25 | Human Consciousness: Something We Have or Something We Are? Pt. 2

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a co-finder of the Table Collective.

This is a “Part 2,” a follow up to the previous Episode as I continue to wrestle with the question about whether we are conscious, or whether we are consciousness.

In other words, is there a me other than my consciousness and awareness, a me that has consciousness?

Or is what I think of as me just consciousness itself, is there an I that exists, or not?

 

The Continental Divide….Again

In the last Episode I suggested that the ways that physics, philosophy and different religions answer that question creates a “Continental Divide.”  Like the spine of the Rocky Mountains in the United State, from which rivers flow either to the west or to the east, so there are schools thought within philosophy, and there are interpretations of physics, and there are religious heritages which answer one way or the other relative to whether we are conscious or, whether we are consciousness itself. 

In the last Episode, which is now Part 1 of this topic, I looked at the side of the divide that says, “we are consciousness.” In this Episode I will look at the other side of the divide, “we are conscious.”

And as I often do, I begin first with how I might try to express some of this through art, in this case another song. I wrote this as I thought about my connections with my daughters, imagining a time when I look back at our relationships from the future, even a future in which I am no longer living. It is called “Someday.”

 

Someday 

I don’t have no words to bring you, barely found this song to sing you

You already know what it’s like to be living on the other side of me

And I’ll be like a whisper in your soul, and you’ll be all the parts that make me whole

I hope that I’ll be whole someday 

 

Whirlpools and camp-out nights, high Sierra fire light

Pittsburgh, Asia, Oildale, there’s still more chapters to this tale

And I’ll be like a whisper in your soul, and you’ll be all the parts that make me whole

I hope that I’ll be whole someday 

 

You’re the ones who know me best, so I’ll leave you here to fill in the rest

I know when I find it hard to stand, you’ll be the ones standing here holding my hand

And I’ll be like a whisper in your soul, and you’ll be all the parts that make me whole

I hope that I’ll be whole someday 

 

Open all the doors inside, to what we didn’t know we were hiding 

And I’ll be like a whisper in your soul, and you’ll be all the parts that make me whole

I hope that I’ll be whole someday 

 

Well life’s a million memories from the grave back to our mother’s knees

Memory’s just another way of seeing all the things that we’re still being

And I’ll be like a whisper in your soul, and you’ll be all the parts that make me whole

I hope that we’ll all be whole someday 

Someday….

 

The song is clearly coming from the side of the divide that assumes consciousness is something I have, and that there is an I that has it. Whether in fact that is the case is something we are still considering.

From art, then, I come back to physics, philosophy and then, religion.

 

Physics and the Other Side of the Divide: We Are Conscious 

I know of no theory among physicists that definitively separates "self" from consciousness and posits that “we” are something that has consciousness in the way I am framing it.

The closest thing to such a theory might be something proposed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, who suggest that consciousness emerges from quantum computations and vibrations occurring within microtubules, or cellular structures within brain neurons. The theory leaves room for something “other” that might be the source of such vibrations, however it focuses on the physical basis of consciousness, and so doesn't address whether there is something in us separate from consciousness. 

As we noted in prior episodes, the theory called panpsychism suggests that consciousness might be a fundamental aspect of the entire universe. But the theory does not really address the question I am asking here: whether this “me” I think is experiencing consciousness as “me” is anything other than the consciousness I am experiencing.

And so again, where physicists land as to our question about whether there is a self that has consciousness or not (and they land on both sides), given that they assess the same evidence, I contend they come to their conclusions about what the science tells them based on something other than the science. Philosophy, or religion for example.

And now I turn there.

 

Philosophy and the Other Side of the Divide: We Are Conscious

I will focus here on western philosophy, because in the west we can rather easily separate religious and philosophical theories. Not that they don’t affect and influence each other, for they do. However, the linkages in eastern thought between what I am calling philosophy and religion are far more closely entertwined. In my view, inextricably. Thus, eastern views of consciousness don’t require that I make a distinction between philosophy and religion.

