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Vedanta of Consciousness

What is Consciousness? How do we experience our self and the world around us? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? What is awareness and self-awareness? What is spirituality? Can Physics explain consciousness and may be spirituality? Is a state of consciousness only a result of irritating a nervous tissue as the neurologists would say?

 

Let’s seek some answers to these questions. Classical mechanics cannot explain consciousness and spirituality. However, scales much smaller may prove useful. Quantum is the smallest possible discrete unit of a physical property, such as energy or matter. So, one can construct quantum physics, quantum chemistry, quantum mind, and so on.

 

Quantum physics is the study of matter and energy at the most fundamental level. Quantum phenomena happen all around us, all the time. So, can Quantum Physics explain Consciousness, since our mind also is matter and energy? Whereas a quantum state in “superposition” is an addition of other distinct quantum states, a group of particles is “entangled” when the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the quantum state of the other particles. This is an important articulation since the brain’s function and our consciousness is also similar. Simply put, our consciousness is a superposition and entanglement of matter and energy in its quantum form. This is what gives our mind incredible power of thought and consciousness.

 

Spirituality is the recognition that there is something greater than us, something more to being human than our sensory experience which could be cosmic or divine in nature. As human beings, do we cognize the objects of experience not as they actually are, but as they appear to us under our sensibility, a phenomenon seen in Quantum Mechanics?

 

Are we all only sentient creatures capable of sensing and responding to this world? Actually, consciousness has many levels of reality. At the primary level it is bodily in nature, but rises to higher levels, to the spirit consciousness or self-consciousness. However, when we move to higher levels of consciousness, do we lose the body consciousness?

 

Vedanta in Hinduism and even Buddhism points out that the body becomes conceptually detached when we experience higher levels of consciousness. Why? Was our body constraining our consciousness from generating new meanings of consciousness? Is a highest consciousness a body-detached consciousness?

 

Is there a soul in a human being? If it is, then why is a human being not sensible of it in sleep. However, our being sensible of it is only in our thoughts, though the question is, is it essential to our thought as well as to our personal identity?

 

In the western philosophy of mind, mind-body dualism denotes the view that mental phenomena are non-physical and that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Hence it is a relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object.

 

But Vedanta the ultimate “Darshana” in Hindu Philosophy speaks of infinitely many degrees of consciousness and perhaps some degrees even of the unconscious. The western philosophy defines six degrees such as Awareness, Bias, Consciousness, Hypnosis, Priming, Sleep and Trance.

 

In Advaita Vedanta, consciousness levels are absolute or ‘brahma–chaitanya’, cosmic or Isvara-caitanya, individual or jiva-chaitanya and indwelling consciousness or sakshi-chaitanya. However, the true nature of consciousness is singular and non-dual.  So, we experience absolute existence or ‘sat’, pure consciousness or ‘chit’ and bliss or ‘ananda’. It considers mind as the subtle form of matter, where body is the gross form and consciousness, is considered finer than ‘mind matter’ and hence all pervasive, omnipresent and omniscient, the ‘Brahman’.

 

We may distinguish conscious from nonconscious states by the intra-mental dynamics. Actually, it is much higher than merely a complex interplay between the neurons and synapses, the neuronal junctions which transmit electric nerve impulses between two neurons or between a neuron and a gland or muscle cell or an effector.

 

Can we actually explain consciousness through naturalism arguing that all that happens is natural supporting it by science or by empiricism which argues that knowledge comes only from sensory experience or by reductionism where we reduce a complex phenomenon to simple events?

 

Can we answer consciousness in the theory of non-duality as in Vedanta? Probably we need to look at the metaphysics of consciousness or ‘consciousness of being consciouses. General metaphysical theories explain consciousness in the ontological schemes, which is reality as it is. It is not fully perceived by this or, that individual consciousness.

 

Is thought and consciousness the same? Or is a thought necessary for consciousness to prevail? Electromagnetic fields are regarded as real in the physical world. The strength of such a field will be based on the particle behaviour that makes the field. However, the field alone cannot be seen as particle behaviour. Similarly, “consciousness” refers to a component of reality that we see in conscious states and not merely a nominalization of the adjective “conscious”.

 

Metaphysical theories that have attempted to define consciousness are higher-order theories, representational theories, interpretative narrative theories, cognitive theories, neural theories, quantum theories and nonphysical theories.

 

Higher-order theory is self-awareness. A desire to understand the brahman involves being in two mental states; one must have both a desire to understand Brahman and also a higher-order state that Brahman exists. Unconscious mental states lack the relevant higher-order states about them.

 

Whereas the cognitive theory associate’s consciousness with a distinct cognitive architecture, the Neural theory of consciousness relates the chemical reactions to the thought processes.

 

Can the physical theories go beyond the neural and place consciousness at a micro-physical level of quantum phenomena? There is a physical reality about quantum mechanics. Can it bridge the psycho-physical gap in explaining consciousness?

 

Quantum mechanics could provide a way out. There is a coherent unity of consciousness. Consciousness relates to the production within the brain of a physical state similar to a Bose-Einstein condensate which is a state of matter in which separate atoms or subatomic particles, cooled to near absolute zero coalesce into a single quantum mechanical entity, i.e., the distinction between discrete atoms is lost.  Our brain also does similar with 86 billion neurons. This corroborates the non-dualism theory as well.

 

All said and done, the theories of consciousness, whether cognitive, neural or quantum mechanical, explain consciousness as a natural feature of the physical world. However, we need to combine the ‘Quantum Mechanical’ theory to ‘Advaita Vedanta’ defined dualism to create a more rational meaning.

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