Rahul Banerjee - Indian Philosophy and Meditation: Perspectives on Consciousness

The last few decades have seen the reemergence of consciousness as an active area of research both in philosophy and in the natural sciences. Since the current interest in consciousness is primarily being fueled by the sciences there appears to be a universally held assumption that consciousness at least in us humans is due to or produced in some manner from brain activity. What kind of brain activity produces consciousness is of course an open scientific question. This book provides alternative points of view to that assumption. The entire Indian experience spanning three thousand years until today is unequivocal in maintaining that consciousness is not only a fundamental reality in its own right, the relation between the brain and consciousness is actually the other way around. It is consciousness which uses the brain or the body and some form of consciousness survives the dissolution of the physical organism. We would hasten to add that no one denies the mutual conditioning of the physical organism and its associated conscious mind. What the Indian theorists denied was the presumption that consciousness can be either reduced to or is identical to some form of biophysical activity based on the body. An analogy might help to clarify the Indian philosophical positions. Electromagnetic waves or the electromagnetic force can be considered one of the fundamental forces of the physical universe. Our technological inventions do indeed produce electromagnetic waves, but from a more fundamental standpoint the production of these appliances is dependent on and derived from the application of electromagnetic phenomena. The same kind of relationship could hold between consciousness and the physical aspects of the biological organism. The large-scale acceptance of the view that consciousness is either identical to or wholly derived from the brain could have unforeseen consequences in the future.

In this book we have tried to present and critically examine alternative models of the conscious mind from Indian sources and have also included a manualised description of meditative practices which enables one to see their main conclusions. We believe that in these troubled times as the world lurches from one crisis to another the Indian views on consciousness are of quintessential interest. This book attempts to describe the Indian philosophical positions and their associated meditative methods as lucidly as possible.

We are grateful to the School of Cognitive Science, Jadavpur University, and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics for providing us with all the facilities for this work. We also acknowledge the consistent encouragement and support of Prof. Bikas Chakrabarti (SINP). The helpful guidance of Samani Sanmati Pragya is also acknowledged. Mr Rajarshi Datta Roy is acknowledged for drawing the figures and Mr Debashish Sen for assistance in formatting.

All the causal links between cittas, cetasiks and matter has been delineated in the Abhidhamma by means of twenty-four causal relations. These relations can be factored into three sets linking: 1) citta to citta, 2) citta to cetasiks, and 3) citta and cetasiks to matter. Again, the bridging relations describe causal conditioning in three overlapping contexts: a) within the structure of the internal state, b) within the temporal structure of a pathway, and finally c) between mental and physical states.

Any causal relationship will obviously consist of an equation with two sides, the conditioning state and the conditioned state, or in other words two related enti ties one of which exercises a causal influence on the other.

Conditioning State Conditioned State

(Bridging Relation)

Any particular bridging relation could be used in different contexts to link diverse elements (citta, cetasiks, kalpas) or the same entities (conditioning and conditioned) could be related by more than one relation. The twenty-four Bridging Relations are enumerated as:

1) Root, 2) Object, 3) Contiguity, 4) Immediate Contiguity, 5) Dominance, 6) Co-nascence, 7) Reciprocity, 8) Dependence, 9) Strong Dependence, 10) Repetition, 11) Pre-nascence, 12) Post-nascence, 13) Kamma, 14) Vipka, 15) Jhna, 16) Path, 17) Nutriment, 18) Faculty, 19) Presence, 20) Absence, 21) Association, 22) Dissociation, 23) Disappearance, and 24) Non-disappearance.

We will first outline causal/bridging relationships between cittas and their concomitant mental factors, before proceeding to the more abstruse causal links between matter and mind.