Mind and Consciousness

Who knows, if no knower is found behind the knowing?

A zoom-in of the exploration Mind and Consciousness: Both Are Also Singled Out.

Seeing, hearing and thinking are plain facts. A seer standing behind them is never found. Both stand, and this page shows how.

The question

It rains. The sound fills the room, and it seems to arrive at someone: a point just behind the eyes, where the world is taken in. Most people never question this point, because it is not felt as a belief. It is felt as the most obvious fact there is.

So when the Buddha says that no self is found, a question follows at once. Something is clearly aware right now. If it is not a self, is it consciousness itself? Is mind the one real thing, the screen on which everything else appears? Or is it something the brain makes? Both answers share an assumption, and that assumption is what this page examines.

The substance reading

Stated fairly, the substance view says: experience needs a subject. There is a world out there and an inner viewer that takes it in. The viewer may be called a soul, a witness, pure awareness or simply "me". Turned the other way round, the brain is a machine standing on its own that produces consciousness as its output.

Both pictures start with two things, a mind and a world, each complete on its own side, and then ask how they meet. The hardest form of this is what philosophers call the Hard Problem: how does grey matter give rise to the felt redness of red? Book 1 argues that the gap was made by the starting point. Define matter as complete without experience, and mind as an inner container, and no bridge can ever join them.

The substance picture of mind.

What the tradition says

Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises; the meeting of the three is contact.
The Buddha, Majjhima Nikāya 18, trans. Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi

Seeing does not see itself. And if it does not see itself, how will it see anything else?
Nāgārjuna, MMK 3.2

In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard.
The Bāhiya Sutta, Udāna 1.10, trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

Applying the logic

1 · What would a substance view say?	A knower stands behind experience, or a brain produces it. Either way, mind is a thing on its own side, and a world meets it from the other.
2 · What does dependency say instead?	Seer, seeing and seen are designated together (MMK 3.6), as the chariot was named on its parts in Step 3. Consciousness is always of something, through something: eye, light, colour, attention. It is not a light switched on first and then pointed at things.
3 · What is affirmed conventionally?	Seeing, hearing, thinking and remembering, and the person who keeps promises. That experience depends on the brain: anaesthesia stops pain, a stroke can take away speech, and medicine rightly acts on this. Dependence is shown; production by a self-standing brain is not.
4 · What is never found?	A viewer apart from the viewing. Look for the one who tastes the tea and you find only more of the tasting: the warmth, the bitterness, the swallow. Mind itself, looked for as the floor everything rests on, is not found either.

Not all mind

Here the habit makes its quietest retreat, the one Step 2 warned of. The witness is not found, so perhaps awareness itself is the real thing, and the world is made of mind. A red patch depends on the seeing; is the seeing then the ground? As I put it in Book 4, that question leads straight back to the witness.

The mind gets no exemption. Look for it the way you look for anything else, and it is not found standing on its own. Making mind the one real thing is the same mistake as making matter the one real thing. In a dream, the dreamed mountain and the dreaming mind appear together, and on waking both are equally unfound.

Knowing is part of what depends. It is not the ground that the rest depends on.

Nor does anything go blank. When the witness is not found, the tree is more vivid, not less. What goes is the distance, not the clarity. That clarity is what the tradition calls luminosity: the appearing itself, known as it appears, not a light shining from behind. Luminosity takes this further. And non-dual means "not two", not "all one": sound stays sound and colour stays colour, close without merging.

Two traps

Too much: eternalism

"Awareness itself is what is really there." The observer drops away, and Presence quietly becomes the new observer: a background awareness, a cosmic mind, consciousness as the stuff of the world. It feels complete, which is why it is hard to see. Before 1997 I read the I AM realisation this way: a pure Witness on one side, a passing world on the other.

Too little: nihilism

"No knower, so nobody is aware, and experience is only a trick." Nobody has disappeared. The rain is heard, the reader reads this sentence, and the reading is reliable enough to act on. What is denied is a knower standing apart, not the knowing.

In practice

Look at a tree and look for the one who sees it. You will find a tree and a seeing, and no viewer standing apart from both.
Listen to a sound. The sense of "someone hearing" is itself one more thing that appears, a thought or an impression. It is not the hearer.
When the looking finds nothing, watch for the next floor: "but awareness is real". Put that through the same test.

In the chain: this page goes with Decoding Anatta and MMK Chapter 3 (3 of 7); What the Logic Is Looking At (2 of 7). The chain starts at Seeing Comes First.

In the books

Dissolving the Hard Problem of Consciousness: Book 1, Chapter 7, the tea, the brain, Descartes and the luminous mind.
Perceptual Co-Arising: Book 1, Chapter 10, colour, the dress and the duck-rabbit.
The Witness Behind Experience: Book 4, Chapter 1, looking for the seer.
Vividness Without a Viewer: Book 4, Chapter 2, why experience does not go blank.
The Collapse of the Observer: Book 2, anatta as the beginning, not the end.
Nāgārjuna, Chapter 3: the senses, and seer, seeing and seen.
Alignment with 4E Cognition: Book 1, Chapter 11, mind embodied and extended, and doing without a doer.
Nāgārjuna, Chapter 9: the prior entity: no someone before the seeing and hearing.
Nāgārjuna, Chapter 10: fire and fuel: self and body, neither the same nor different.
Nāgārjuna, Chapter 14: connection: why seer, seeing and seen cannot meet as three.

Talks

The Fallacy of 24/7 Awareness: talk on YouTube, the witness looked for in deep sleep.
Who Am I Vs Anatta: talk on YouTube, the search for the self.

Words to know

Consciousness (vijñāna): Awareness of an object, arising in dependence on a sense and its field.
Witness: The pictured viewer behind experience. Looked for, it is not found.
Hard Problem: How matter could give rise to experience. A gap made by starting with two self-standing things.
Luminosity: The knowing clarity of appearing itself. Not a light or an awareness behind things, and empty too.
Non-dual: "Not two": no real wall between knower and known, and no single substance they melt into.