What is Consciousness?
By Kendra Cherry, About.com Guide
Consciousness refers to your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and environment. Your conscious experiences are constantly shifting and changing. For example, in one moment you may be focused on reading this article. Your consciousness may then shift to the memory of a conversation you had earlier with a co-worker. Next, you might notice how uncomfortable your chair is or maybe you are mentally planning dinner. This ever-shifting stream of thoughts can change dramatically from one moment to the next, but your experience of it seems smooth and effortless.
The conscious experience was one of the first topics studied by early psychologists. Structuralists used a process known as introspection to analyze and report conscious sensations, thoughts, and experiences. American psychologist William James compared consciousness to a stream; unbroken and continuous despite constant shifts and changes. While the focus of much of the research in psychology shifted to purely observable behaviors during the first half of the twentieth century, research on human consciousness has grown tremendously since the 1950s.
What aspects of consciousness to researchers study? Topics such as sleep, dreams, hypnosis, and the affects of psychoactive drugs are just a few of the major topics studied by psychologists.
What is Consciousness?
The state of undivided consciousness is none other than our essential nature we all were born with. We are that truth-awareness-bliss. This state of ultimate truth was not only born with us, but it never left us! This leads to the following question: If it never left us then how we lost track of it? Our false ego sense has intervened. That’s all! False ego sense is nothing but disturbance on the surface of the undivided consciousness; resulting in subject-object relationship where the world of names, shapes, cause, effect, time and space is seen.
Although as an infant we are born as undivided consciousness, however, afterwards, while growing, we are trained and programmed to identify with the body-consciousness of ‘i, me, mine, your’. In the process, side by side, there arises false ego — divided or conditioned consciousness — as one grows from infancy to adolescence. It then gets firmly rooted after we marry and entangle in the achievement of various worldly desires.
“As is the fire within the womb, so is maya outside. The fire of maya is one and the same; creator has staged this play. According to his will, the child is born, and the family is very pleased. Over time, love for the lord wears off, and the child becomes attached to desires; the script of maya runs its course.”
(SGGS p921)
How can undivided become divided? It does not! In reality, undivided ever remains intact, because Absolute cannot be ’cause’ and ‘effect’. If you take something out of infinite, it still remains infinite! With ‘ego-center’ arises the confusion, in which we keep making one error: We take ourselves to be finite, and the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. That conscious principle which is ever present in us, we take to be outside us, and what is outside (the world of gross objects) we take to be in us.
“Continually claiming,’mine, mine’, the mortals are drowned; the fools waste away and die.”
(SGGS p380)
“O lord, what can I say about this illusion; what we deem a thing to be, in reality, it is not like that.”
(SGGS p657)
In order to realize the state of intact consciousness, the men of light urge us to go back to that state of Pure Being called infant-like Consciousness. That infant — which we are even at this very moment — is our Real Self. We must retrace our steps back to That state of Intact Consciousness, where the real ‘i’ is still in its Totality. It was later, on account of the rise of false ego, that it became temporarily confused as ‘I am this or I am that’. Simply put: Once the burden of false self-identifications is abandoned, the state of undivided consciousness shines forth from the behind!
“I have met God through innocent faith, and He has blessed me with peace.”
(SGGS p1307)
“With a childlike, innocent nature, remain detached, turning away from the world.”
(SGGS p1076)
