The notion that consciousness marks humans as divinely distinct, can first be challenged by recognizing that consciousness does not independently exist, but is an interrelational function. What is considered to be conscious, is inseparable from what is not considered to be conscious.
Here is a brief outline of the relationship. Sensory perception must involve an image of the perception in order for the perception to be noted. This image, such as that of a tree, is known as consciousness. Consciousness cannot be separated from sensory perception or from the tree.
They are not distinct entities. Thinking, is but the interplay of these sensory-perceptual images. Likewise, conscious thought is not an independent affair, but a dynamic, interrelated mind-body-world activity.
Conscious images are not objective impressions of a world out there. They are a function related to human survival (just as is the notion of subjectivity is such a function). For instance, there are no colors in the world. However, color is necessary to help mobile organisms make distinctions between objects.
The perceptual image of color is activated when different wavelengths of light are converted into images of color within the neural-visual system. Objects are not the separate entities that they appear to be either. The impression that they are, involve other interrelated processes that allow an immeasurable quantum-like world to appear as object images.
A key point here is that what is considered to be conscious, depends upon sensory organs such as eyes, ears, touch, etc., that are not regarded as conscious, but as material body parts. Objects of sensory perception such as the tree, are also not considered consciousness, but matter. Likewise, the neural brain that is integral to the formation and interaction of perceptual images, is not conscious by definition, but regarded as brain matter. Therefore, no fundamental distinction can be drawn between mind and matter.
For if you look at all that consciousness depends upon and that is not considered conscious and cleared it away, there would be no consciousness essence or function left over. Since consciousness depends upon conditions that are not regarded as conscious, consciousness cannot be established as having its own independent nature, being or constitution.
The issue is not to regard consciousness (or any phenomenon) as non-existent, but to recognize that its freestanding appearance is deceptive. In the same way, a tree appears to be a separate entity and yet what we call a tree cannot be separated from the sun, clouds, rain, oxygen, minerals, and so forth.
The appearance of its inherent separateness is like a mirage.
And as with a tree, it is important to note that given all of the diverse conditions that consciousness relies upon such as sense organs and their perceptual objects, there cannot be one singular consciousness. Consciousness becomes reified into a unitary essence under the lens of a mechanical reductionism.
Consciousness is an abstract, conventional name for what is not reducible to a separate entity that is conscious in and of itself. Nor can matter be reduced to an essence that is inherently material. One cannot say what mind or matter truly are, because all formations, in both their coarse and subtle appearances, are relational and therefore cannot ultimately be singled out.
Objects appear and function but have no nature of their own. Regarding consciousness, the straightforward recognition that it cannot manifest apart from a body makes the point that consciousness cannot have its own nature, as does the arising of conscious thought upon reading these printed words.
Now, previous thoughts conventionally appear as proximal conditions for subsequent thoughts to arise, but this is not the result of an individual continuum with an essence. A thought does not think in itself.
Thought is a dynamic interplay without establishing one iota of independence that endures as its own entity.
Excerpted from emptinesscafe.com. Susan Kahn is a licensed psychotherapist who unites both tradition and nondual emptiness teachings.
Susan Kahn
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