It is odd to describe such an event as being awake or being present, for those terms generally connote an awareness of something or other. But in this experience there is no particular or identifiable object of which I am aware. Yet I am driven to say I am awake for two reasons. First, I emerge with a quiet, intuited certainty that I was continually present, that there was an unbroken continuity of experience or of consciousness throughout the meditation period, even if there seemed to have been periods from which I had no particular memories. I just know that there was some sort of continuity of myself (however we can define that) throughout.14
In Buddhism such Pure Consciousness Events are called by several names: nirodhasamapatti, or cessation meditation; samjnavedayitanirodha, the cessation of sensation and conceptualization; sunyata, emptiness; or most famously, samadhi, meditation without content (cf. Griffiths, 1990). What is most fascinating about traditional Buddhist explorations of this state is that despite the fact that one is said to be utterly devoid of content, according to Yogacara Buddhist theorists one?s consciousness is said to persist as ?some form of contentless and attributeless consciousness? (Griffiths, 1990, p. 83). That is, despite the fact that one is not aware of any specific content or thought, ?something persists? in this contentlessness, and that is consciousness itself: ?I, though abiding in emptiness, am now abiding in the fullness thereof? (Nagao, 1978, p. 67). When discussing this possibility that one may abide in the ?fulness? of ?emptiness?, Vasubandu states:
It is perceived as it really is that, when anything does not exist in something, the latter is empty with regard to the former; and further it is understood as it really is that, when, in this place something remains, it exists here as a real existent.15
In sum, the PCE may be defined as a wakeful but contentless (non-intentional) experience. Though one remains awake and alert, emerging with the clear sense of having had ?an unbroken continuity of experience?, one neither thinks, nor perceives nor acts. W.T. Stace (1960):
Suppose then that we obliterate from consciousness all objects physical or mental. When the self is not engaged in apprehending objects it becomes aware of itself. The self itself emerges. The self, however, when stripped of all psychological contents or objects, is not another thing, or substance, distinct from its contents. It is the bare unity of the manifold of consciousness from which the manifold itself has been obliterated (p. 86).
Now what implications can we draw from the pure consciousness event about the nature of human consciousness?
1. We have a pattern here that is seen across cultures and eras. This, in combination with the reports offered in The Problem of Pure Consciousness, suggests that the phenomenon is not an artifact of any one culture but is something closer to an experience that is reasonably common and available in a variety of cultural contexts.16
2. Thomas Clark and other defenders of functionalism have suggested that consciousness is identical to certain of our information-bearing and behaviour- controlling functions, even going so far as to define it thus (Clark, 1995, p. 241). Others have suggested that consciousness is an artifact or an epiphenomenon of perception, action and thought, and that it arises only as a concomitant of these phenomena. Our accounts tend to disconfirm this view, which is generally argued on a priori grounds. Rather they suggest that consciousness does persist even when one has no perception, thought or evaluation. This suggests that consciousness should not be defined as merely an epiphenomenon of perception, an evaluative mechanism, or an arbiter of perceptual functions, but rather as something that exists independently of them.
3. Some have suggested that if we can understand how we can tie together perceptions and thoughts ? the so called binding problem ? we will ipso facto understand consciousness.17 Now, how we bind together perceptions is a very interesting question for cognitive psychology, neurobiology and philosophy of mind. But even if we understand how we do tie together perceptions, we will not necessarily understand the phenomenon of consciousness per se thereby, for according to these mystical accounts, it is more fundamental than a mere binding function.18 These reports suggest that binding is something done by or for consciousness, not something that creates consciousness.19
4. Our evidence suggests that we should conceptually and linguistically differentiate merely being aware or awake from its functional activities. Accordingly, I propose to use the terms as follows: (i) ?awareness? and ?consciousness? for that facet of consciousness which is aware within itself and which may persist even without intentional content; (ii) ?awareness of? and 1consciousness of? to refer to that feature of experience which is cognizant when we are intentionally aware of something; and (iii) ?pure awareness? and ?pure consciousness? to refer to awareness without intentional content.20
5. Reports of pure consciousness suggest that, despite the absence of mental content, the subjects were somehow aware that they remained aware throughout the period of the PCE . Apparently they sensed a continuity of awareness through past and present. If they did, even though there was no content, then they must have somehow directly recalled that they had been aware despite the absence of remembered content.21 This implies human awareness has the ability to tie itself together and to know intuitively that it has persisted.22
We may want to say that being conscious seems to entail this sort of direct self-recollection, a presence to oneself that is distinct from the kind of presence we have to perceptions and other intentional content. In this sense, the pure consciousness event tends to affirm Bernard Lonergan?s distinction between our conscious presence to intentional objects and our consciousness of consciousness itself:
There is the presence of the object to the subject, of the spectacle to the spectator; there is also the presence of the subject to himself, and this is not the presence of another object dividing his attention, of another spectacle distracting the spectator; it is presence in, as it were, another dimension, presence concomitant and correlative and opposite to the presence of the object. Objects are present by being attended to but subjects are present as subjects, not by being attended to, but by attending. As the parade of objects marches by, spectators do not have to slip into the parade to be present to themselves; they have to be present to themselves for anything to be present to them (Lonergan, 1967, p. 226, quoted in McCarthy, 1990, p. 234).
