States of Consciousness

Integral Christian

Two Minds, Two "Selves"

The fifth component of the integral model is states of consciousness. Before we can fully understand states of consciousness, we need to understand something about how our mind works. In our usual everyday awareness, we experience our "mind" as one thing: as the part of us that is aware, thinks, knows, learns, understands, etc.

But if we look closely into the nature of our own mind, we will see that it is not just one thing. To see this for yourself, try this experiment. Close your eyes, and silently repeat to yourself the phrase, "Mary had a little lamb."

Did you do it? If you did, you can see that there are two different parts of your mind. One part of your mind repeated the phrase. Another part of your heard you repeat the phrase. The part of your mind that repeated the phrase is the thinking part of your mind. The part that heard you repeat the phrase is the Awareness part of your mind.

In other words, one part of our mind thinks, and another part of our mind is aware of our thinking. The aware part of our mind is aware of everything, not just thoughts. It's aware of our emotions, our body, our sensory perceptions, and everything in the world around us.

The part of our mind that is aware is much bigger than the part of our mind that thinks.

Normally we don't experience the thinking part of our mind and the aware part of our mind as two different things. We go through life with these two parts of our mind fused together.

Because the Awareness part of our mind is bigger than the thinking part, in order for us to experience the two of them as one the way we normally do, Awareness has to contract or get smaller. This is the way we normally go through our lives, with Awareness contracted down and fused with our thinking mind.

Another differences between the aware part of our mind and the thinking part of our mind is that conscious Awareness is always located only in the present moment. Thought is not. Thought can be focused in the past, the present, or the future. When the two parts of our mind are fused, our contracted Awareness goes wherever thought goes. Thought is in control, and it takes our contracted Awareness with it wherever it goes: into the past, the present, or the future.

But when these two parts of our mind aren't fused together – when we are consciously aware of the aware part of our mind – then Awareness is always in the present moment.

When spiritual traditions talk about the "small self" or the "relative self", they are referring to our individual body, emotions, and the thinking part of our mind. When they talk about the Higher Self, the True Self, Big Mind, or the Self with a capital "S", they are talking about the Awareness part of our mind.

The small self exists in the world of form, which includes our individual physical, emotional, and thought forms. Eastern spiritual traditions call the world of form maya or samsara. The Higher or True Self is the Formless, the Absolute, the Pure Consciousness out of which all relative forms arise. The modern-day spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls it Presence, or the Eternal Now. It is what some people in deistic traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam experience when they truly experience the presence of, or oneness with, God or the Spirit.

With this basic understanding of these two parts of our mind and our two "selves", we are ready to move on to the fifth component of the integral model: of states of consciousness.

Terms

Many of the terms related to states of consciousness (including in the audio clips) come from Eastern traditions, because we don’t have comparable well known Western terms. Here are the definitions of some of these terms:

Satori: awakening, enlightenment, or liberation

Nirvana: a state of enlightenment or liberation from suffering (same as Satori)

Samsara: the gross, physical, manifest world

Ramana Maharshi: a modern day Indian sage in the Vedanta Hindu tradition who mastered Witnessing Awareness

Three Everyday States of Consciousness

We are all familiar with the three states of consciousness we all cycle through every 24 hours:

Waking (gross consciousness)
Dreaming (subtle consciousness)
Deep, dreamless sleep (causal consciousness)

Spiritual traditions maintain that each of these three states of consciousness has an energetic support – a "body." In other words, we each have a "gross" physical body, a "subtle"energy body (or a soul), and a "causal" bliss body. The terms "gross," "subtle," and "causal" are general terms used by the traditions to refer to both the states of consciousness and their associated bodies.

Click here to hear Ken Wilber talk about these three everyday states of consciousness. To purchase the CD sets that are the source of the clips on this website (Kosmic Consciousness and The One Two Three of God) click here.

States of consciousness can be defined by what we are aware of when we are in them. In the waking state, we are aware of gross physical objects (rocks, trees, chairs, our physical bodies, etc.). When we are in the dreaming state, we are aware of dream lights, images, sounds, dream characters, and other dream objects. When we are in the deep dreamless sleep state, most of us are not aware of anything.

