What Is Consciousness?

CONSCIOUSNESS is not the product of brain activity: It is the fundamental reality without which thinking as a conscious activity could never take place. Consciousness works through the brain, but doesn’t require a brain to exist. It was, indeed, consciousness that produced the brain, as it did everything else in existence—even the apparently insensate rocks.

Consciousness requires a material medium, such as the brain, to bring it into material manifestation, but it requires no such medium, to exist. The outward manifestation of consciousness was a potential from the beginning of creation. That this is not an inference, but an actual fact, can be experienced in superconsciousness by anyone who attains deep states of meditation. As the Bhagavad Gita—India’s best-known scripture—states, that essential consciousness exists everywhere, but is forever unaffected by anything.

The universality of consciousness helps to explain a scientific anomaly. Telepathy, so often demonstrated as to be held no longer in serious doubt, continues to baffle researchers because, unlike that of any other known phenomenon, the power of thought remains constant with increasing distance. Every other known force, including light, diminishes with distance, but a thought can be received as clearly on the other side of the earth as in the next room.

Superconsciousness takes human awareness outside the brain. We may say even that the brain is only a filter for superconsciousness. It can serve as a window onto superconsciousness, much as windows themselves reveal the scenery lying beyond them, but the brain can no more produce superconsciousness than a window can produce scenery.

That is why scientists encounter so much frustration in their efforts to subject higher levels of awareness to testing by the scientific method. The conscious mind cannot oblige superconsciousness to do its bidding, any more than Alice in Wonderland could oblige her croquet ball, which was a hedgehog, to remain wherever she placed it. The conscious mind, including the reasoning faculty, is subordinate to superconsciousness, not superior to it.

The secret of meditation, then, lies not in affirming states that are foreign to us, but in reclaiming what we are. Meditation is a returning to our center within. It may be termed a process of upward relaxation into superconsciousness. The only “effort” required is to resist the tendency, born of habit, toward tension and restlessness. What we must do, simply, is increase our receptivity—mentally and emotionally first, and then intuitively.