So, the (western) philosophical view that the self is distinct from consciousness involves two core ideas. The first is what is called mind-body dualism, which posits that the self, or "I," is a non-physical entity.

The second idea is that there is a self which is the "subject" that experiences consciousness. A self that is the "I" which is aware of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and which experiences consciousness. 

In summary, the self is non-physical and is something which can experience being conscious rather than being defined by it.  

While philosophy has advanced beyond the thinkers I will briefly introduce here, in my way of understanding these provide the fountainhead, as it were, for the philosophical frameworks which continue to see the self as something distinct in some way from consciousness. The two foundational figures in this regard are Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant.

Descartes, famous for the statement "I think, therefore I am," highlighted not only the distinction of mind and body, but also emphasized the primacy of the thinking self over the physical body, a bias which has affected western thought ever since (the bias being not only the primacy of mind over body, but of the thinking self over other psychological functions such as emotions or imagination). 

But notice too, Descartes is subtly referencing an “I” that thinks, and an “I” which is. In fact, Descartes’ entire philosophical project is rooted in his reflection on the act of thinking as a self that thinks. It is an extended process of self-reflection. In this he has similarities with the Buddha, however Buddha’s reflections caused him to assert a far more skeptical view of the accuracy of human reason than did Descartes.

Immanuel Kant took up this question of self/subject and consciousness more explicitly in his philosophical work. He referred to the "I think" of Descartes as what accompanies all our thoughts, uniting them into a unified self-consciousness and enabling us to have experiences of any sort in the first place. He referred to this as “transcendental apperception” and saw it as the basis for the awareness of ourselves as a thinking subject. 

Frankly, Kant is what I would term a “thick” thinker, difficult to fully grasp or explain. But he is in many ways the fountain head for subsequent philosophical streams that (in a wide variety of ways) hold some sort of view that consciousness is not what we are, but is something we have, or experience. The "I think" for Kant, or the I that thinks, is not an object of experience, but rather the condition that makes experience possible. 

Just two philosophers as examples? I grant this is a thin presentation, and that there have been significant developments since these foundational thinkers. However, all later philosophical approaches which land on the distinction between the self and consciousness are like rivers whose waters seem to flow from this fountainhead.

 

Religions and the Other Side of the Divide: We Are Conscious

In the last Episode I described the way in which I see Buddhism as unique among the religions in defining the self as consciousness, and thus belonging on that side of the divide. I am still wrestling with whether Buddha belongs there or not! In this Episode my aim is to summarize what the other religious heritages add to the discussion, and will come back to the Buddha as well.

 

Animism

Animism is the view that all the natural world is animated, is souled, in some way. That includes, of course, human beings. Now, I have not discovered any descriptions among animists that indicate how they view the relationship between an “I” and consciousness.

However, when I consider the importance of dream states in animistic accounts, and the reports of visitations and conversations with the departed, it seems to me that animism best fits with the view human nature that that says there is something to us that has consciousness as one of its attributes.  There is a self that has those experiences, including beyond death.

 

The Gita

According to the Gita the world as we know and experience it, prakriti, the material world of nature is unconscious matter. It is uncaused, it has no beginning, will not end. We experience it through our six senses. Five of those we are familiar with: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. The sixth, the mind, is seen as one of the senses because it is how we engage with the world.

But this implies there is a “we” that is engaging with the material world. One of the major themes of the Gita is that what we normally think is “us”, what we normally experience as ourselves being conscious, is enmeshed in the material world, prakriti, and is not the true self. There is an eternal, unchanging consciousness, and one way to describe its relationship with prakriti is to say that prakriti is an eternal expression of its eternal energy. 

This is the true Subject, or “I”, and according to the Gita, it is also our true self. And through the process of enlightenment and transformation taught by Krishna in the Gita, we can come to know this true self. Our small s self, small a atman, can come to know it’s true nature as large S Self, large A Atman.

