It seems to have been one of regular comforts of Church Philosophers to believe that what cannot be thought can be said. Nanamoli Thera
Though it is possible to define fog perfectly clearly, such a definition will not aid one to find one's way about in the fog. Nanamoli Thera
Two demons: one who insist that what is to be inferred by verbal processes must correspond to experience; and one who insist that what cannot be arrived at by verbal processes cannot correspond to experience. Nanamoli Thera
'With entire fading out and cessation, friend, of the six contact-bases, there is something else' – saying thus, one diversifies non-diversification. 'With entire fading out and cessation, friend, of the six contact-bases, there is not something else ... there both is and is not something else ... there neither is nor is not something else' – saying thus, one diversifies non-diversification. So long, friend, as the six contact-bases continue, so long diversification continues; so long as diversification continues, so long the six contact-bases continue. With entire fading out and cessation of the six contact-bases, ceasing and subsidence of diversification. A. IV,174 (ii, 161-2)
—A monk who is a worthy one, his task done,
His cankers destroyed, wearing his last body,—
Is it because this monk has arrived at conceit
That he might say 'I say',
And that he might say 'They say to me'?
—For one who is rid of conceit there are no ties,
All his ties of conceit (mānaganthā'ssa) are dissolved;
This wise man, having got beyond conceiving (yam matam),
Might say 'I say',
And he might say 'They say to me':
Skilled in worldly expressions, knowing about them,
He might use them within the limits of usage.
Devatā Samy. iii,5
Thus far, Ānanda, may one be born or age or die or fall or arise, thus far is there a way of designation, thus far is there a way of language, thus far is there a way of description, thus far is there a sphere of understanding, thus far the round proceeds as manifestation in a situation,—so far, that is to say, as there is name-&-matter together with consciousness. D 15
"Just as a flame blown by the wind's force,
Upaslva," said the Blessed One,
"Goes out, and designation applies to it no more,
So too the Silent Sage, being freed from the name-body,
Goes out, and designation applies to him no more."
"Then when he has thus gone out, does he exist no more?
Or is he made immortal for eternity?
So may it please the Sage to make this plain to me,
Because it is a state that he has understood."
"There is no measuring of one who has gone out,
Upaslva,' said the Blessed One,
"And nothing of him whereby one could say aught of him;
For when all ideas have been abolished,
All ways of saying, too, have been abolished."
Sn. 5:7
" 'Tell, then, where do water, earth,
Fire and air no footing find?
Where likewise the long and short,
Small and big and fair and foul?
Where is it that name-and-form
Do without remainder cease?'
And the answer thereto is this:
" 'The consciousness that makes no showing
Nor has to do with finiteness,
Claiming no being apart from all:
There it is that water, earth,
Fire and air no footing find,
And likewise the long and short,
Small and big and fair and foul;
There it is that name-and-form
Do without remainder cease.' "
Unfortunately, I find that I have made a slip that needs correcting. In my discussion of viññānam anidassanam anantam sabbatopaham, I said (as I remember) that 'the arahat's consciousness neither indicates nor originates a "self" or "subject".' This should be: 'neither indicates a "self" or a "subject" nor originates from a "self" or "subject"'. Actually, the meaning of anidassanam and sabbato-apaham is the same: it is simply that, since there is no more Ahan ti vā Maman ti vā Asmi ti vā* with the arahat, consciousness is no longer 'mine'. And anantam may be taken in the same sense—for the arahat consciousness is no longer limited by being 'my' consciousness (a determination is always a limiting, being a negation; and consciousness is now, in this respect, asankhata or non-determined). In the Asankhata Samyutta (iv,359-73) you will see that asankhata, anidassana, and nibbāna are all synonyms, and are all defined as rāgakkhaya dosakkhaya mohakkhaya, which, in the Itivuttaka (v,5: 38) is said to be saupādisesā nibbānadhātu.
Edward Conze's translation as 'invisible infinite consciousness which
shines everywhere' is quite wild (no doubt he has taken it without
considering the Pali at all), and one is tempted to ask how
consciousness can be 'invisible' if it 'shines everywhere'. But what,
precisely, it is that Mahāyānists understand by nibbāna is very difficult to make out. Nanavira Thera
*'"I" or "mine" or "am"'.
