The Mystery of Consciousness
The Universe is nothing but Consciousness, and in all its appearances reveals nothing but an evolution of Consciousness, from its origin to its end, which is a return to its cause. It is the goal of every "initiatory" religion to teach the way to this ultimate union.
As I sit in my yard among the late afternoon shadows, a baby cottontail peeks out from under a shrub. With nose wriggling up and down, she ventures into the open, pauses, sniffs some more, and begins to nibble blades of grass. A jay calls out raucously. The bunny scampers back under the shrub. After a few minutes she cautiously emerges and again nibbles. A crow caws. The bunny spins about and retreats into the bushes once more.
This baby is obviously conscious. Her behavior tells me that she is aware of sights and sounds around her and is reacting to them. My conscious experience of her tells me that she has conscious experiences, too. I cannot experience her consciousness directly. I am locked into my own world, and she has subjective, private experiences, known only to her. I cannot directly share her inner life, nor she mine. Yet both she and I can observe the conscious actions of others around us.
You have experienced consciousness vividly ever since you were born, and even before birth, while you were still in the womb. Except in dreamless sleep and abnormal unconscious states, you have continuous inner awareness of things around you and of your own sensations, thoughts, and feelings. This awareness is the ground of everything you experience, the background on which all experience arises. The table at which you sit feels solid and heavy, the sunflower in the garden looks yellow, the thrush's song drifting through the trees sounds melodious. But you know about these things only through your consciousness. That is how you can know anything at all, whether "out there" or within your own mind. If you are made unconscious by anesthesia or a blow or when you are in dreamless sleep, the outer and inner worlds cease to exist for you.
Consciousness has a protean quality. It can face outward to the moving traffic or inward to your sense of hurry and anxiety. It can expand to take in a panoramic view or contract to focus on a single tiny bud. It conforms to its changing contents. If your emotions are gloomy, you feel that your consciousness turns gloomy. If you are absorbed in plans for the summer, you experience consciousness as full of plans. If the temperature drops, your consciousness registers coldness. Changes in the contents of consciousness seem like changes in consciousness itself. But consciousness is the changeless background behind changing contents, the silent awareness within which all thoughts, emotions, and perceptions come and go.
Consciousness is a profound mystery that has baffled philosophers, psychologists, theologians, and ordinary people like you and me for centuries. Though consciousness is so intimate and familiar, it is difficult to identify. A dictionary may define the word as "a state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought." Varieties of consciousness listed in the dictionary—such as sentience, awareness, and reflection—have the common characteristic of subjectivity, of knowing from inside. They are what the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin 
called "the within of things" (The Phenomenon of Man 53-74); they are what experience feels like from inside. They are the subjectivity that underlies all experience—the raw feel of awareness that is unmistakable.
In recent decades, an expanding field of inquiry into consciousness has grown up in areas such as cognitive science, neuroscience, social science, extrasensory perception, religious studies, and philosophy. Researchers have looked into such diverse areas as the brain and nervous system, contemplative practices, and quantum mechanics. The unbelievably complex functioning of the brain and its pharmacology have been probed by newly developed tools, and we now know many details about how the brain and nervous system function. The word "qualia" signifies subjective perceptions such as redness in an apple, pain from touching a hot grill, hunger pangs, as well as sensations of anger or grief or joy. But we have no idea what consciousness is or how an intention, an act in consciousness, can set up nervous and muscular impulses that cause an arm to raise or a head to turn. Various states of consciousness have been identified and studied. But these as well as physical correlates to consciousness and changes in the contents of consciousness are not consciousness itself. Like electricity, which we know only by such means as meter readings, motors running, and bulbs lighting up, consciousness in itself defies definition. It remains a mystery.
You can easily observe the changing contents of your consciousness. Right now by a switch of attention you can notice a slight ache in your neck, your back beginning to tire, or the way this book feels in your hands. You can watch thoughts arise and pass away as you consider words on the page, perhaps evoking memories or related ideas. You may feel slight surges of emotion as approval or skepticism arises with thoughts. You can look through a window at a tree and perceive its image in your mind. At any time you can be aware of sensations, emotions, images, and thoughts moving through your stream of consciousness. But you are not aware of the ability to cognize all this, consciousness itself, which stands behind all the changing contents. Though it is always with us, consciousness is ordinarily imperceptible, as the eye that cannot see itself. Yet consciousness is the constant backdrop of all our experience, every moment throughout our whole lifetime. It is the changeless, colorless screen on which life's ever-changing moving pictures take place. We are well aware of the changing shadows but not of the screen on which they play, though we can get a fleeting glimpse of it in still moments between two thoughts.
We feel that our consciousness is confined to what we are aware of at the moment and what we can easily recall. Yet we react to subliminal signals flashed for too short a time for them to register in awareness. Sigmund Freud and generations of psychologists and psychiatrists after him established that the full range of consciousness is far wider than our familiar waking consciousness. William James , a pioneer psychologist and member of the Theosophical Society, said, "Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness."