In sum, the PCE militates towards a distinction between consciousness or awareness per se and its usual binding, relational and culturally-trained processes. It suggests that consciousness is more than its embodied activities.
The dualistic mystical state, the peculiar ?oceanic feeling?
The second mystical phenomenon bears a dualistic pattern. Let us look at a few reports. The first comes from the autobiography of a living American mystic, Bernadette Roberts, middle-aged ex-nun, mother, housewife, and author of The Experience of No-Self. She had been in the practice of meditating in a nearby monastery, she tells us, and had often had the experience of complete silence we described above. Previously such experiences had sparked fear in her, perhaps a fear of never returning. But on this particular afternoon, as her meditation was ending,
once again there was a pervasive silence and once again I waited for the onset of fear to break it up. But this time the fear never came. . . . Within, all was still, silent and motionless. In the stillness, I was not aware of the moment when the fear and tension of waiting had left. Still I continued to wait for a movement not of myself and when no movement came, I simply remained in a great stillness (Roberts, 1984, p. 20).
She became silent inside but, to her surprise, did not emerge from that silence. She stood up and walked out of her chapel, ?like a feather floats in the wind?, while her silence continued unabated. No temporary meditative experience, this was a permanent development of that quiet empty interior silence.23
. . . Once outside, I fully expected to return to my ordinary energies and thinking mind, but this day I had a difficult time because I was continually falling back into the great silence (ibid.).
She ?remained in a great stillness?, driving down the road, talking on the phone, and cutting the carrots for dinner. In fact that inner stillness was never again to leave her.
She experienced her interior silence as her original ?consciousness?, by which I understand that she experienced it as devoid of the intellectual self-reflection that generally accompanies experiences. She describes this new state as a continuation of what she had encountered when she was in her meditative silence (PCE); only here she remains fully cognizant of her own silent awareness even while active.
My own previously published autobiographical report of such a state also associates a permanent interior silence with consciousness:
This began in 1972. I had been practicing meditation for about three years, and had been on a meditation retreat for three and a half months. Over several days something like a series of tubes (neuronal bundles?) running down the back of my neck became, one by one, utterly quiet. This transformation started on the left side and moved to the right. As each one became silent, all the noise and activity inside these little tubes just ceased. There was a kind of a click or a sort of ?zipping? sensation, as the nerve cells or whatever it was became quiet.24 It was as if there had always been these very faint and unnoticed activity, a background of static, so constant that I had never before noticed it. When each of these tubes became silent, all that noise just ceased entirely. I only recognized the interior noise or activity in these tubes in comparison to the silence that now descended. One by one these tubes became quiet, from left to right. It took a couple of weeks and finally the last one on the right went zip, and that was it. It was over.
After the last tube had shifted to this new state, I discovered that a major though subtle shift had occurred. From that moment forward, I was silent inside. I don?t mean I didn?t think, but rather that the feeling inside of me was as if I was entirely empty, a perfect vacuum.25 Since that time all of my thinking, my sensations, my emotions, etc., have seemed not quite connected to me inside. It was and is as if what was me, my consciousness itself, was (and is) now this emptiness. The silence was now me, and the thoughts that have gone on inside have not felt quite in contact with what is really ?me,? this empty awareness. ?I? was now silent inside. My thinking has been as if on the outside of this silence without quite contacting it: When I saw, felt or heard something, that perception or thought has been seen by this silent consciousness, but it has not been quite connected to this interior silence. (Foreman, date??, p.??)
In this experience the silence is explicitly associated with awareness. It is experienced as ?the I?, ?what was really ?me?, ?my consciousness itself?. Somehow this area in the back of the head seems to be associated with being aware; as it became silent, a sense of the self or consciousness itself within became more articulated, and was now experienced as silent.
Like Roberts?, this shift to an interior silence was permanent.26 Thus we should call it a state, not a transient experience. I call it the dualistic mystical state (DMS).