1) citta = to know 2) cetasika = to do 3) rupa = to be
Rupa appears as some definite form and as such is entirely positive. To the question "what is this?" the answer can be given at once: "It is what it is". But to be what it is, it has to be determined as such, and this determining is the function of sankhara (including vedana and sanna, two special instances of sankhara, which we entitled "to do"). To the question "what is a determination?" we define it as an act of showing or determining an appearance that a form perceived "is this form, not that form". The negation in determining is only implied by, or employed by determination but does not constitute an element of its being. Of that determination too it can be replied to the question "what is I" that it is what it is (sanna, vedana, sankhara, phassa - samudaya). That form can be and be determined is only possible in the presence of consciousness.
A peculiarity of consciousness at once appears introspectively in that it does not in itself appear positively as rupa (form) and cetasika do. ... The capacity of negation appears to reside in consciousness which provides the "empty space" in which questions can be asked and "forms" (things) determined. If with the other two it constituted a plenum, there would be no questions and no acts of determining possible. Consciousness, than, begins to appear as the questioning element, and it can turn the question on itself: if I am what I am.
Nanamoli Thera
Consciousness and Being
What follows will have to be stated in terms of ordinary speech, though that necessarily involves the word “is” and logical constructions, because speech is hardly possible without them. Nevertheless they have to be regarded here as a makeshift, and the whole of what follows tends to undermine the ultimate value of speech, retaining it, however, as a necessity for communication in conditions where separateness and individuality predominate.
The word “consciousness,” it seems to me, can only refer to what one might define provisionally as “the knowing that cannot know itself without intermediary and that cannot function in experience (of which it is an indispensable component) except negatively.”
To the question “What is consciousness,” then, a low level provisional answer might be “It is the pure subjective” or “It is the bare knowing of what it is not that constitutes (orders) experience and allows it being.” It must be added that, when consciousness is, it seems to be individualized by what it knows. But on another (higher) level the “is” in the question has still to be questioned, and so the low-level (and logical) answer is only a conventional makeshift, a conventional view, nothing more. And this qualification applies not only to logically inductive and deductive statements necessitating use of the word “is,” but also to descriptive statements that appear in “logical” form, using that term, or any equivalent.
When I ask myself, “What does the verbal expression ‘universal consciousness’ refer to?” I confess to be unable to find an answer, because, in spite of its “attractive” form, I cannot distinguish it from non-consciousness (see below). So I seem to have no alternative but to regard the phrase as one of those abstract expressions that appear on the surface to mean something, but when more closely examined, do not. (This, I know, may seem shocking, but I am more interested here in finding the facts than in avoiding shock.)
The more I examine and observe experience (What else can one do? Build castles?), the more I find that I can only say of consciousness (and in this I find a notable confirmation in the Pali Suttas) that it seems only describable (knowable) “in terms of what it arises dependent upon” (i.e. seeing-cum-seen … mind-knowing-cum-mind, known or mind cum-ideas), that is, negatively as to itself. And so, instead of being said to appear, it should rather be called that negativeness or “decompression of being” which makes the appearance of life, movement, behaviour, etc., and their opposites, possible in things and persons. But while life, etc. cannot be or not be without the cooperation of the negative presence of consciousness, which gives room for them (and itself) to “come to be” in this way (gaining its own peculiar form of negative being, perhaps from them)—the only possible way of being—they are, by ignorance, simultaneously individualized in actual experience. Unindividualized experience cannot, I think, be called experience at all. Thus there appears the positive illusion also of individual consciousness: “illusion” because its individuality is borrowed from the individualness of (1) its percepts, and (2) the body seen as its perceiving instrument.
Unindividualized perception cannot, any more, I think, be called perception at all. The supposed individuality of consciousness (without which it is properly inconceivable) is derived from that of its concomitants. This illusory individualization of consciousness, this mirage, manifests itself in the sense both of “my consciousness” and of “consciousness that is not mine” (as e.g. in the sensation of being seen when one fancies or actually finds one is caught, say, peeping through a keyhole, and from which the abstract notion of universal consciousness develops). The example shows that the experience of being seen does not necessarily mean that another’s consciousness is seeing one, as one may have been mistaken in one’s fancy owing to a guilty sense (though the experience was just as real at the time), before one found no one was there. To repeat: my supposed consciousness seems only distinguishable from the supposed consciousness that is not mine on the basis of the particular non-consciousness (i.e. material body, etc.) through which its negativity is manifested and with which it is always and inevitably associated in some way. It is impossible, I think, to overemphasize the importance of this fact. So of the concept, “universal consciousness,” I at present think that the word “universal” misleads. (Perhaps some hidden desire for power to “catch all consciousness in the net of one’s understanding,” and so escape the horrors of the unknown, seduces one to catch at this seemingly attractive term.)