These "potential forms of consciousness" include sensations, feelings, thoughts, and memories of which we are not aware. Freud himself had a dream in which the Latin name of a particular fern appeared. It turned out that there is such a fern with that name, but he was sure he had never seen or heard of it before. Yet some time later he found the Latin name written in his own hand in a notebook from his studies as a schoolboy: His consciousness somehow retained that distant memory, though it had vanished from his immediate awareness.
Using a metaphor that has become famous, Freud compared waking consciousness to the tip of an iceberg. He explored the "subconscious" beneath that tip, consisting, in his view, of lustful or hostile urges too threatening to be allowed into our awareness. C. G. Jung and others discovered higher, noble urges and wisdom of which we are normally unaware, deep in the "unconscious." Roberto Assiagoli, another psychotherapist, calls this area the "superconscious." He and other transpersonal psychologists deal with spiritual aspects of consciousness that are ordinarily beyond everyday awareness. We have memories, feelings, and thoughts that can easily be brought to awareness, sometimes called "preconscious," but there are also less accessible experiences buried in the deepest regions of the mind.
The contents of the subconscious and the superconscious are within a global consciousness that is larger than ordinary waking awareness. What we are aware of at a given moment is only a small part of our total consciousness. For example, you may have a dream that brings to mind a time when, as a child, you were in the hospital at Christmas time. Your feelings of being abandoned may arise with the memory of the incident. You were unaware that you had this memory until the dream evoked it. Yet, since it was retrievable, it was within the range of your wider consciousness.
How can we use the word conscious for something of which we are not conscious? Since consciousness implies awareness, perhaps we need another word for the range of potential inner experience. Blavatsky seemed to think so when she wrote, ". . . such is the poverty of language that we have no term to distinguish the knowledge not actively thought of from knowledge we are unable to recall to memory" (Secret Doctrine 1:56).
Not only memories but knowledge of transcendental truths are in our wider consciousness, though not our awareness. We know such things without knowing that we know them. In discussing absolute consciousness—undifferentiated consciousness without content—Blavatsky says, "This is not the kind of consciousness that we can manage to distinguish from what appears to us as unconscious" (Secret Doctrine 1:87).
Most of the time we feel encapsulated within our skins and minds, our "space suits." We are aware only of what the senses feed us at any given moment, plus any memories, thoughts, images, and feelings that arise inside us. But there is overwhelming evidence that consciousness can extend beyond the here and now and beyond what we have learned by means of the brain and senses. For example, it is not uncommon for someone to know of danger to, or the death of, a distant loved one.
In addition to such spontaneous incidents, there are thousands of controlled experiments on record showing that thoughts can be transferred from one person to another over distances. In one series of experiments, subjects were hooked to a device that measures electrodermal activity—an indication of the degree of activity in the autonomic nervous system, which controls functions like heartbeat and digestion. People with illnesses such as ulcers, high blood pressure, and anxiety neurosis have overactive autonomic functions. In the experiments, influencers tried to calm or stimulate autonomic activity in the patients, who were in another room by themselves. The influencers sent the patients mental imagery suitable to the mood they were trying to induce, sometimes themselves becoming calm or excited. Although the patients did not know when the thirty-second "influence" periods came, they consistently showed an increase in the intended direction during these periods. They sometimes reported getting images that matched the ones beamed at them. One subject reported a vivid impression of the influencer coming into his room, walking behind his chair, and shaking it vigorously. The influencer, trying to activate the subject from afar, had used just that image (Dossey, Healing Words 181).
Knowledge at a distance has been confirmed by years of controlled experiments in "remote viewing," underwritten by the United States government. In these experiments, typically one person drives to a distant spot, which he explores. While he is exploring, his partner in the lab tries to get in tune with him. She describes images that come into her mind while he is exploring. Judges report that these images match the place far more than would be expected by chance. The researchers believe that everyone has latent ability to sense something at a distance (Murphy, The Future of the Body 279-82). "Nonlocality" is a term borrowed from quantum physics to describe this ability of consciousness to extend beyond the immediate locality of the person who is conscious. It has also been referred to as "field consciousness," a term that suggests a continuum of consciousness in which space is no impediment.
There is reason to believe that consciousness is not just a byproduct of the intricate arrangement of complex molecules in the brain, as materialistic science has traditionally held. Theosophy teaches, and some contemporary scientists concur, that the entire universe is conscious, that even apparently inert minerals have some degree of sensitivity or sentience. The biologist and Nobel laureate George Wald concluded, with some of the "monumental physicists" who first explored the contemporary realm of subatomic particles, that some type of mind or consciousness is in all matter, so that mind and matter are twin aspects of reality. According to Wald, "One has no more reason to ask that matter occur without some aspect of mind accompanying it than to ask for radiation that is waves and not simultaneously particles" (Theosophical Research Journal, 43).