Descriptions of a DMS are surprisingly common in the mystical literature. Teresa of Avila writes of such a dualistic state. Speaking of herself in the third person, she writes:
However numerous were her trials and business worries, the essential part of her soul seemed never to move from [its] dwelling place. So in a sense she felt that her soul was divided . . . Sometimes she would say that it was doing nothing but enjoy[ing] itself in that quietness, while she herself was left with all her trials and occupations so that she could not keep it company (Peers, 1961, p. 211).
She too describes an experience in which, even while working and living, one also maintains a clear sense of the interior awareness, a persisting sense of an unmoving silence at one?s core.
Meister Eckhart describes something similar, calling it the Birth of the Word In the Soul. One of Eckhart?s clearest descriptions is from the treatise ?On Detachment?. It analogizes the two aspects of man with a door and its hinge pin. Like the outward boards of a door, the outward man moves, changes, and acts. The inward man, like the hinge pin, does not move. He ? or it ? remains uninvolved with activity and does not change at all. This, Eckhart concludes, is the way one should really conduct a life: one should act yet remain inwardly uninvolved. Here is the passage:
And however much our Lady lamented and whatever other things she said, she was always in her inmost heart in immovable detachment. Let us take an analogy of this. A door opens and shuts on a hinge. Now if I compare the outer boards of the door with the outward man, I can compare the hinge with the inward man. When the door opens or closes the outer boards move to and fro, but the hinge remains immovable in one place and it is not changed at all as a result. So it is also here . . . (Clark and Skinner, 1958, p. 167; emphasis mine).
A hinge pin moves on the outside and remains unmoving at its centre. To act and yet remain ?in her inmost heart in immovable detachment? depicts precisely this dualistic life. One acts, yet at an unchanging level within retains a sense of something unmoving. One lives a dichotomous existence. Inside, she experiences an interior silence, outside she acts. Elsewhere Eckhart describes what this is like:
When the detached heart has the highest aim, it must be towards the Nothing, because in this there is the greatest receptivity. Take a parable from nature: if I want to write on a wax tablet, then no matter how noble the thing is that is [already] written on the tablet, I am none the less vexed because I cannot write on it. If I really want to write I must delete everything that is written on the tablet, and the tablet is never so suitable for writing as when absolutely nothing is written on it. (ibid., p. 168.)
The emphasis in this passage is on the achievement of emptiness within. One has ?deleted? everything inside; one comes to a ?Nothing? inside; the tablet is ?blank?. When one is truly empty within, comes to ?the Nothing,? what goes on ?outside? is of lesser significance, for it is unconnected to the inner ?nothing?. Only once this interior ?Nothing? is established does one truly begin ?acting rightly?. This is highly reminiscent of the empty interior silence achieved by our other reporters.
In sum, in this DMS the subject has a sense, on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, of being in touch with his or her own deepest awareness, experienced as a silence at one?s core, even while remaining conscious of the external sensate world. Awareness itself is experienced as silent and as separate from its intentional content.
This dualistic mystical state seems to evolve gradually into another state. First this author?s own experience (cf. Forman, date??):
Over the years, this interior silence has slowly changed. Gradually, imperceptibly, this sense of who I am, this silence inside, has grown as if quasi-physically larger. In the beginning it just seemed like I was silent inside. Then this sense of quietness has, as it were expanded to permeate my whole body. Some years later, it came to seem no longer even limited to my own body, but even wider, larger than my body. It?s such a peculiar thing to describe! It?s as if who I am, my very consciousness itself, has become bigger, wider, less localized. By now it?s as if I extend some distance beyond my body, as if I?m many feet wide. What is me is now this expanse, this silence, that spreads out.
While retaining something of the dualistic character, the sense of the self or awareness itself here seems to have become as if quasi-physically expanded, extending beyond the felt borders of the usual physical frame. It is important to note that exterior perception has not changed here, only the sense of what consciousness itself is. That will change in the next state.
Freud called this a ?peculiar oceanic feeling?, which seems to communicate both the ineffability and the expanded quality of such a sense of consciousness.27 Yet at this point this sense of an inner expanse does not yet seem to ?touch? or affect the perception of objects.
Being in the middle of an expanse is reminiscent of the well known passage from Walt Whitman. As if having a conversation with his soul, he recalls,
I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth.28
Here the sense of inner silence, the peace, is experienced as part of the world. But note again that Whitman does not suggest that the peace is within the world.
The sense seems to be that what one is, one?s awareness itself, is experienced as oceanic, unbounded, expanded beyond the limits of the body. Here, I believe, a theist might plausibly associate this silence, that seems to be both inside and yet quasi-physically expansive, with God. If this is true, then St. Teresa?s ?Spiritual Marriage? is very much like this one. In it, one is permanently ?married? to the Lord,