Click here to hear Ken Wilber talk about how to identify these three states. To purchase the CD sets that are the source of the clips on this website (Kosmic Consciousness and The One Two Three of God) click here.

Higher States of Consciousness

In addition to the three everyday states of consciousness we all experience, contemplatives in every spiritual tradition have also described two higher states of consciousness beyond gross, subtle, and causal. Different traditions may break these two higher states down into more detailed sub-divisions, but for our purposes we will use two.

Descriptions of these higher states of consciousness can be found in every major spiritual tradition the world over – Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. One of the benefits of the integral model is that it shows how each of the traditions are really describing the same higher states of consciousness, even though they may use different words or theological concepts to describe them.

Turiya: The Witness

The first higher state of consciousness is called "Turiya," or "the Witness." Turiya literally means "the fourth," as in the fourth state of consciousness beyond gross (waking), subtle (dreaming), and causal (deep sleep).

The Witness is the aware part of our mind. It is the witnessing state of Awareness that we are practicing when we mediate. In a typical meditation practice, we try to focus our Awareness on a single object, such as counting our breath or repeating a mantra. As soon as we become aware that our Awareness has fused with thought and wandered off in thought, we just notice that, and return our Awareness to our meditation object. When we do this, we are practicing being the witnessing part of our mind watching the thinking part of our mind repeatedly get carried away in thought. In other words, we are practicing being aware of what we are aware of in this present moment.

Turiya or witnessing consciousness has an ability that our three everyday states of consciousness don't have. Our three everyday states of consciousness are mutually exclusive – we can only be in one of these states of consciousness at a time. For example, we can't be in the waking state and in the deep dreamless sleep state at the same time, or in the dreaming state and the deep dreamless state at the same time. Witnessing Awareness is not mutually exclusive. We can experience it while we are in any of the three everyday states of consciousness. This means that our own Awareness, if it is trained through a practice like meditation, can consciously witness the waking state, the dreaming state, and the deep sleep state.

Click here to hear Ken Wilber talk about Witnessing Awareness. To purchase the CD sets that are the source of the clips on this website (Kosmic Consciousness and The One Two Three of God) click here.

If the Witness is always present, even in deep dreamless sleep, then why don’t we have any Awareness or memory of being in deep dreamless sleep? To understand this, we must go back to a concept from the Stages & Lines of Development page: the concept of subject and object. Remember we learned that "subject" is something I identify as me, and "object" is something I identify as not me. "Subject" is what's on the inside of my face looking out, and "object" is everything on the outside of my face that my subjective self is looking at.

In our average everyday waking state of consciousness, we experience our individual self – our body, thinking mind, and feelings – as subject. And we experience everyone and everything outside of our individual body and mind as objects.

When we meditate, we are practicing a shift in our Awareness. We are practicing being the Witness "watching" temporary thoughts come and go in our minds, and temporary feelings and sensations come and go in our bodies. In other words, we are temporarily making out entire individual self – our body and our thinking mind (our "bodymind") – into an object in a larger Witnessing Awareness. When we do this, we are temporarily shifting our subjective sense of self – our identity – from our bodymind to Witnessing Awareness.

When we aren't doing something like meditating – when we're back in our everyday waking state of consciousness – it isn't that Witnessing Awareness is somehow gone. Witnessing Awareness is always present, just like it was in our "Mary had a little lamb" experiment. But since we normally identify only with the thinking part of our mind as our "self," we don't usually notice that the Witness is there, or experience it as our "self."

A practice such as meditation is one way to develop Witnessing Awareness. But practicing this shift in Awareness does not have to be limited to a specific period of the day when we sit it meditation. Because Conscious Awareness is always in the present moment, we can make this shift throughout the day, every day, by bringing our Awareness into the present moment and becoming aware of what we are aware of right now. Eckhart Tolle is a modern-day spiritual teacher who advocates the practice of bringing our attention to Awareness or Presence in this present moment as a way to wake up from our mistaken identity with the small self.

As we practice being in Witnessing Awareness more and more, our ability to experience this Witnessing Awareness as our true identity increases. When our identification with it becomes strong enough, we may start to lucid dream.

