What is consciousness?

Consciousness is the One without the second. It is the source of everything. The ‘who, what, where, when’ are all conceptual images in consciousness. They are all as real as any mirage or dream.

The totality of manifestation, and everything therein, is consciousness , the Unicity. All there is, is consciousness, unaware of itself in its noumenal subjectivity, but perceived by itself as phenomenal manifestation in its objective expression.

If this is understood in depth, there is nothing more to be understood because such understanding must comport the realisation that there is no individual entity as insubstantial shadow, whereas what we really and truly are, is consciousness itself, the formless Brahmn.

All that exists is universal consciousness. The universe as such is not the universal consciousness, but consciousness is the universe just as the bracelet is made of gold but the gold is not made of the bracelet. Whether the manifested universe exists or not, consciousness is there as the subjective Absolute...

The appearance of the universe exists in infinite consciousness, just as the notion of distance or emptiness exists in space... Consciousness creates the illusion of the world appearance and the ego-sense , and perceives the illusion of diversity in what is truly pure Unicity...

How can the universe exist in infinite consciousness that is supposed to be transcendental?

Truly there is nothing other than consciousness, and therefore consciousness cannot but be immanent in everything that appears to exist. And yet no phenomenal manifestation can have any kind of relationship with consciousness because a relationship can exist only between two different entities. It is in this sense that consciousness is transcendental to the manifested universe.

What appears within consciousness as its own reflection — the manifestation of the universe — is not separate or different from consciousness. While the shadow, by itself, has no existence and is therefore unreal, the shadow is not different from the substance when seen together.

When there is no mind in operation, when there is no conceptualising, it is clearly known, felt and experienced, that phenomenality is only the objective expression of the subjective noumenon... God is that formless subjectivity , pure potential, the infinite, universal consciousness, Brahmn, which alone exists even after the cosmic dissolution.

It is only within this pure, infinite consciousness , the potential plenum, that phenomenal manifestation arose as a mere reflection of that potentiality, as a mere objective expression of that pure subjectivity.

The phenomenal objectivisation of this pure subjectivity appears and functions in our outer world of consciousness in the waking state, precisely like sentient and insentient objects seem to exist and function in the inner world of consciousness in the dream state. Nothing really happens.

The final truth is that there is neither creation nor destruction, neither birth nor death, neither destiny nor free will, neither any path nor any achievement... So there is no reason to be aware of anything. So consciousness-at-rest is not aware of itself.

It becomes aware of itself only when this sudden feeling, ‘I Am’ , arises. I Am is the impersonal sense of being aware. And that is when consciousness-at-rest becomes consciousness-in-movement , when potential energy becomes actual energy. They are not two. Nothing separate comes out of the potential energy.

Source: The Times of India