This is why I have placed the Gita’s view of human consciousness on the side of the continental divide that says that the human self has consciousness, it is conscious. The human self is not, as in Buddha’s view, consciousness itself. 

However, in the Gita, the human self is not simply or merely the self that we think it is or normally experience. Because at the end of the day, the “I” which is speaking in the Gita, Krishna, is an “I” that pervades everything in the cosmos, and in which every other “I” is ultimately to be found, or ultimately exists. The “I” which we might say possesses consciousness is not defined by it, and that I is not merely the “I” which I think of as “myself.”

 

Judaism

In the opening book of the Jewish scriptures, specifically in Genesis 2, we are told that God breathed breath from God’s own mouth into the physical body of the first human, this rendering humanity a living being. This is the origin of the self, or the soul.

We noted in prior Episodes that in some expressions of Jewish thought every object possesses some level of animation, “souled-ness.” Every blade of grass and grain of sand has a soul, in some way. But the human soul is the most complex. In fact, in some streams of Judaism, there are five names or dimensions of the soul:

Nefesh (breath): the soul as the engine of physical life.

Ruach (wind/spirit): the emotional self and "personality."

Neshama (literally another word for breath): the intellectual self. 

Chaya (life): the supra-rational self—the seat of will, desire, commitment and faith.

Yechidah (singularity, or oneness, unity): the essence of the soul, its unity with its source, which is ultimately, the singular essence of the divine One. 

The essence of the soul of a human being, then, is united in some way with the divine Being. Using the Gita’s language, the small s self and soul of human beings is united with the large S self, God. Not, as in the Gita, ultimately the same as the large S self, but united, a “singularity,” which is the term used in some Jewish thought.

 

Christianity

The Christian scriptures, which include the Jewish scriptures, do not specifically address the question of consciousness. We must extrapolate from what the texts do say explicitly about the nature of human beings. 

In a letter written by Paul to Jesus followers in the city of Thessalonica, there is an expression that has become a sort of blueprint in Christian thinking for understanding the nature of human beings:

In the fifth chapter of that letter, verse 23, Paul wrote, “And may your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

That verse expresses the classic formulation of the Christian view, that human beings are body, soul, and spirit. For now, I will leave aside what makes the spirit different from the soul, and with which of those two elements of our human nature consciousness is associated. What is clear is that from a Christian perspective, human consciousness is distinct from the physical body, and so this could be seen to fit with the philosophical traditions of mind-body dualism.

However, distinct does not mean separate, necessarily. I say that because of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. This is a complicated area because on the one hand, Christians generally believe that the human soul (and mind, and by extension, consciousness) is not merely a product of the brain, and so not dependent on the brain for its existence. It is a distinct entity that can continue to exist beyond physical death. On the other hand, the belief in the resurrection of the body seems to suggest some sort of essential entangled connection between consciousness and our physical existence. 

One element of the continued existence of humans beyond death as embodied souls is that the resurrected body is both the same and yet also different than the bodies we have prior to death. Thus, for example, we are told that after his resurrection Jesus was recognizable by his wounds, though not always so, and that his body had the power evidently to move through walls.

The Jewish view that there is a resurrection is similar in a number of respects to the Christian view , however I want to note that in the Jewish scriptures there are a variety of understandings of what happens when a person dies, whether there is a resurrection, or whether the soul continues in anything other than a shadowy state of existence, or even merely as a memory in future generations. 

By the time the Christian scriptures were written, and we should remember that the authors of those texts were with very few exceptions also Jewish, the view of a physical resurrection had become almost universally accepted. But in the Jewish scriptures, this is an idea that developed over time. 

I note too, that in Christian teaching, and in Jewish thought, this is applied at the level of the individual self. This is distinct then from the Gita of course, in which ultimately the individual self, the small a atman, is the same as the large S self.