Again it may be asked: What knows universal consciousness? Would not individual consciousness (if the “universal” is accepted) be held inadequate to judge it? And how can it know itself, or what are the means by which it can know itself and distinguish itself from non-consciousness and individual consciousness? I can find no answer to that and so I conclude that, if I ask it, that is simply because I must have started out with an unjustified assumption about the nature of consciousness (which, platitudinous as it may seem, is horribly difficult to understand and handle in view of its negativity; when one talks about “consciousness” normally, one finds on examination that one has not been talking about it at all but about the positive things like pleasure and pain, action, perception, etc., that always accompany and screen it). Is the question then really necessary? Consciousness, of course, cannot be denied as a necessary constituent of experience, but the trouble starts when we begin to ask what consciousness (or its nature) is. We have assumed the individuality of consciousness, apparently unjustifiably, because of the observed individuality of the objective part of experience through which we say it is manifested; and the assumption of its individuality logically leads to the further assumption of some universal form. Why?
Now, as I said earlier, when I begin to ask what something is (is, say, consciousness individual, universal, both, or neither?), we have taken being for granted and failed to examine the nature of a part of my question. In one sense consciousness seems correctly describable as functioning (that is in its true negativity) by putting everything in question: What is this? What am I? What is life? What is consciousness? What is being? Now here the emphasis must be removed from “what” and “this” and placed squarely on “is.” Suppose I suggest this: for “is” read “belief-attitude” (as a mode of craving combined with ignorance). In other words, it is the nature of consciousness to make be (with the aid of desire-for-being and of ignorance-of-how-anything-comes-to-be) and the nature of being to depend on consciousness. The multiplicity and the contradictoriness of the answers normally given to these questions ought to be sufficient evidence for something of the sort, or at least for the suspicion, that all the methods of answering them in the way normally done are radically wrong in some way. In fact the contradictory answers in all their variety, as usually given, each bolstered up by logic, betray, it seems to me, just that form of ignorance-craving combination which make perception/non-perception, change/immortality, time/eternity, life/death, action/inaction, choice/fatality, unity/variety, individuality/universality, seem not only possible but real. (It then seems necessary or “right” [here we have craving] to determine what among these is [here we have ignorance] real and what is not.) And the trouble begins again: I begin asserting “I am this, I am not that,” “This is that,” “A is B,” “Consciousness is life,” “Truth is beauty,” “Life is good,” “Killing is right,” “The end is the justification of the means,” “I am,” “God is,” etc., all of which others may deny. Perhaps we get angry and come to blows. How many more people in history have been killed for the sake of opinions about what is and what is not than have been killed for the sake of facts? Viewpoints, interpretations, and opinions about the raw material of experience differ, less or more, from individual person to individual person. The more consistent and logically strengthened any moral, religious, or philosophical system becomes, the more possible it becomes for it to be contradicted by an opposing system. And then bare craving has to arbitrarily choose and bash the opponent on the head if it can. That is why Buddhism (especially Nagarjuna, but also Theravada) favours a dialectic that pulls down all such positivistic- negativistic systems (the positive is always haunted by the negative, and so there is really no true via negativa or via positiva in any absolute sense). It pulls them down using their own premises.
Of whatever I can say that it is, by that very fact I imply that it is not: It is this, is not that. It then is in virtue of what it is not, being so constituted by the consciousness that determines it thus. But the consciousness on which its being depends is negative, whose negativity appears in objective things as their temporality and change, the change in their being. But while the being of whatever is objective to it appears as positive, even though it may change, its own being appears as a negation of itself and a denial, flight or movement, the temporalizing of the temporalized objective world.
Now, perhaps, you will understand why it is really impossible for a Buddhist to answer the questions, “Does Buddhism teach the extinction of consciousness? Is nibbana the extinction of consciousness?” On the basis of what has been said above, could it be answered yes or no without examining each term of the question?
