Consciousness

Tantra style

there is no essential difference between waking and dreaming… all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt, text…

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak §119

I had an uncomfortable dream last night. I was in a church, about to deliver a sermon. But I was in my dressing gown and I was having real trouble keeping it tied up. I guess it was the preacher’s version of that dream where you turn up to school naked.

And, what’s more, I had not had time to prepare properly. My notes were a mess and I was struggling to make sense of them. I started to speak several times, losing my train of thought while having to awkwardly retie my gown.

Finally, just as I was finally about to launch into it, two people from the congregation rose to their feet, came up to the pulpit, and started heckling me. They jabbed their fingers at me and poked me, even calling me names.

One of the interesting things about dreams is how you don’t know when you’re in them. The experience is completely convincing. There is a sense in which being inside a dream is basically indistinguishable from the experience of being awake. Both experiences are totally convincing.

This is something that philosophers and theologians from Ancient Greece to medieval India to 19th century Europe have thought about. And still today, whether it is in New Age spirituality, academic philosophy or neuroscience, the question of the relationship between waking and dreaming states continues to be asked.

Is there a sense in which, just as a person wakes from a dream to find out that it was not ‘real,’ a person can wake up from waking, also to find that it is not ‘real’?

Reality and Illusion

Many spiritual traditions take you down this path. That is, if you take this comparison between dream states and waking states all the way, then you end up believing that ordinary experience is an illusion in the same way that a dream is an illusion.

And this has a profound consequence. It makes you fundamentally negative towards life, even if it is couched in all kinds of gooey positive-sounding language. If ordinary experience is an illusion then, if you want to know the truth, you have to break free from it. You have to awaken from the dream of your everyday life to see what’s really there. Your everyday experience might even be worse than an illusion, it might be a downright lie.

If you are looking for a life-affirming spiritual tradition then don’t go down this very common path. This kind of thinking absolutely dominates spirituality. You find it in Christianity, in Buddhism, in Vedic Hinduism, in Judaism and Islam, and, somewhat surprisingly, in most forms of New Age and alternative spirituality. I frequently hear from spiritual and religious teachers that the goal of spiritual life is to break free from the illusion of separation, of self, of sin, of … whatever.

The persistent negation of ordinary human experience in spiritual communities is, in my opinion, a huge problem. My eyes were opened to this problem by the great German iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche. The persistent question that he asks is about what it would really take to affirm life. Not life as you wish it was, but life as it really is.

Fortunately, there are spiritual traditions that have robust underlying philosophies that do just this.

Upside Down

The monistic Tantric traditions of India like Trika Shaivism engage very directly with this issue. The solution that these philosopher-theologians came up with is ingenious, built on thousands of years of accumulated observations, and totally counter-intuitive.

It is counter-intuitive because it involves turning completely upside down your common sense understanding of what is happening when you experience something, anything.

An ordinary person might assume that conscious experience is a feature that has been added on to the basic building blocks of concrete reality. Conscious experience emerges from the bedrock of biology, physics, chemistry and so on. Here, the things that make up physical reality are foundational. Human consciousness filters and absorbs these objects as they come in through our senses.

Tantrism turns this seemingly obvious approach upside down. It suggests that the bedrock of reality is not the physical, seemingly objective and concrete world. The bedrock of reality, of existence itself, is consciousness. Consciousness does not emerge from the physical world. The physical world emerges from consciousness. Conscious is not a feature. It is the source.

Science and Consciousness

This might sound outlandish and, frankly, hard to believe.

But there is a common thread that ties this thousand-year old idea to contemporary scientific thinking, especially fields like physics and neuroscience.

Take, for example, the idea that human cognition is a process of precision-weighted predictive processing. This concept here is that the brain can’t process every piece of incoming sensory input in order to stitch together your experience in real time. This would be extremely inefficient or perhaps even impossible.

Instead, your brain adopts a more effective mechanism for building your inner experience of the world. Instead of a real-time feed from the world ‘out there’ to replay that world on the internal screen of your consciousness, the brain predicts what it thinks is out there and then processes actual sensory data only when an error in its predictions is identified. The better your brain gets at predicting, the fewer corrections it needs to make.