Teilhard de Chardin held that there is an inner, conscious side to everything, animate and inanimate, "the within of things." He argued that any phenomenon that exists in a highly developed form in nature must exist in a rudimentary way throughout nature. "It is impossible to deny that, deep within ourselves, an 'interior' appears at the heart of beings, as if it were seen through a rent. This is enough to ensure that, in one degree or another, this 'interior' should obtrude itself as existing everywhere in nature from all time" (The Phenomenon of Man, 56). Thus, he argues, consciousness, which is highly developed and apparent in human beings, must exist in some rudimentary form, even in mineral matter. Wald concurs: "The whole cosmos, if it is to produce consciousness in creatures like us, must be of the nature of consciousness beforehand" (ibid 44).
Teilhard's and Wald's view is exactly the Theosophical one. According to Blavatsky, "Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception. We men must remember that, simply because we do not perceive any signs which we can recognize—of consciousness—say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either 'dead' or 'blind' matter" (Secret Doctrine 1:274). The root of consciousness is always present with matter. Transpersonalists like the psychiatrist John Nelson concur that consciousness is nonphysical and interacts with matter everywhere. According to the psychologist Gardner Murphy, this does not disparage the flowering of consciousness in humans but rather glorifies the primal ooze from which life arose.
Ordinarily, we experience ourselves as separate and apart from the whole of things. But according to John Nelson, "The ordinary state of consciousness is neither innate nor normal but simply one specialized tool for coping with the ordinary environment and people" (Healing the Split 15). At the level of pure consciousness, behind the changing contents, we are one with everything, a focus of that which is undivided and universal. The seemingly separate self is an illusion. The philosopher Carlos Suares holds that in consciousness there can be no compartments, no partitions or dividing walls. Without our concepts of who we are, what groups we belong to, and what our roles are as opposed to the roles of others, there are no divisions. Blavatsky tells us that "Consciousness (as such) is ubiquitous and can neither be localized nor centered in any particular subject, nor can it be limited" (Secret Doctrine 1:387). One pervasive consciousness runs through us and everything else. As numberless ponds and even muddy puddles reflect the one moon, the light of consciousness in each of us has but one source. Those who have experienced this consciousness in its purity tell us that, in spite of outer distinctions, inwardly we are all one. The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi says that in the transcendental awareness where there is Being alone, "There is no you, no I, no he" (Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality 314). As the mystic poet Rumi put it, "I, you, he, she, we, / In the garden of mystic lovers / These are not true distinctions" (Moyers, The Language of Life 57).
Our consciousness is not really "our" consciousness at all, but rather is universally shared. Our ordinary experience of consciousness is a pale reflection of atma, modified and stepped down through our principles and the vehicles in which consciousness works. Lama Govinda, deep student of Tibetan Buddhism, commenting on the Lankavatara Sutra, says that intellectual consciousness (concrete mind) sorts and judges sense impressions, followed by attractions and repulsions. "Universal consciousness," on the other hand, "is compared to the ocean, on the surface of which currents, waves, and whirlpools are formed, while its depths remain motionless, unperturbed, pure, and clear" (Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism 73-74). Mind is the focal point between surface and depth consciousness. Atma, the one infinite consciousness, is focused in us as individuals.
The fundamental Reality from which the universe arises is called Parabrahm in Indian philosophy. Like the original fireball posited by the Big Bang theory, the potential for everything that unfolds throughout time inheres in it. We cannot fathom its nature, but the Upanishads and other traditional sources characterize it as Consciousness. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says, ". . . the supreme Spirit is an ocean of pure consciousness boundless and infinite" (Mascaro 132). Blavatsky refers to the One Reality as "the field of Absolute Consciousness" (Secret Doctrine, 1:15).
Consciousness creates the world in which we live. You can see this in your everyday sense experience. For example, you look at a sunflower and perceive its petals as bright yellow. But what has happened, objectively speaking? Light of 590 millimicron wavelength has bounced into your eyes and stimulated your nervous system. Your brain responded to the stimulus, and you saw yellow. But there is no yellow in your retina or in the electrical and chemical events in your brain. Nor does yellow exist in the wavelength associated with it. Your consciousness somehow superimposes the experience of yellow onto these events.
We do not see "the thing in itself," as philosophers put it. Perception of reality requires a transmitter from the external world and a subject as receiver. All individual receivers create their own pictures of reality; we each create our own world, depending on our unique inner filters and our state of consciousness at the moment. We see only what comes through, and that is colored by our sense organs and also by our minds. Indeed, the way we perceive the world is heavily influenced by our worldview, attitudes, expectations, ideas, and preconceptions, as well as by our physical organs. As Lama Anagarike Govinda says, "Our consciousness . . . by its selective faculties of perception and co-ordination determines the type of world in which we live. A different kind of consciousness would create a different world around us, whatever the . . . raw material of the universe may be" (Way of the White Clouds 123).
According to Theosophy, just as we create our private world through consciousness, so the whole of the manifested universe is brought into being by Universal Consciousness, the subjective side of the universal process, called atma or Brahman or God. As the Indian sage Shankaracharya asserted, Brahman is Absolute Consciousness. This view of consciousness as a fundamental attribute of the divine is taught, not only by Eastern philosophers, but also by Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart, by Pythagorean and Platonic philosophers, and even by some scientific theorists. As the ancient Hermetic principle states, the world works "from within without," from the inner domain of pure atma or consciousness to the dense material world. Consciousness precedes all forms and indeed calls forth forms into being as vehicles for its expression. It conceives, constructs, and subsequently governs visible matter. As George Wald declares, "Mind or consciousness is a constant pervasive presence guiding matter" (ibid 43).