There is, of course, another, different approach to the analysis of (not the answer to) that question: Why should consciousness (however conceived) seem preferable to cessation-of-consciousness (however conceived)? Consciousness of deprivation, of an “abyss of nothingness,” is not cessation of consciousness. Would not any preference (absolute one-sided choice) for one over the other show craving in the aim if that were set up as the ultimate aim? The desire-to-end-craving, as I see it, is a provisional measure adopted while craving is still present in order to use craving to terminate itself, while the aim is absence-of-craving and consequently ending of suffering. Use of the word is (which implies presence of ignorance) in this way is also use of present ignorance to terminate itself, while the aim is (to me in this state) liberation from ignorance.
Second, suppose a state of consciousness without suffering. Would it not have to be entirely without change since the slightest change in the state must imply a degree of suffering intruding. But can a state of consciousness absolutely without change be distinguished at all from absence of consciousness? I do not see how it can. However a mixture of longing for the incompatible (craving) and fear of or disinclination to face the facts of the association and complexity which are inseparable from conscious experience (ignorance) can make it seem as possible and realizable as the catching of the red in a rainbow with a butterfly net. So out we go with our butterfly nets chasing colour … and get wet instead. Craving and ignorance persist in heaven, though suffering may be suspended there for a time.
That is how I see Emerson’s “Take what you will but pay the price,” viz. “Pay death as the price of life,” or “Pay suffering as the price of consciousness.” May get it on loan, but if one does not pay up when the bill comes in, the bailiffs distrain. But that does not mean that I think one should counter with undiminished craving and ignorance and use them to denounce life, consciousness, etc. I say one should take them as they are and develop understanding of them. That, as I see it, and only that, along with the sharing of it, is the true source of joy, not joy of life haunted by fear of loss-of-consciousness, and so on. This you know, so I am not saying anything new.
If I ask myself “Is it possible for me to end consciousness?” I have to reply to myself that I see no possibility at present. (What might happen if I succeeded in ending craving and ignorance, of which I see no prospect at present, is, of course, hard to say!) If the possibility were available now, I at present see no sound reason why I should not avail myself of it. Pure speculation! Yes, but at least it prevents me coming down one-sidedly in favour of consciousness or in favour of non-consciousness in the crude mode. I do regard death (my life’s end, murder, or suicide) as the ending of consciousness: to presume that conscious continuity (negativity) ends because a particular continuity of its material objective world (including its body) ends seems to me a pure assumption whose opposite is just as valid, with possibly better logical arguments in favour of it if the evidence is observed without bias. However, what happens to me at death cannot be known. Consequently I am at liberty to assume (since I cannot avoid assuming something about it) what seems most reasonable. Death seems above all to be forgetting. I do not know. But since I have to believe something about it whether I like it or not, I do not believe that consciousness ends with death. Memory may well do so. I don’t, however, know that this is what I want not to believe.
It is, I think, rather important to bear in mind one thing in regard to what has been said above. With this view there are two scales of value (not so much divorced as crossing at right-angles) which must be carefully discriminated. The physical world of consciousness-being- action in which we live and are, biased by ignorance and propelled by craving, is governed by perception of being and the practical values based on that. But any positive metaphysical system, whether based only logically or emotionally on it, which is founded on that, is haunted by the shadows that it cannot avoid casting and that it cannot itself see (like the Sun). It acts in virtue of cause and effect and its thought is logical by its dependence on the word “is.” As far as we live in this world we have to live its mode and by its values, or we risk falling into wells through star-gazing. But none of its laws are made absolute (without divorcing idea from experience). The Void, of which it cannot be said that it is or is not, nor that it has consciousness or has none, while it denies absoluteness to any experiential value (alike to being and to consciousness) cannot be identified. And that is the doctrine of not-self (anatta) as I see it in one aspect at present. This voidness cannot be “is-ed” and so introduced into the worldly scheme, except as the denial of absoluteness of all particular values. It has no more effect on ordinary life than the theory of relativity. But just as that theory completely alters calculation of enormous speeds, so, as I see it, this void-element completely alters calculations of extraordinary situations, of death (as killing, suicide or the partner of old age). Nanamoli Thera
1) citta = to know 2) cetasika = to do 3) rupa = to be
Rupa appears as some definite form and as such is entirely positive. To the question "what is this?" the answer can be given at once: "It is what it is". But to be what it is, it has to be determined as such, and this determining is the function of sankhara (including vedana and sanna, two special instances of sankhara, which we entitled "to do"). To the question "what is a determination?" we define it as an act of showing or determining an appearance that a form perceived "is this form, not that form". The negation in determining is only implied by, or employed by determination but does not constitute an element of its being. Of that determination too it can be replied to the question "what is I" that it is what it is (sanna, vedana, sankhara, phassa - samudaya). That form can be and be determined is only possible in the presence of consciousness.