On this view, your conscious experience arises from the integration of a two way stream. You are always knitting together the outward projection of your brain onto the world and the inward flow of data from your senses to create an integrated conscious experience.

Tantra and Consciousness

The medieval Tantrikas, a thousand years earlier, proposed something strikingly similar. They even named these two streams of experience. They called the inward moving one the ‘left’ current and the outward moving the ‘right’ current. And they also proposed that the totality of a person’s conscious experience involved knitting these two streams together in an integrated central channel of energy.

One of the main goals of Tantric practice is to be able to access that central integrated channel. This way, you get the full experience of reality rather than having to choose one stream over the other.

But the Tantrikas took this basic idea much further than a cognitive scientist would normally dare to take it. For them, this was not merely a phenomenon of individual human consciousness. It was how the world itself is actually constituted. For them, human experience has this character because it is reflecting something more basic, more primordial. We are like this because of the way the universe is in its most basic configuration.

Tantric Metaphysics

This profound idea - that consciousness is the bedrock of reality itself - can be found in all of the monistic Tantric traditions.

Let me give it a little bit more texture as a viable philosophical idea. Let’s think about this Tantric theory of consciousness as an open field of possibility. It functions as the infinite ground of every reality and of all reality. Consciousness is here a metaphysical principle that contains the full set of every possible experience. Your particular experience is extracted from this field and instantiated as you - this person, in this place, at this time.

And so... everyday experience is a manifestation of this universal metaphysical principle. And this means that you can’t negate or deny ordinary experience as an illusion or as a lie. The only possible response to this foundational Tantric concept is to affirm every experience, even the experience of a dream, as ultimately real.

If you decide to read the Tantric literature, and I highly recommend that you do, you will come across this concept in many disguises. Perhaps the most common disguise is the god Shiva. In Tantric spirituality, this metaphysical concept of consciousness as a field of infinite possibility is personified as the god named Shiva. And, as we’ll see next post, the dynamic power that manifests a particular experience out of that field is personified as the goddess Shakti.

If you want to understand Tantric philosophy and spirituality, and how it allows you to relentlessly affirm every aspect of life, then you really have to spend some time with this idea.

Because here, everything that exists is just a specific instance of only one underlying thing: the union of Shiva and Shakti. Or, better put, everything that exists exists as the dynamic result of infinite possibility intertwining with the power to actualise.

The Power to Create

This idea has profound and, in my opinion, positive consequences. It allows you to do two things. The first we have already spoken about - it allows you to take a relentlessly positive stance on all of life.

The second is that it allows you to take control of your experience in some important ways.

Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that the balance between the left, inwards-flowing current and the right, outwards-flowing current was 50/50. That is, your experience of life, your ‘consciousness’, is equally composed of things that you predict and project out onto the world and of things that come to you through your senses.

That means that at least 50% of your experience is fabricated by you, it not the majority of it. What would happen if you could take control of that aspect of your experience, and start to manufacture absolutely convincing, absolutely real experiences tailored to your desires? Like taking elements of a dream, and bringing them forward into waking experience so that these are as convincing, as compelling as anything else that you experience?

Well, there’s not much from my dream last night that I would want to bring forward into my day today. But it’s not hard to think about a different dream, on a different night, and how amazing it would be to bring those experiences into the light of day as absolutely convincing, absolutely rock solid elements of my lived experience of life.

This power - to control the predictive processing in your brain to the point where you are able to create for yourself the experiences that you want in life, is one of the highest goals of Tantric practice. This is not meditation in the Buddhist sense, the sense of calming the chattering mind and creating an open silence.

The Tantric way is much, much better, in my opinion.

If you want to get started down this path, the fundamental Tantric practice to focus on is visualisation. It’s an easy thing to do, just try to visualise something in your mind, the same thing, every day. Eventually you’ll learn to bring this thing to mind during your day, even to project it out into that boring meeting you’re suffering through or when you feel like staying in bed for the day or when you’re a week overdue to get your Substack out.

I’ll give some more guidance on this at a later date. But visualising is essentially practicing how to take control of your predictive engine, and if you can do that, you can gradually learn to transform every experience into what you want it to be.

Neil