Some quantum physicists are finding corroboration for this ancient view of the primacy of consciousness. For example, Amit Goswami, a physicist and former researcher for the Institute of Noetic Science, finds in the behavior of quanta support for the view of consciousness as universal and impartible. Quanta are discrete bits of energy emitted by objects such as electrons and photons. These unimaginably small bits of matter and energy do strange things that defy Newtonian physics and common sense. For example, electrons instantaneously jump from one orbit around the nucleus of an atom to another orbit, without traversing the space between. Further defying Newtonian physics, unless they are observed and measured, subatomic particles spread out and exist as probability waves in more than one place. They show up in diffraction pictures as fuzzy orbits or clouds. Electrons can pass through two slits at the same time. But when measured by tracking them in a cloud chamber, they always appear in a single place, as particles. The conscious act of observing them brings them from a cloud of uncertainty into space-time reality as particles. Somehow consciousness and the choice of an experiment select whether they appear as a particle or a wave.
Furthermore, if two electrons or photons interact for a period of time and then are separated, even by a great distance, they still affect each other. For example, measuring one and collapsing it from a wave to a particle state simultaneously collapses the other one. Such instantaneous influence without any signals in space-time is called "nonlocality." Some physicists recognize that the two quanta objects are connected in a transcendent domain, out of space-time, where the probability waves of quantum physics exist. The physicist Henry Stapp finds reason to believe that "the fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time but generates events that can be located in space-time" (Goswami, Self-Aware Universe 61).
Goswami makes a case for this transcendent domain as nonlocal consciousness. He espouses "monistic idealism," the view that consciousness, not matter, is primary and is the ground of being. He points out that both material objects, such as balls, and mental objects, such as the thought of balls, are known only by means of consciousness. We never experience a material object without an associated mental object, so material objects and mental objects are both objects of consciousness. Goswami quotes C. G. Jung as saying it is "probable that psyche [subjective experience] and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing" (ibid 127).
According to monistic idealism, our consciousness, as the subject that experiences an object like a ball, is the same consciousness that is the ground of being. But we do not recognize our familiar waking consciousness, in which we feel separate and discrete, as this universal consciousness, which transcends space and time and is all-pervading, not limited to what we can see or know about locally. Writer and Theosophist Norman Hankin explains how we can experience the ultimate Ground: "The path through human consciousness . . . can be opened by ourselves by simply retreating from particular objects and centering ourselves in our ground consciousness, in that proper 'being-as-consciousness' which is what we as selves are .... When we withdraw our gaze from . . . items in the 'foreground' and refocus in (not on) their background . . . then we experience being in the interface of ourselves and the ultimate Ground" (The Theosophist 137).
Although consciousness occurs in everything that is, only in the human kingdom do we find self-consciousness. You have known for as long as you can remember that you are different from your brother, from your car, from the plants in your garden. You may wake up in a strange place and wonder: Where am I? But you never wonder: Who am I? You have had a sense of being a self—yourself—that (except for cases of severe amnesia) stays with you through profound changes as you grow older through all the seasons of life. You have a persistent sense of I-am-ness, of egoship, of being yourself and no one else. As Annie Besant says, "The Self is that conscious, feeling, ever-existing one that in each of us knows himself as existing" (Thought Power 13).
Yet we have not always had this seemingly inborn sense. Newborn babies have to learn to differentiate between themselves and what is around them. Somewhat older babies look at one of their hands or feet, seeming to wonder what that strange object is. When they are a little older their sense of self includes their body parts, and they know that their body is part of themselves.
Researcher John Broughton has mapped the developmental stages of knowing oneself, of self-consciousness (Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality 268-70). He asked individuals from preschool age to early adulthood, "What or where is your self?" He found that toddlers feel that the self is "inside" and reality is "outside." Slightly older children believe that the self is identified with the physical body, but the mind controls the self and can tell it what to do: the mind is a big person and the body is a little person. At ages seven to twelve, the self is not a body but a person, a social role that includes both mind and body. At ages eleven to seventeen, the social personality or role is seen as a false outer appearance, different from the true inner self. These young people begin to glimpse the self as the nature that remains itself amid changes in mental contents. Reflective self-awareness dawns, so that they can entertain thoughts and feelings independent of the social situation. At later stages, the self as observer is distinguished from the ideas we have about who we are, or our self-concept.
Adults at the highest levels of development identify with an observing self or witness as distinguished from the outer, objective self or persona. They no longer think of themselves exclusively as the body, persona, ego, and mind, but they can integrate these in a unified fashion. Over many years, the sense of self evolves from simply differentiating oneself from the environment to identifying with the awareness or consciousness that stands behind the changing elements that make up the objective self (Wilber, ibid 260-62).
