise start to recognise that we are connected at a deeper level than we may appear to be. Our capacity to feel deeply for each other is in no way a cerebral process, but a deeply embodied, felt experience.
When we start to pay enough attention at an experiential level to what is going on within us and around us, rather than trying to figure it all out at the level of ideas, we witness the gradual dismantling of our isolated sense of self, and the gradual emergence or recognition of a deeper intelligence behind our lives, through which we are all connected to each other.
This inner conviction does not come upon us because we join up the dots or put all the pieces of the jigsaw together. It comes through at a much deeper level than that of our concrete ideas. In fact we may spend most of our lives not fully understanding how or why we feel the way we do, but simply knowing that we do.
Now how does this relate to what happens if we add a spiritual context into our lives? Whatever that spiritual context might be, whether it starts with meditation or prayer or just a deeper reflection upon life, what is it that prompts us to start opening up at a heart level?
The opening of the heart starts not with the certainty that we understand anything, but with the acceptance that it is OK that we do not know. And this in turn matures into a state of surrender and grace.
It is probably the case that we start meditating from some kind of self-focused perspective. ‘What’s my life all about? Who am I? How can I find peace?’ We sit down and we start to investigate it with the question of ‘Who am I?’ right at the forefront of our minds. But it is through the very investigation that meditation brings about that the ‘Who am I?’ starts to be dismantled, as we open up to the understanding that it is not about me, that there is something bigger at work here.
Through a devotional attitude we might open our heart to an idea of some principle, and let’s only call it a principle at this stage, some governing principle that is out there to be discovered that we do not understand. Maybe we call it God, and it may well be an idea that we inherited through views that have been passed down to us. Although we do not really know anything about whether they are true or not, there is something that is instilled in us that prompts us to look beyond the obvious for a deeper truth behind our lives.
Where we look does not actually matter when we start, because it is the looking for a deeper meaning itself that opens the heart to the idea that it is not all about me and that there is something beyond the appearance of things. We cannot understand why we feel love, but we certainly know that we do. Real love is the longing for the happiness of another. Why would we feel this, if it was all about me? The point is we would not.
As intelligent beings, we may even go on to formulate some kind of spiritual context at an intellectual level. That is when we use our own individual consciousness to try to create context to our lives and we look out upon the world seeking answers at the level of ideas. We then rally behind this view without ever knowing if it is right or not.
The best we can do is to look out upon the world as it appears to be and hypothesise around these appearances. From such a perspective we might come to the idea that God and this idea of connectedness are created in the mind simply to add a sense of meaning to our lives. This is the end point for the view-rooted perspective, as mentioned earlier. From the view-rooted perspective we might consider God and connectedness and then decide whether to reject or accept it as an idea, but without having worked towards an experience of such things.
On the opposite side of the fence, when we pray we invite into our lives something that we have the humility to accept may be beyond our current understanding, and acknowledge we do not yet know. In Christianity we have the idea of a creator being, in Buddhism the idea of an intelligent creative process. But both of them hold on to the belief that the creative process itself is perfect.
Whether it is Jesus or a saint of the past, whether it is Buddha, or whether we are simply moved by the experience we have, be it of love or suffering, to the point of entering more completely into it at a level that is beyond our concrete understanding, does not matter. But when we do first start to encounter it, a part of us begins to look beyond ourself for inspiration and meaning in our lives. And that is the point at which the heart opens, and the mind that insists on knowing has to acknowledge that it does not.
Once we start to open up to it we gradually come to recognise that there is an intelligence at work which holds our life together, which flourishes when our mind is out of the way: when we are asleep or in deep meditation; but atrophies and becomes impeded when our conditioned mind and its ideas of ourself hold sway. It is there every night when we fall asleep even though we do not recognise it. In those moments when we are out of the way, it reorganises and refreshes us. And it does so in ways that we do not fully understand but that we know we totally rely upon.
While we are in a deep sleep, we come to rest in a state of consciousness that we are not aware of and yet which contains this profound capacity to maintain our lives. Far from the kind of active intelligence that arises within our mind when we are ordinarily awake, it is in fact a state of pure, luminous awareness and clarity, and we can often live our entire lives ignorant of its presence or existence.
Jesus acknowledged that it was something that eluded concrete understanding, calling it the ‘peace that passeth all understanding’. If we can practise meditation and maintain awareness when our mind comes to cessation we will start to enter deeply into this state. If then we are able to maintain awareness as we fall asleep, we will also witness for ourselves this same state of pure luminosity as the place that we rest in while appearing to be dead to the world.
And we will witness its extraordinary capacity to repair and reorganise all the incoherence that the mind has produced, with all its lofty ideas of itself. If we can come to recognise it, it is this same state of luminosity that will reveal itself to us when we die.