A peculiarity of consciousness at once appears introspectively in that it does not in itself appear positively as rupa (form) and cetasika do. ... The capacity of negation appears to reside in consciousness which provides the "empty space" in which questions can be asked and "forms" (things) determined. If with the other two it constituted a plenum, there would be no questions and no acts of determining possible. Consciousness, than, begins to appear as the questioning element, and it can turn the question on itself: if I am what I am.
Nanamoli Thera
Consciousness and Being
What follows will have to be stated in terms of ordinary speech, though that necessarily involves the word “is” and logical constructions, because speech is hardly possible without them. Nevertheless they have to be regarded here as a makeshift, and the whole of what follows tends to undermine the ultimate value of speech, retaining it, however, as a necessity for communication in conditions where separateness and individuality predominate.
The word “consciousness,” it seems to me, can only refer to what one might define provisionally as “the knowing that cannot know itself without intermediary and that cannot function in experience (of which it is an indispensable component) except negatively.”
To the question “What is consciousness,” then, a low level provisional answer might be “It is the pure subjective” or “It is the bare knowing of what it is not that constitutes (orders) experience and allows it being.” It must be added that, when consciousness is, it seems to be individualized by what it knows. But on another (higher) level the “is” in the question has still to be questioned, and so the low-level (and logical) answer is only a conventional makeshift, a conventional view, nothing more. And this qualification applies not only to logically inductive and deductive statements necessitating use of the word “is,” but also to descriptive statements that appear in “logical” form, using that term, or any equivalent.
When I ask myself, “What does the verbal expression ‘universal consciousness’ refer to?” I confess to be unable to find an answer, because, in spite of its “attractive” form, I cannot distinguish it from non-consciousness (see below). So I seem to have no alternative but to regard the phrase as one of those abstract expressions that appear on the surface to mean something, but when more closely examined, do not. (This, I know, may seem shocking, but I am more interested here in finding the facts than in avoiding shock.)
The more I examine and observe experience (What else can one do? Build castles?), the more I find that I can only say of consciousness (and in this I find a notable confirmation in the Pali Suttas) that it seems only describable (knowable) “in terms of what it arises dependent upon” (i.e. seeing-cum-seen … mind-knowing-cum-mind, known or mind cum-ideas), that is, negatively as to itself. And so, instead of being said to appear, it should rather be called that negativeness or “decompression of being” which makes the appearance of life, movement, behaviour, etc., and their opposites, possible in things and persons. But while life, etc. cannot be or not be without the cooperation of the negative presence of consciousness, which gives room for them (and itself) to “come to be” in this way (gaining its own peculiar form of negative being, perhaps from them)—the only possible way of being—they are, by ignorance, simultaneously individualized in actual experience. Unindividualized experience cannot, I think, be called experience at all. Thus there appears the positive illusion also of individual consciousness: “illusion” because its individuality is borrowed from the individualness of (1) its percepts, and (2) the body seen as its perceiving instrument.
Unindividualized perception cannot, any more, I think, be called perception at all. The supposed individuality of consciousness (without which it is properly inconceivable) is derived from that of its concomitants. This illusory individualization of consciousness, this mirage, manifests itself in the sense both of “my consciousness” and of “consciousness that is not mine” (as e.g. in the sensation of being seen when one fancies or actually finds one is caught, say, peeping through a keyhole, and from which the abstract notion of universal consciousness develops). The example shows that the experience of being seen does not necessarily mean that another’s consciousness is seeing one, as one may have been mistaken in one’s fancy owing to a guilty sense (though the experience was just as real at the time), before one found no one was there. To repeat: my supposed consciousness seems only distinguishable from the supposed consciousness that is not mine on the basis of the particular non-consciousness (i.e. material body, etc.) through which its negativity is manifested and with which it is always and inevitably associated in some way. It is impossible, I think, to overemphasize the importance of this fact. So of the concept, “universal consciousness,” I at present think that the word “universal” misleads. (Perhaps some hidden desire for power to “catch all consciousness in the net of one’s understanding,” and so escape the horrors of the unknown, seduces one to catch at this seemingly attractive term.)