Animals may have a rudimentary sense of self-consciousness, but they probably cannot differentiate themselves from their appetites, instincts, and actions. Dolphins can be trained to modify their behavior, but can they examine their motivation or replay and evaluate an incident? Can they address their own mind and its content or stand back from these and identify with the consciousness through which they know anything?
Since self-consciousness is apparently a human characteristic, it is surprising that Blavatsky says, "Every atom in the Universe has the potentiality of self-consciousness in it" (Secret Doctrine 1:107). This is a powerful statement of her conviction that consciousness exists in varying forms everywhere, not only as we know it. She also says that there is no potentiality for self-consciousness in pure spirit or consciousness: "It is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as 'I am I' " (ibid 1:15). Pure consciousness or atma must become involved in the principles and the vehicles of matter before a sense of self as opposed to other can arise.
Blavatsky links self-consciousness with mind or manas, which is the hallmark of human beings. One function of the mind is to separate and divide, to classify things into compartments. This ability creates order from the confusion of the many sense impressions that impinge on our minds. But in this process of differentiating and pigeonholing, without especially meaning to do so, we divide the world into two basic categories—myself and everything else. Ordinarily, we experience ourselves as a subject who is aware of objects. Even our own thoughts and feelings appear as objective to the subject who is ourselves.
This subject-object split pervades our experience most of the time. We set ourselves, as observer, apart from any contents that arise in our consciousness. This setting-apart leads to experiencing ourselves as separate and alienated from everything else. Yet both the subject we identify with and the objects we observe occur in one consciousness that has become polarized into subject and object. Both of these vanish in the light of atma, the ground consciousness behind them, which has been described as a boundless field of awareness with no subject, no object. Blavatsky says, "Absolute Consciousness contains the cognizer, the thing cognized and the cognition, all three in itself and all three one" (ibid 1:56).
The mind conceives of the subjective "I" as an entity with continuity. It appears to us that we are an ongoing, definite self apart from everything else. But a deep awareness of inner processes reveals that this sense of self comes from stringing memories together. As many meditation masters have discovered, our usual sense of an independent "I" is an illusion, a crystallized concept in our minds. Observing the contents of the mind reveals only passing sensations, thoughts, emotions, memories, and images, with no self encapsulated anywhere in them. What we usually think of as "I" is a reference point that orients us in the rushing stream of changing contents of consciousness. The twentieth-century sage, Ramana Maharshi, says, "Since the Self, which is pure Consciousness, cognizes everything, it is the Ultimate Seer . . . . All the rest: ego, mind, body, etc., are merely its objects; so each one of them except the Self or pure Consciousness is a merely externalized object and cannot be the true Seer" (Wilber, Spectrum of Consciousness 71). If we learn to extricate ourselves from the changing stream of the contents of consciousness, we can truly know who we are.
What we take to be a separate, individualized ego that plans and chooses is a secondary entity. It is a localization in time and space of pure, undivided cosmic consciousness. Amit Goswami says it is brought into being by an individual brain-mind and its belief that it is the body-mind. He and other physicists such as Erwin Schroedinger hold that the subject of experience is a single universal subject for everyone, not our personal ego. Schroedinger said, "Consciousness is a singular for which there is no plural." Fundamentally, our consciousness is consciousness of Being or, one could say, of God—transcendent, out of time and space, beyond the subject-object split. Goswami says that consciousness has no other source, for it is all there is. In other words, atma and Brahman are one, or as said by the German mystic Meister Eckhart speaking of his mystical apprehension, "I receive an impulse which shall bring me above all the angels . . . In this breakthrough I discover that I and God are one" (Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality 311).
Yet at a level deeper than our tendency for egotistical self-centeredness, there is an immortal center of being in us, our localization in the universal field of atma. Atma is the most difficult of the principles to understand because it is both a localized center of consciousness in a human being (jivatma) and a continuous field of consciousness. As the immortal center of each individual, it takes on a vehicle of buddhi, the most ethereal of the principles or fields. This combination of atma and buddhi is called the "monad" by Blavatsky. It is "the immortal part of man which reincarnates," also called "the Unity, the One," but also means "the duad, atma-Buddhi" (Theosophical Glossary 216). It is the "pilgrim," our permanent locus of consciousness throughout our long evolutionary journey in the fields. Our fundamental sense of being a self is a reflection of this abiding focus of consciousness.
Yet, though atma-buddhi in each of us is individual, it is not separate from universal consciousness, the One Life. Blavatsky says it is "the egotistical . . . principle in man, due to our ignorance which separates our 'I' from the Universal One-Self" (ibid 10).
As the above discussion shows, the word "self" can be used in various ways. Here "self" signifies the personality; that is, the physical body, emotions, and concrete or lower mind. The philosophical or higher mind, intuition, and spiritual will is called the "transpersonal Self," as explained earlier. Atma as Brahman, the continuous field of consciousness or ultimate Ground of Being, is designated as "Self" or "One Self."