And this is what Jesus and the Buddha were trying to point us towards in their different ways. What is more, they both suggested that it is our failing to recognise it both within our lives and in the moment of our death that brings us to so much unnecessary suffering. It is the 'not knowing' of this that the Buddha states is the fundamental ignorance that is the ultimate cause of suffering.
This intelligence is always and everywhere sitting in the background, doing what it can to keep life in balance, within us and around us. It has kept all life perfectly in balance for millions of years before the emergence of man and his personal will. When we live in alignment with that intelligence we flourish, when we live in conflict with it we flounder.
Even when we fall into sheer delusion, and our life becomes nothing but an expression of our personal will, that intelligence does not stop functioning. It simply becomes so interfered with that there is little sign left of its functioning.
We are close to such a situation in the world today, where the will of man is expressed to the extreme, but the creative intelligence behind our lives has almost been cut off. We can keep ourselves alive artificially now, but while the intelligence of man and his ability to impose his will is developing, our connection to this higher consciousness itself may well be degenerating in ways that we are not recognising.
***
What Role Does meditation Play in Connecting Us to a Higher Intelligence?
So what role does meditation play in reconnecting us to this higher intelligence? When we come to meditation for the first time we often do so seeking to support our life at a personal level. We start to work out some of our personal challenges and we start to refine our character and reorganise our ego, by knocking off the rough edges, developing more patience, more feeling of compassion, less feeling of judgement, less feeling of arrogance, more feeling of humility. And hopefully a little more peace in our lives.
All of these things are wonderful and that refining of the character is very important in bringing us to the point where we are willing to surmount our idea of ourselves in favour of a higher principle by allowing the heart to open.
This opening of the heart allows us to start to feel what is happening to us at a deeper level. Our capacity to feel is the result of awareness moving fluidly through us. When awareness stagnates around fixed ideas and attitudes our capacity to feel likewise stagnates. If this happens too much then we are left with only our ideas to fill the gap in our experience.
If this goes on for too long we end up inhabiting a virtual inner world that is entirely subjective, with very little connection to the actual world we are a part of. We have reached a point today in life where, because our ability to connect through what we feel has been so shut down on a number of fronts, our virtual world feels more compelling to us than our actual world. This marks the point of the degeneration of consciousness where we lose our connection to the creative process, as we become totally intoxicated with the idea of ourselves as the creator.
This loss of feeling at a fundamental level is another form of ignorance that leads to suffering. Although we may not be physically afflicted or experiencing obvious hardships, the numbness that comes upon us as we lose our capacity to feel starts to disconnect us from our sense of deeper meaning to our lives. And in its absence we turn instead to the pursuit of our desires in our efforts to find happiness and fulfilment.
However, as we open up through the practice of meditation and start to let go some of these fixed ideas and the charge around them, there comes a point where we start to reconnect to our feelings again and their ability to show us where we might be in conflict. We stop being informed only by the ideas that we are able to formulate, and start to relate to the actual experience we are having.
Gradually there comes a point at which, instead of working at a level of ideas and principles that we seek to uphold, or trying to join up the dots, we acknowledge that this pursuit of a personal resolution is not ultimately getting me anywhere. This is when we start to connect again to that higher intelligence and start to recognise how it is expressing itself through life at a deeper level.
Now how does that start to work on us energetically? We start to recognise that aspect of consciousness which we connect to through the heart and which is beyond our concrete ideas. We start to align more with this state of pure awareness in the background of our lives. In our meditation, we begin to recognise that basic state of pure awareness, within which our mind, with all its elaborate ideas, merely arises and passes moment to moment. We turn our focus from the display to the process by which it is arising, and gradually this starts to become our reference point.
We see the ideas and thought-forms, and associations and reactions and feelings and perceptions that arise within the mind to colour our experience as something that is secondary to the actual experience itself. The experience itself is arising within that ground of pure awareness. And we start to recognise that the pull and distraction and intoxication with the things we seek to add to our experience with our mind are actually merely robbing us of the experience itself.
Gradually we start to stand upon the basic ground of awareness, and we start to surrender the personal will and all its ideas, allowing this higher intelligence to become our teacher.
We start to gradually, in stages, look into and see that what appeared at first to be a process of matter becoming consciousness actually is the process of consciousness becoming matter. We see that it is not the idea of myself that is sitting in the background, but that there is a fundamental primal ground to existence that is the basis for the arising of everything of which we are a part. Now we start to establish a more universal context for our existence rather than an individual one.
Then we start to look to the future and the time that we will die and ask: What is it that is dying? And we may not know the answer yet, but our questions are starting to turn themselves around. We gradually start to recognise that apart from our instinctive, creative urge that drives most of our desires, there is a higher creative principle at work that is bringing things into being out of this basic all-pervasive ground of awareness. We recognise that there is a higher longing within us which is the longing to experience and come to know directly what it is that connects us to all things.
1 For a full explanation of this process please see 'The Flavour of Liberation Vol 1 chapter 31, and Vol 3 chapter 31
