More On Consciousness

As I mentioned before, the problem with talking about consciousness is that lacking a clear understanding of what it is we're talking about, the term keeps shifting in meaning.  I'm interested in what Richard Dawkins referred to as "subjective consciousness," that unique and personal experience of what it is to experience oneself, but that's not how the term was always used.  I don't think that's what the Buddha was talking about when he discussed consciousness.

As ably described in Wikipedia, the English word "conscious" originally derived from the Latin conscius (con- "together" + scire "to know").  However, the Latin word did not have the same meaning as the modern term - it meant knowing with, in other words, having joint or common knowledge with another.  In its earliest uses, the English word "conscious" retained the original meaning of the Latin conscius.  For example, in his Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes writes: "Where two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another."

There were, however, many occurrences in Latin writings of the phrase conscius sibi, which translates literally as "knowing with oneself", or in other words, sharing knowledge with oneself about something.  This phrase had the figurative meaning of knowing that one knows, as the modern English word "conscious" does.   Conscius sibi was rendered in English as "conscious to oneself" or "conscious unto oneself".  Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of "being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness".  

By 1690, John Locke had defined consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” Locke's definition illustrates that a gradual shift in meaning had taken place, from Hobbes' joint or common knowledge to knowledge unto oneself.  This change in meaning occurred 2,000 years after the life and times of the Buddha, so we can infer that the different culture of his distant land far back in the misty recesses of time may have had a very different concept of consciousness. 

As stated here before, the Buddha typically discussed consciousness only in connection with the senses.  Hence, he had sight consciousness and aural consciousness and so on, including thought consciousness.  He considered these to be six separate consciousnesses, not a part of one seamless holistic experience as we typically consider it now.  Sight consciousness was merely the awareness that the eye, the organ of sight perception, had encountered a visible object.  Similarly, mind consciousness was merely the awareness of a thought.  

That unique, subjective experience of our selves, then, was not contained so much in the Buddha's use of the term consciousness.  In fact, the Sanskrit word for consciousness, vijnana, is in its etymology almost the opposite of the Latin conscius.  Rather than con- ("together"), the vi- in vijnana means "to divide,"  while    -jnana means "to know."  Therefore, vijnana emphasizes knowledge that results from separation, separation of subject from object and of one object from another, and vijnana is therefore sometimes translated as "discrimination."  The subtle point here is that vijnana consciousness is the ability to be aware, but always of something, and to remove and isolate that something from the rest of the universe.  Especially in the sense of mind vijnana, these "somethings" also included the ego, the self.   

The totality of the awareness of our experience of being ourselves, knowing what our senses and emotions and memories and ideas actually feel like - in other words, what I call "subject consciousness" - was to the Buddha merely six separate channels of perception. But in our awareness of these perceptions, we tie them all together in our minds to form a mental model of an individual self, apart (vi-) from the rest of the world, and this separate self, this ego, is merely a construct of the imagination and mind, no more real than the  world within a dream.  In addition to the self, these mental formations, sanskara, also include memories, impulses, and our working mental maps and models of the world around us.  But the Buddha saw all of this as being like a dream, no more real than shadow-play, and results in a form of consciousness, vijnana, that divides rather than unites.

There is talk in some New Age circles of consciousness being the ultimate fabric beneath all of existence, the stuff from which matter and energy both emerge.  This talk employs a hybrid brand of quantum physics theory and cites Buddhism as a verification of this view.  Those who think this way might be shocked to understand that to the Buddha, consciousness was a divisive, discriminating force that separated us from our true nature, and a source of much of our delusion and resultant suffering.