Reading time about 8 – 10 minutes
One key learning from meditation is our appreciation of the continuity of awareness. We may lose attention and mindfulness, but as soon as we return it’s clear that we were not unconscious during that time: our awareness may have been ‘distracted’ from whatever we had intended, but it was definitely aware. This may prompt us to wonder whether this continuity is absolute – do we ever have breaks in awareness /consciousness?
Is sleep a break in awareness? Most of us recall some of our dreams, but does awareness continue in deep sleep? What evidence can we bring to bear on this? When we’ve been asleep and dreaming, sometimes we emerge slowly and can recall some of our dream – we became aware we were dreaming before we’re fully awake. Sometimes we know we were dreaming but can remember nothing of it. At other times, if woken suddenly, we have no memory of what went before.
When we remember nothing, we don’t think that we have only just gone to sleep, we still have a sense of time having passed. This suggests that consciousness has continued, even though we recall nothing of its contents. So what is the process by which we know time passing? Usually we could tell a tale of a thread of events happening, a knowledge of whatever it is we were aware of during that time. This must be a good basis for the notion of ‘experiencing time’. When we know we’ve been dreaming, we still have that story in our minds of something that has been happening, time running on, which continues now we’re awake.
If time stopped…
What about when we wake straight from sleep with no memory of a dream just having occurred? We recall nothing, and this may lead us to assume that if we remember nothing we were aware of, then maybe we were aware of nothing – a break in the thread. This reminds me of my paradoxical question: if time stopped, how long would it be before it started again? The same paradox applies here: if we were not aware, how would we ever wake up? Actually we know we were aware in some way from the times when something we heard or felt woke us up: a gust of cold wind from the window, a noise, our partner getting up.
I had another experience which corroborates this suggestion that without a memory of previous happenings we assume we were not aware. I had a medical procedure with pain relief by gas and air. It wasn’t enough so the surgeon gave me a “sedative”. He told me afterwards that I had still been conscious throughout the procedure – but I had no memory at all of it. I would have said that I was not conscious for that time. Perhaps it sedated the part of my mind that reflects what I am experiencing – so that I am having the experience but not noting it, even in short term memory.
Might this be what Alzheimers dementia is like: not ‘logging’ events as they happen, while still being present in the moment? A similar case might be deep meditation, when we are experiencing without thinking, knowing directly with our senses but not commenting mentally on what we are experiencing. Sometimes a long meditation seems like a very short time. It also happens in sport or music when we’re ‘in the flow’ of undistracted attention and we don’t notice time.
reflective knowing
When we ‘know’ what’s happening by means of a thought-stream of perceptions, even a mental commentary, we are continuously reflecting on our direct sensory experience. This kind of knowing we could call “reflective knowing”, and we can recognise that it lies in the realm of thinking. In meditation when we ‘come to’ from a wandering thought and realise we were thinking we may literally tell ourselves we have just been thinking. And then we recognise that this too was a thought. At some point we just have to stop this cycle and let go of thinking.
During those times described above when we are not doing this reflective process we still know our experience, it’s not a blank, even if we haven’t laid a trail of reflective-knowing to recall it by later. This direct knowing is what awareness is at root, this is un-doubled, unechoed, unreflected awareness, and this shows us that awareness is intrinsically reflexive. It knows itself, that’s what awareness is. If it did not, there would be no awareness.
vijnana & the self-notion
The fifth skandha is translated as “consciousness”, from the Sanskrit “vijnana”. It seems to me that this is the self-conscious “knowing” I’ve called reflective knowing. I use the quotation marks for this ‘think-knowing; because the original knowing has to be the reflexive knowing which is inherent in awareness. The vijnana which adds to this inherent knowing so easily gives rise to the idea that there is a self doing this knowing, that something is experiencing these sense impressions. That’s just a trick of thinking.
The basic knowing of reflexive awareness however, can not be taken as a separate self, because there is nothing to create an idea of separation, there’s no reflecting going on. This present-moment knowing actually knows all that there is, because there is nothing real apart from present-moment awareness. This may include a thinking-story of objects, people and events, but it’s only when we take the story as more real than the direct awareness that we slip back into vijnana. It’s when we live in our thinking-world that we are deluded, and create a story of time and self. In the eye of awareness, it’s just thinking.
Pieces of Five 