Our ability to observe what goes on within us makes it possible for us to think abstractly and to use symbols, which are principally human characteristics. By stepping outside our experience, we can give names and symbols to the things we have experienced and mentally map them. The psychologist Rollo May states that "the capacity to transcend the immediate situation is the basic and unique characteristic of human existence" (May, Angel, and Ellenberger, Existence 75). This capacity is the result self-awareness: "The mere awareness of oneself as a being in the world implies the capacity to stand outside and look at one's self and the situation and to assess and guide one's self by an infinite variety of possibilities" (ibid 74).
You can study the symbols on a map and decide on the best route to your vacation hideaway. You can imagine the experiences you would have if you choose one college or one career instead of another. You can be guided by the pros and cons of any decision you have to make. This ability to transcend the situation enhances our power to control our lives and thus enhances our sense of self, as we experience ourselves as a center of choice and of action. The use of computers has revolutionized our ability to foresee the results of various decisions, as we study computer models of the outcomes of ideas before they are put into practice.
Our ordinary experience does not tell us that we are part of universal Consciousness, one with the divine. We feel confined within our body, mind, and emotions, with which we usually identify ourselves, because our principles and their various vehicles or fields heavily color our conscious experience. As explained before, we do not experience pure consciousness in itself but only its contents mixed with the characteristics of the principles. As Annie Besant points out, "Mind unconsciously modifies what it sees as though through colored glasses and presents a combination of itself and the object perceived" (Thought Power 26).
The principles are aspects of the one undivided consciousness, as electricity and magnetism are aspects of the one electromagnetic field. Electricity can produce many effects. Plug in your toaster, and its filaments glow with heat. Turn on your stereo, and sound fills the air. Flip the switch on your wall, and your room lights up. One electrical force produces those very different effects, depending on the machinery it operates through. Similarly, consciousness operates in many modes, depending on the particular principles it is energizing.
Consciousness working through the mental field as manas wells up as mind-consciousness or mental cognition. Consciousness working through the emotional field wells up as emotions such as anger or excitement or boredom. Emotion is the instrument by which we as the knower vividly experience our inner and outer worlds. Both mind and emotion are instruments used to obtain knowledge. All the principles and their sheaths are the means by which the supreme consciousness is brought under the spell of a seemingly separate personal self.
Mental, emotional, and other differentiations within the one consciousness are atma's latent potentials, which embodied life draws out into active powers. Our ability to cognize, to remember, to use logic, to visualize, to plan ahead; flashes of sudden comprehension or creativity; our capacity to feel love and hate, elation and despair, excitement and boredom; even our physical perceptions such as of hot and cold—all these and more are powers inherent in our principles. The principles reveal the orderly structure latent in atma, just as the colors of the rainbow are latent in clear light. Blavatsky describes the principles as "seven individual and fundamental aspects of the One Universal Reality in Kosmos and in man" (Theosophical Glossary 262). Elsewhere she says, "We divide man into seven principles .... These principles are all aspects of one principle, and even this principle is but a temporary and periodical ray of the One eternal and infinite Flame or Fire" (Collected Writings 10:335). We can think of the principles and powers as luminous shadows that reveal something of the light of atma while concealing its fullness.
These seven differentiations as planes and principles operate throughout the cosmos, not only in us humans. As physicists posit a unified field encompassing all known physical fields, atma, the One Life, Brahman, God can be thought of as a unified field in which all the principles, fields, and levels of the cosmos inhere. We are each a microcosm of the great macrocosm, according to Theosophy and other wisdom traditions; the structure of our nature mirrors that of the universe. The cosmos itself has fields or spheres of mentality and emotionality that are evoked by living beings. Not only consciousness but sentience and intelligence exist everywhere. We can see sentience in plants as they react to light, and intelligence working in them as they unconsciously unfold geometric patterns in their flowers. Animals display intelligence and emotion as they protect their young. Thus, each of us, far from being separate and independent, has our being in a system of interpenetrating universal fields at different levels. We are supported by and are part of the entire cosmos.
Blavatsky explains that atma in itself cannot be effective in the world without a material vehicle in which to manifest itself. But she is not referring to physical matter only. Each of the human principles is an expression of a universal field or "plane," a term used by Blavatsky and other earlier Theosophical writers. These fields interpenetrate each other. They are intermediate states that range from the filmiest supersensual buddhic to the dense physical world.
Each level is characterized by its own unique kind of matter. The Secret Doctrine (1:139) says, "Just as a human being is composed of seven principles, differentiated matter in the solar system exists in seven different conditions." There are seven such levels that correspond to the seven human principles such as the physical, vital, and emotional. The matter in all except the physical is too rarefied for our senses to register, but it is still matter. The matter of the emotional level is sometimes referred to as "astral" matter because of its luminous or "starry" quality. Matter at the mental level is called "mental" matter, though it, too, is luminous.
The vehicles through which atma operates in physical and superphysical matter are sometimes called "bodies" or, in the Indian tradition, "sheaths." Blavatsky's descriptions, and much more the Indian ones, were written before the development of field theory in physics. Today the principles and their vehicles and the "planes" that support them are often described as fields. In physics, a field is a region in space in which an energy, such as magnetism, acts in an organizing way upon physical matter. Similarly, each nonmaterial principle organizes the superphysical matter associated with it.