Again it may be asked: What knows universal consciousness? Would not individual consciousness (if the “universal” is accepted) be held inadequate to judge it? And how can it know itself, or what are the means by which it can know itself and distinguish itself from non-consciousness and individual consciousness? I can find no answer to that and so I conclude that, if I ask it, that is simply because I must have started out with an unjustified assumption about the nature of consciousness (which, platitudinous as it may seem, is horribly difficult to understand and handle in view of its negativity; when one talks about “consciousness” normally, one finds on examination that one has not been talking about it at all but about the positive things like pleasure and pain, action, perception, etc., that always accompany and screen it). Is the question then really necessary? Consciousness, of course, cannot be denied as a necessary constituent of experience, but the trouble starts when we begin to ask what consciousness (or its nature) is. We have assumed the individuality of consciousness, apparently unjustifiably, because of the observed individuality of the objective part of experience through which we say it is manifested; and the assumption of its individuality logically leads to the further assumption of some universal form. Why?
Now, as I said earlier, when I begin to ask what something is (is, say, consciousness individual, universal, both, or neither?), we have taken being for granted and failed to examine the nature of a part of my question. In one sense consciousness seems correctly describable as functioning (that is in its true negativity) by putting everything in question: What is this? What am I? What is life? What is consciousness? What is being? Now here the emphasis must be removed from “what” and “this” and placed squarely on “is.” Suppose I suggest this: for “is” read “belief-attitude” (as a mode of craving combined with ignorance). In other words, it is the nature of consciousness to make be (with the aid of desire-for-being and of ignorance-of-how-anything-comes-to-be) and the nature of being to depend on consciousness. The multiplicity and the contradictoriness of the answers normally given to these questions ought to be sufficient evidence for something of the sort, or at least for the suspicion, that all the methods of answering them in the way normally done are radically wrong in some way. In fact the contradictory answers in all their variety, as usually given, each bolstered up by logic, betray, it seems to me, just that form of ignorance-craving combination which make perception/non-perception, change/immortality, time/eternity, life/death, action/inaction, choice/fatality, unity/variety, individuality/universality, seem not only possible but real. (It then seems necessary or “right” [here we have craving] to determine what among these is [here we have ignorance] real and what is not.) And the trouble begins again: I begin asserting “I am this, I am not that,” “This is that,” “A is B,” “Consciousness is life,” “Truth is beauty,” “Life is good,” “Killing is right,” “The end is the justification of the means,” “I am,” “God is,” etc., all of which others may deny. Perhaps we get angry and come to blows. How many more people in history have been killed for the sake of opinions about what is and what is not than have been killed for the sake of facts? Viewpoints, interpretations, and opinions about the raw material of experience differ, less or more, from individual person to individual person. The more consistent and logically strengthened any moral, religious, or philosophical system becomes, the more possible it becomes for it to be contradicted by an opposing system. And then bare craving has to arbitrarily choose and bash the opponent on the head if it can. That is why Buddhism (especially Nagarjuna, but also Theravada) favours a dialectic that pulls down all such positivistic- negativistic systems (the positive is always haunted by the negative, and so there is really no true via negativa or via positiva in any absolute sense). It pulls them down using their own premises.
Of whatever I can say that it is, by that very fact I imply that it is not: It is this, is not that. It then is in virtue of what it is not, being so constituted by the consciousness that determines it thus. But the consciousness on which its being depends is negative, whose negativity appears in objective things as their temporality and change, the change in their being. But while the being of whatever is objective to it appears as positive, even though it may change, its own being appears as a negation of itself and a denial, flight or movement, the temporalizing of the temporalized objective world.
Now, perhaps, you will understand why it is really impossible for a Buddhist to answer the questions, “Does Buddhism teach the extinction of consciousness? Is nibbana the extinction of consciousness?” On the basis of what has been said above, could it be answered yes or no without examining each term of the question?
