Our culture is founded upon the assumption that reality consists of two essential ingredients: mind and matter. In this duality, matter is considered the primary element, giving rise to the prevailing materialistic paradigm in which it is believed that mind, or consciousness — the knowing element of mind — is derived from matter.
How consciousness is supposedly derived from matter — a question known as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ — remains a mystery, and is indeed one of the most vexing questions in science and philosophy today. Strangely, the fact that there is no evidence for this phenomenon is not deemed significant enough to dissuade most scientists and philosophers from their conviction that consciousness is a derivative of matter, although more and more are beginning to question it. Most still believe that, with advances in neurology, the neural correlates of consciousness and the means by which it is derived from the brain will sooner or later be discovered, and this belief is reinforced by the mainstream media.
However, until such time, the hard problem of consciousness remains an uncomfortable dilemma for exponents of the materialist paradigm. Ironically, in all other fields of scientific research such lack of evidence would undermine the premise upon which the theory stands, but in a leap of faith that betrays the irrational nature of materialism itself, the conviction at its heart is not undermined by the lack of supporting evidence, nor indeed by compelling evidence to the contrary. In this respect, the prevailing materialistic paradigm shares many of the characteristics of religion: it is founded upon intuition that there is a single, universal and fundamental reality, but it allows belief rather than experience to guide the exploration and, therefore, the implications of that intuition.
Some contemporary philosophers go further than believing consciousness to be an epiphenomenon, or secondary function, of the brain. In an extraordinary and convoluted act of reasoning they deny the very existence of consciousness, claiming it to be an illusion created by chemical activity in the brain. In doing so, they deny the primary and most substantial element of experience — consciousness itself — and assert the existence of a substance — matter — which has never been found.
In fact, it is not possible to find this substance on the terms in which it is conceived, because our knowledge of matter, indeed all knowledge and experience, is itself an appearance within consciousness, the very medium whose existence these philosophers deny. Such an argument is tantamount to believing that an email creates the screen upon which it appears or, even worse, that the email exists in its own right, independent of the screen, whose very existence is denied.
All that is known, or could ever be known, is experience. Struggle as we may with the implications of this statement, we cannot legitimately deny it. Being all that could ever be known, experience itself must be the test of reality. If we do not take experience as the test of reality, belief will be the only alternative. Experience and belief — or ‘the way of truth and the way of opinion’, as Parmenides expressed it in the fifth century BCE — are the only two possibilities.
All that is known is experience, and all that is known of experience is mind. By the word ‘mind’ in this context I don’t just mean internal thoughts and images, as in common parlance; I mean all experience. This includes both our so-called internal experience of thoughts, images, feelings and sensations, and our so-called external experience of consensus reality, that is, the world that we know through the five sense perceptions. Mind thus includes all thinking, imagining, remembering, feeling, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.
If all that could ever be known is experience, and all experience is known in the form of mind, then in order to know the nature or ultimate reality of anything that is known, it is first necessary to understand the nature of mind. That is, the first imperative of any mind that wishes to know the nature of reality must be to investigate and know the reality of itself.
Whether mind perceives a world outside of itself, as is believed under the prevailing materialist paradigm, or projects the world within itself, as is believed in the consciousness-only approach suggested here, everything that is known or experienced is known or experienced through the medium of mind. As such, the mind imposes its own limits on everything that it sees or knows, and thus all its knowledge and experience appear as a reflection of its own limitations. It is for this reason that scientists will never discover the reality of the universe until they are willing to explore the nature of their own minds.
Everything the mind knows is a reflection of its own limitations, just as everything appears orange when we are wearing a pair of orange-tinted glasses. Once we are accustomed to the orange glasses, orange becomes the new norm. The orange colour we see seems to be an inherent property of consensus reality and not simply a result of the limitations of the medium through which we perceive. In the same way, the mind’s knowledge of anything is only as good as its knowledge of itself. Indeed, the mind’s knowledge of things is a reflection and an extension of its knowledge of itself. Therefore, the highest knowledge a mind can attain is the knowledge of its own nature. All other knowledge is subordinate to and appears in accordance with the mind’s knowledge of itself.
In fact, until the mind knows its own essential nature, it cannot be sure that anything it knows or experiences is absolutely true and not simply a reflection of its own limitations. Thus, the knowledge of the ultimate nature of mind through which all knowledge and experience are known must be the foundation of all true knowledge. Therefore, the ultimate question the mind can ask is, ‘What is the nature of mind?’
The common name that the mind gives to itself is ‘I’. Hence, we say, ‘I am reading’, ‘I am thinking’, ‘I am seeing’, and so on. For this reason, the question ‘What is the nature of mind?’ could be reformulated as, ‘Who or what am I?’ The answer to this question is the most profound knowledge that the mind can attain. It is the supreme intelligence.
The question ‘What is the ultimate nature of the mind?’ or ‘Who or what am I?’ is a unique question in that it is the only question that does not investigate the objective content of the mind but rather the essential nature of mind itself. For this reason the answer to this question is also unique. The answer to any question about the objective content of mind will always itself appear as objective knowledge. For example, the question ‘What is two plus two?’ and the answer ‘Four’ are both objective contents of mind. But the nature of the mind itself never appears in, nor can it be accurately described in the terms of, objective knowledge, just as the screen never appears as an image in a movie.
The mind’s recognition of its own essential nature is a different kind of knowledge, a knowledge that is the ultimate quest of all the great religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions and that, although we may not realise it lies at the heart of each person’s longing for peace, fulfillment and love.
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The above excerpts are taken from Rupert Spira’s book The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter.
Kalampedia 