You probably experienced the seemingly miraculous action of a field in elementary school. You were given a bar magnet to explore and play with. You discovered that if you point one end (the negative pole) toward bits of iron, the bits race over empty space to clamp onto the magnet. If you point the other end (the positive pole), the iron bits spring away from the magnet. A Laplander, who lectured in Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1940s, described how Laplanders hunted with the help of magnetism. Subsisting on reindeer through the long Arctic nights, they would look up at the aurora borealis, that tenuous aura of light and color caused by conditions in the earth's magnetic field. The deer pawed the snow looking for moss, striking magnetic stones underneath, which disturbed the magnetic field. The disturbance appeared as ripples in the aura borealis, a giveaway of the deer's location!
Just as a magnet affects the position of iron bits around it or magnetic changes on the ground affect the aurora borealis, so similarly consciousness affects the fields associated with the human principles. At one moment you might stir up the emotional field by powerful surges of feeling. At another time you might stimulate the mental field by concentrated thought. You bring buddhi or the intuitive field into life from time to time as you catch glimmerings from the domain of unlearned knowledge or you sense oneness. Sometimes you can evoke the will aspect of atma as you make life decisions and commitments. When our consciousness becomes active in these fields, our principles also become active at various levels. Consciousness expresses itself in the world through these vehicles of matter—shadows of itself.
All the fields interpenetrate one another, just as the electromagnetic and gravitational fields do; our principles are interdependent and inseparable in manifestation. This interdependence is borne out by the work of health professionals like Bernie Siegel, Joan Borysenko, and Larry Dossey, who have shown that health involves not only the physical level but mental, emotional, and spiritual levels as well. You can see for yourself that every thought, even if abstract, touches off some degree of emotion, and every emotion that arises is accompanied by at least some degree of thought. Thought and feeling are so closely related that we really "feel-think" or "flink," as it has been put humorously. We cannot modify one of our principles without also changing the others in some measure. Even at the higher levels, as will be seen in later chapters, the will is intertwined with desire, and the intuition or buddhi is reflected in emotions.
We are normally not aware of the sphere of luminous matter called the "aura," in which each of us exists. The aura is composed of matter at the emotional and mental levels of our consciousness. This matter changes in response to whatever we are experiencing at the moment. When you feel a rush of affection for your child, it glows pink. When you get angry at your computer, lurid red appears. Think strongly of someone, and a picture of her face may appear at the mental level of your aura. Or contemplate the beauty and order behind all life, and a symmetrical mandala-like figure appears. Clairvoyants with paranormal vision perceive such effects in the aura, though projections and distortions are common in most clairvoyance.
According to many clairvoyant descriptions, the aura is seen as shining lights that constantly move and change. In her book The Personal Aura, Dora Kunz says, "To me the higher dimensions are forms of radiant energy related to light . . . . Clairvoyance may be an instrument which makes some otherwise invisible wavelengths and frequencies come within the range of perception" (14). The emotional or astral levels of our being are literally luminous-reflections of the atma in moving light. As mentioned, astral means "starry." Higher levels may also be experienced as light, appearing luminescent to clairvoyant vision. Even the physical body has a counterpart in subtler matter, the vital body as it is called, which is the medium through which the universal energy of prana enlivens the physical body (chapter 3).
We rarely experience pure consciousness in itself because, as explained, our emotional, mental, and other fields so strongly affect what we experience. In addition, the vehicles easily take on habits and conditioning and automatically repeat whatever we practice. You can brush your teeth, type a letter, or drive a car without telling your body what to do. It automatically repeats a familiar action. In the same way, emotions and thoughts repeat on their own. Thoughts of loved ones come up unbidden, as does worry about paying bills, or annoyance when a salesperson phones during dinner. No one wants to feel depression, but it pops up by itself from time to time. Repetitive thoughts and attitudes like disapproval or criticism intrude, though you may want to be loving and accepting. Nietzsche complained that a thought would come to him as it will, not as he willed. William James said that, rather than saying "I think," one should say "thought goes on."
Instances of automatic action like those described in the preceding paragraph show that the vehicles have a kind of semiconscious life of their own that is not necessarily in harmony with you as their central consciousness. Your body wants to indulge in a second helping of ice cream, though you want to lose weight. Your emotions want you to stay up late watching a scary movie on television, though you want to get enough rest and be alert for work the next morning. Such conflicts are brought to life in the young Jiddu Krishnamurti's short treatise At the Feet of the Master, which advises us to learn to differentiate between ourselves as the consciousness and the various fields we inhabit. We do not see things in the light of pure consciousness but rather through the coloration of the fields and their conditioning. The conditioning is a property of the fields or sheaths, not of the consciousness that inhabits them.