There is, of course, another, different approach to the analysis of (not the answer to) that question: Why should consciousness (however conceived) seem preferable to cessation-of-consciousness (however conceived)? Consciousness of deprivation, of an “abyss of nothingness,” is not cessation of consciousness. Would not any preference (absolute one-sided choice) for one over the other show craving in the aim if that were set up as the ultimate aim? The desire-to-end-craving, as I see it, is a provisional measure adopted while craving is still present in order to use craving to terminate itself, while the aim is absence-of-craving and consequently ending of suffering. Use of the word is (which implies presence of ignorance) in this way is also use of present ignorance to terminate itself, while the aim is (to me in this state) liberation from ignorance.
Second, suppose a state of consciousness without suffering. Would it not have to be entirely without change since the slightest change in the state must imply a degree of suffering intruding. But can a state of consciousness absolutely without change be distinguished at all from absence of consciousness? I do not see how it can. However a mixture of longing for the incompatible (craving) and fear of or disinclination to face the facts of the association and complexity which are inseparable from conscious experience (ignorance) can make it seem as possible and realizable as the catching of the red in a rainbow with a butterfly net. So out we go with our butterfly nets chasing colour … and get wet instead. Craving and ignorance persist in heaven, though suffering may be suspended there for a time.
That is how I see Emerson’s “Take what you will but pay the price,” viz. “Pay death as the price of life,” or “Pay suffering as the price of consciousness.” May get it on loan, but if one does not pay up when the bill comes in, the bailiffs distrain. But that does not mean that I think one should counter with undiminished craving and ignorance and use them to denounce life, consciousness, etc. I say one should take them as they are and develop understanding of them. That, as I see it, and only that, along with the sharing of it, is the true source of joy, not joy of life haunted by fear of loss-of-consciousness, and so on. This you know, so I am not saying anything new.
If I ask myself “Is it possible for me to end consciousness?” I have to reply to myself that I see no possibility at present. (What might happen if I succeeded in ending craving and ignorance, of which I see no prospect at present, is, of course, hard to say!) If the possibility were available now, I at present see no sound reason why I should not avail myself of it. Pure speculation! Yes, but at least it prevents me coming down one-sidedly in favour of consciousness or in favour of non-consciousness in the crude mode. I do regard death (my life’s end, murder, or suicide) as the ending of consciousness: to presume that conscious continuity (negativity) ends because a particular continuity of its material objective world (including its body) ends seems to me a pure assumption whose opposite is just as valid, with possibly better logical arguments in favour of it if the evidence is observed without bias. However, what happens to me at death cannot be known. Consequently I am at liberty to assume (since I cannot avoid assuming something about it) what seems most reasonable. Death seems above all to be forgetting. I do not know. But since I have to believe something about it whether I like it or not, I do not believe that consciousness ends with death. Memory may well do so. I don’t, however, know that this is what I want not to believe.
It is, I think, rather important to bear in mind one thing in regard to what has been said above. With this view there are two scales of value (not so much divorced as crossing at right-angles) which must be carefully discriminated. The physical world of consciousness-being- action in which we live and are, biased by ignorance and propelled by craving, is governed by perception of being and the practical values based on that. But any positive metaphysical system, whether based only logically or emotionally on it, which is founded on that, is haunted by the shadows that it cannot avoid casting and that it cannot itself see (like the Sun). It acts in virtue of cause and effect and its thought is logical by its dependence on the word “is.” As far as we live in this world we have to live its mode and by its values, or we risk falling into wells through star-gazing. But none of its laws are made absolute (without divorcing idea from experience). The Void, of which it cannot be said that it is or is not, nor that it has consciousness or has none, while it denies absoluteness to any experiential value (alike to being and to consciousness) cannot be identified. And that is the doctrine of not-self (anatta) as I see it in one aspect at present. This voidness cannot be “is-ed” and so introduced into the worldly scheme, except as the denial of absoluteness of all particular values. It has no more effect on ordinary life than the theory of relativity. But just as that theory completely alters calculation of enormous speeds, so, as I see it, this void-element completely alters calculations of extraordinary situations, of death (as killing, suicide or the partner of old age). Nanamoli Thera
