Moderation and Consciousness

August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Damasio, Antonio, Emotion, Enlightenment, Feeling |

One understanding of enlightenment is the pursuit of a state of being in which individual consciousness is minimised and a ‘larger’ or more totalising consciousness is accepted. Individual consciousness involves a close identification with the personal thoughts, opinions, desires, attitudes, and feelings of the individuated self, and this usually involves the establishing of a distinction between these entities, which we consider ‘the self’, and the rest of experience which we might consider ‘non self’. This differentiation is the duality which many spiritual and religious tradition attempt to dissolve.

Those aspects of experience which tend to draw us toward individual consciousness are recognisable by the fact that they are value-laden, by which is meant that they have a positive or negative emotional component. When I put my hand on a hotplate for example, the experience gives me an unpleasant feeling which I will most likely try to minimise by moving my hand away as quickly as possible. I can make a conscious decision to leave my hand where it is and continue to feel the sensation, prolonging the pain, but the extent to which I do this, resisting the urge to move my hand, is also the extent to which I am identifying with my individual consciousness. Or more accurately, this experience would constitute my individual consciousness. Individual consciousness is not the pain, or the sensation of pain, but rather it is my identification with the pain and my resistance to the urgings of my body to move away from that pain.

We know from neurological experiments that in an episode like this, the order in which stimuli, response, feeling, and consciousness emerge is not intuitively obvious. One might imagine that the natural order of events would be that the sensation of heat on the hand caused certain neural activity in the brain, which then coalesced into a conscious experience of pain, followed by a quick decision to move the hand away from the source of pain, and lastly the action itself. In actuality the order of events is that the sensation of heat does cause stimulation of the nerve endings, which does cause neural activity, but this is followed immediately by a decision to move and the beginnings of the movement itself in the form of the ‘readiness potential’. At this crucial stage between the rising of the readiness potential and the carrying out of the action itself consciousness inserts itself as a sluice gate which allows for the possibility that the action be not carried out. We could choose at this point to override the urgings of the emotionally tagged cognitive processes preparing the arm to withdraw, and decide consciously to leave the hand where it is. It is only at this stage that there is an experience of pain, the consciousness of that pain, and its accompanying and following thoughts, feelings and attitudes. In other words, individual consciousness is not present in the action of the hand and the hotplate until after the responsive action had been prepared for and the possibility of not carrying out that action has arisen. It is, to paraphrase Damasio, the feeling of what may or may not happen. The possibility of this choice is the source of identification.

It might be assumed that prior to the moment at which consciousness became identified with this action and pain it had been identified with something else. Individual consciousness simply had another focus, another set of contents, although possibly less laden with emotional value and the urgency which accompanies it. If this is the case, then this consciousness would be constituted through the successive feelings of whatever has happened, arising in response to the hailing of emotionally tagged stimuli. Just as my momentary consciousness (of pain) is individuated as a response to the hotplate, allowing me the option to maintain that sensation, so my apparently continuous individual consciousness arises as a neverending succession of such individuations.

One conclusion we may draw from this is that, if one is trying to minimize individual consciousness in order to enter some kind of enlightened state, then one should avoid situations in which such decision-making must take place.