But what about spirit and soul, as mentioned in that letter I cited? The consensus in Christian thinking might be best described by saying that there is an interconnection between soul and spirit (as there is with the body as well) but that the spirit is what renders connection with the divine possible, while the soul is the seat of emotions, thought, and will.

If that distinction is accepted, then one can say that the soul is where consciousness is “located’ as it were, but that this is different than the spirit.

A text which is very suggestive here is another letter from Paul to a group in the city of Corinth, chapter 2:11, “who knows the thoughts of a person except for the person’s spirit which is in them?”

Interestingly, that same verse describes the inner life of God in the same way, “no one knows God’s thoughts except God’s Spirit.”

Relative to human consciousness the point seems to be that there is something else, something we might say is deeper, than consciousness, namely the spirit, which has consciousness, but is not equated with it. Nor, as we noted when I compared Jewish views with the Gita, is the individual self or spirit the same as the big S Self. However, mysteriously, we might suggest that Paul at least says this is also true of the divine Self: there is a deeper Self than even the divine consciousness.

Paul also went on to add in that same text, that we somehow “have” not only our human spirit, but the divine Spirit as well. More on that later.

 

Islam

I will organize the insights about consciousness that Islam contributes to the conversation around three main sub-topics:

The concept of the soul; types of consciousness, including consciousness of oneself and of the divine; states of awareness and lack of awareness, including death and sleep. 

 

The Soul

The Arabic word nafs (related to the Hebrew word nefesh we noted earlier when speaking of Judaism), refers to the soul. It is the essence of a person, the self. It is the “seat” of our deeper sense of identity and agency. It includes the capacity to perceive and to be aware of one's surroundings and actions, as well as the capacity for thought and understanding. It is the human nafs that enables us to understand of our own character, feelings, motives, and desires.

In other words, the soul of a human being is what enables consciousness, or we might say, it is the instrument of consciousness.

 

Types of Consciousness:

In Islamic thought, especially in the Sufi traditions, there is emphasis on what I would call self-awareness, or consciousness of oneself. This is not self-consciousness as we sometimes use it in English, meaning something like an awkward embarrassment. Instead, this way of using self-consciousness is referring to a deep and honest appraisal of one’s nature and character, good and bad.

However, this emphasis on consciousness of the self is part of the process that aims at cultivating a state of divine consciousness, or taqwa. This involves conscious efforts to develop the habit of being mindful of God.  

What about times when we are not mindful or aware, not conscious?

 

Aware and Not Aware:

In an Islamic perspective we can speak of the self as having two main states. There is the state of consciousness, which we have touched on above. This is a state that the soul or essence of who we are, possesses. We can be aware, but awareness is not who we are. 

One reason I say this is because of the second state of the soul which is the state of death. However, Muslim thinkers speak of death in its permanent state, and as temporary, meaning when we sleep.

Relative to the current topic, the key point is that Islamic thinking about human consciousness places it clearly on the side of the continental divide, the side I have referred to as “we are conscious” or “we have consciousness.”

In very different ways each religious heritage raises the question not only of our human nature, but especially of the relationship of the human self, and human consciousness, to the divine Self and divine Consciousness. This Episode is not the place, nor do I have the space, to probe that question further. I will need to, and I will. There are real differences among the religions in terms of this question. Animism, and Hinduism, and Judaism, and Christianity, and Islam all have a different take. I will explore that.

 

A Lingering Question: Back to Buddha

But notably missing from that list is Buddhism. I asked the question in the last Episode whether Buddha belonged on the side of the divide where I placed him or not. And in this Episode, I admitted I was still wrestling with whether I got it right or not.

Though mainstream Buddhism suggests that we are consciousness, there are streams within Buddhism which suggest that consciousness is connected with something more, something permanent.  In Mahayana Buddhism, the concept of the Buddha-nature, or Buddha-mind, or luminous mind, refers to something akin to a collective or universal consciousness of some sort, which can be shared along with the Buddha who attained it. 