The aging Joseph Campbell was able to see himself as consciousness. In a television conversation, Bill Moyers asked Campbell how he felt about old age and dying. Campbell said he wasn't upset by his body deteriorating. Then he asked rhetorically, "Am I the bulb or the light?" He knew himself as consciousness, not its vehicle. Spiritual insight leads to detachment from the contents of consciousness—our thoughts, opinions, emotions, attitudes, roles, status, sensations, and body. And it leads to a realization of ourselves as atma, the consciousness in which all the contents arise. Thoreau saw himself as consciousness, the witness outside the stream of thoughts and actions. He wrote that he was conscious of a part of himself that yet was not a part of himself but a spectator that noted his experience but did not take part in it. This "spectator," he felt, was no more himself than any other person.
Imagine being in an isolation tank. You are floating in warm water that is the same temperature as your body. You cannot see anything because your eyes are covered, and "white noise" is fed into your ears. There are no sensations for you to focus on. In addition to this sensory deprivation, you have managed to calm your emotions so that they are quiet, and your mind has stopped churning up its usual stream of thoughts. All familiar experiences are stilled. What would you experience in such a state? Only pure consciousness without content, bare awareness in itself. You would not be distracted by your principles and their vehicles but would be thrown back to primordial consciousness, simply the ability to cognize or know.
Ordinarily, people cannot bear sensory deprivation for long. Subjects studied in isolation tanks begin to hallucinate and thus give content to their empty consciousness. But for a meditator who gradually develops a mind that can release all content, an experience of this emptiness is considered a high state of meditation in some systems. A taste of it helps us disentangle ourselves from the hooks of our minds, emotions, and bodies.
The Buddha made it clear that suffering comes from clinging to life and to our notions about ourselves. A glimpse of emptiness momentarily frees us from the roles, attitudes, goals, and emotions that we ordinarily identify with. Such glimpses begin to loosen our hold on our idea of who we are, and we see ourselves as something different from the changing conditions in which we usually live. At such moments we drop our worries and concerns, detach from our roles in life, and rest in simple being. When we can momentarily shake free from our vehicles and their conditioning, we can hold life more lightly and let in more joy.
Training is needed to accomplish this disidentification. We need to train our personal mind so that it is not so much engrossed in self-centered thoughts. We can do so because as humans we have self-consciousness and can observe our thoughts and emotions objectively. By cultivating the standpoint of the witness, we can come to use the powers of our principles and vehicles rather than being used by them. We override their semiconscious life, and they become instruments on which we as consciousness play, as the pianist plays on piano keys. The keys can make their own sounds, but only the musician playing on them can make music. I. K. Taimni says a goal of spiritual training is "wielding with perfect mastery the powers and faculties belonging to all the planes in carrying out the divine Will" (Way of Self-Discovery 41).
Deep listening is also a way to experience pure consciousness beyond the duality of subject and object—of me as opposed to something else. Jean Klein writes, "When you listen without being aggressive or resisting, your whole body becomes this listening, it is not confined to the ears. Everything surrounding you is included in this global listening and ultimately there is no longer a listener and something listened to. You are then on the threshold of nonduality" (I Am 52).
Theosophy teaches that through life experiences—both happy and tragic—we are unfolding the potentials of atma through our principles. We, as the human species, develop ever more refined powers of mind, emotion, intuition, and will. We are also penetrating into superconscious realms of experience beyond the personality. We are broadening our boundaries and thus enlarging our sense of self. We are evolving toward the goal of conscious unity with all.
Meditations and spiritual practices can help move us toward that goal as they purify the mind and remove obstructions to the spontaneous revelation of atma. Teachers like Jiddu Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi emphasize the importance of achieving an unobstructed consciousness, in which all our experience, even awareness of the superconscious, takes place. When we achieve that goal, we will know that the consciousness we experience is one in its nature with universal consciousness. Father Bede Griffith, a Catholic priest who founded an ashram in India, understood the universality of consciousness when he wrote:
We are slowly recovering . . . the knowledge which was universal in the ancient world, that there is no such thing as matter apart from mind or consciousness. Consciousness is latent in every particle of matter and the mathematical order which science discovers in the universe is due to the working of the universal consciousness in it. In human nature this latent consciousness begins to come into actual consciousness, and as human consciousness develops it grows more and more conscious of the universal consciousness in which it is grounded. (Anderson, Noetic Science Review 27)
We, ourselves, are fundamentally no other than that primal consciousness at the base of all that is: atma. Our deepest, pure, unqualified consciousness, free of any content, is one with universal consciousness. Seers and sages testify that, by stripping away all objects from consciousness, it is possible to experience this most basic Self, our primary consciousness. As Shankaracharya says in The Crest Jewel of Wisdom, "The wise man is one who understands that the essence of Brahman and Atman is Pure Consciousness, and who realizes their absolute identity." Or in the words of Annie Besant, "The SELF of the universe and the SELF of man are one, and in knowing the SELF we know That which is at the root of the universe and of man alike"(The Self and Its Sheaths 5).
Note: The Seven Human Powers by Shirley Nicholson may be purchased from the Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Illinois. Phone: 630-665-0130 Web: www.questbooks.net