However, it is important to add that even with this caveat, in Buddhist thinking even if there is a self which we can say “has consciousness,” it is not an isolated, individual self in the way most of us use that term.

 

Something More Than the Something More:

In this Episode I have collected some of the insights from physics and philosophy and some religions, insights which see “us” as beings which are conscious, which have consciousness. More than physical beings, more than the flow of awareness. There is a “something: in us or to us more than that. Is there more than that as well? 

We are approaching the point where I will turn to look explicitly at the question of a divine self. And so, as I come near to the end of this Episode, I will offer a poem that wrestles with the question of the human self, thought, consciousness, awareness, and the divine self, a poem called “I and i.” For listeners, that is a big I and a small I, “I and i.”

 

I and i 

“I was going to say something, but a thought never formed”, she said.

We laughed.

But I wondered, “Does this work the other way?”

 

“I was going to think something, but a word never formed.”

 

And there it is: my question already a thought formed in words.

 

A man named Qurtubi said, using words of course,

“Before the worlds, before time, before the angels, 

‘Allah praised himself.’”

 

Did Allah speak to Himself in words? Thoughts?

 

John wrote in words about a word.

A word towards the God who was the word that was towards the God who was, and so on…

 

Was there actually a word? Thought?

 

Then too, there is Om. 

When I say it, it is a word.

Some say it is the sound of the universe, embracing all other sounds within it. 

 

And what are words, but thoughts wrapped in sounds wrapped again

In the thoughts of someone hearing the sounds?

 

There are thoughts that never find words, 

And there are thoughts before thoughts,

Thoughts without thought.

 

Of course, to say so requires the thought that there may be no thoughts, 

And this has required words.

 

There are times, I know, 

When I have spoken words for which I had no thoughts.

What if I thought something for which I had no words?

No one would know.

Would I know? 

 

I cannot be alone in this:

Knowing something undefinable, inexplicable, 

Yet patently, clearly known.

 

“Well then, what is it that you know when you know something you don’t know?” 

Fair question.

 

And here is the rub. 

An answer requires words. 

Words require thoughts,

What if there is no thought, and so, no words for what I know?

Then?

 

Here I am, in the impossible necessity of communicating,

Struggling to stitch and patch a cobbled something,

Like a child’s stick-figure-school-room-picture-of-mommy,

Scratched in crayon on paper atop a glue sticky desk.

Destined for a smile, and a magnet and a refrigerator door.

 

I think in the end these scribbled words disguise 

More than they disclose.

 

This is the way of things:

 

There are things I know, you know, we know,

Rich, creamy, frothing with meaning. 

When we try to churn them down into yellow cubes of words,

We find them melting away,

Butter in a heated pan.

 

And of course, right there, to say that,

I needed words.

And you needed me to use them.

 

I will intend in moments at least, 

 

to

just

stop

 

words.

 

And to stop the thought of thinking.

 

I seek some still, silent, unspoken knowing 

Of whatever precedes words, thoughts.

The knowing before knowing.

 

Qurtubi, John, and the primordial hummers of Om

Will smile at me for this, patiently, indulging me.

Like the mommy taking and loving that child’s crayoned smudges.

 

Long ago they seemed to have found a way to say 

That this wordless knowing 

Is before anything else,

Before words and thoughts,

The word of one speaking to oneself, in praise and delight.

 

I am looking for that place (place is a word for a thought about something surely meaningless here?)

The place where God’s self is knowing God’s self.

 

God’s I and I.

 

A place where I and i.

I to i, and i to I,

Might exist, be, 

In a wordless unknown knowing before knowing. 

 

Somewhere in the depths of God.

 

And Next?

I mentioned that we are approaching the point where I will turn to look explicitly at the question of a divine self. I say in every opening of every Episode of the podcast that I am sharing how I as an artist view the world, humanity, and the divine. However, I have not expressed my own conclusions about how I see humanity yet. And I want to do that…

Until next time.