Let’s look at what is happening when we lucid dream. Normally when we dream, we experience our "self" as whatever character we are in our dream. We experience as objects everything else in the dream.

Notice what's gone from this picture: our physical body. In the dream state, we are no longer identified with or experiencing our physical body as our "self." Our physical body is asleep in bed, completely gone from our Awareness. And yet we still recognize our "self" as being present in the dream state. We say, "I was dreaming last night," or, "In the dream, I did (this or that)." In other words, we still experience a sense of "self" or "I-ness" even when our physical body is completely gone from our Awareness.

Just as in the waking state, in the dream state the Witness is always there, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. In fact, it's actually the Witness that is seeing and hearing everything in the dream.

Lucid dreaming happens when we become consciously aware of the Witness while dreaming, and our dream character shifts from subject to object, so that our felt experience of "self" shifts from the dream character to the Awareness that was there all along, witnessing the dream.

Now we are lucid dreaming. We are experiencing our real "self" as whoever or whatever is aware of the dream. Now we know, even while the dream is playing itself out, that it is all a dream. We know that the dream character we are temporarily experiencing ourselves to be is not who we really are. We know that eventually we're going to wake up, and when we do, this whole dream world, including our dream character, will disappear, because they're not "real." And we know that no matter what happens to us in the dream, even if it's scary or painful, everything will be okay, because its not really real, and its not happening to the person we "really" are.

What happens when we go even deeper into dreamless sleep, and even the dream world disappears from our Awareness?

For most of us, deep dreamless sleep seems like a complete blank. There doesn't seem to be any Awareness present in deep sleep. Why is this? It's because of what we identify with and experience as our "self."

In the waking state, we experience our "self" as our body and mind. In the dream state, we experience our "self" as our dream character. But from the perspective of Witnessing Awareness, are these two "selfs" really subjects, or objects? They are objects.

This means that from the perspective of consciousness itself, what we normally identify with and experience as our self, both in the waking and dreaming states, are really objects, not subjects. The ultimate subject is Witnessing Awareness.

But we aren't used to experiencing our "self" as pure Awareness, pure Consciousness, apart from any of our "self" objects. We're used to experiencing our self as something that is really an object. So, if the only experience we've ever had of Conscious Awareness is when it's fused with one of our self objects, then when the self objects are gone...

... so is our Conscious Awareness.

What would happen if our experience of our "self" shifted from any object in Awareness, to Awareness itself? What if we experienced ourselves as pure Awareness, apart from any self object?

Then we would experience lucid deep sleep. We would maintain a very subtle Awareness even in deep dreamless sleep. Some long-time meditators report experiencing lucid deep sleep.

Waking Up

When we wake up from a dream, our felt identity shifts from our dream character back to our gross physical bodymind. Our dream character goes from being our "self" to being an object in the Awareness of our waking self. Unless we've been lucid dreaming, it's only after we wake up that we realize that the dream was just a dream, and that the dream character isn't who we really are.

Enlightenment or Satori or Nirvana is also called waking up. Only this time the "character" we are waking up from being identified with is the person we experience our self to be in the everyday waking state of consciousness – our bodymind. This waking up has been called the great liberation, or self-realization, because we become free of our identity with the limited, physical self, just as we become free of our identity with a dream character when we wake up from sleep.

There is one way enlightenment is not like waking up from a dream. When we wake up from a dream, our dream self and the dream world we were in disappear. When we wake up to our true identity as the Witness, our gross body and the gross physical world do not disappear. What changes is that we no longer experience our gross body or thinking mind as our essential "self," or who we really are. Our exclusive identity with our individual body and mind as who we fundamentally are is gone.

The True Self

Different traditions call this witnessing consciousness by different names. Some traditions call it the Witness. The Bible calls it "I Am." It is what Jesus was referring to when he said, "Before Abraham was, I Am." It has also been called Christ Consciousness. All of the traditions say that this Witnessing Awareness or I Am-ness is our True Self.

Click here to hear Ken Wilber talk about the Witnessing Awareness that is our True Self. To purchase the CD sets that are the source of the clips on this website (Kosmic Consciousness and The One Two Three of God) click here.

Spiritual traditions call this Witnessing Awareness the True Self because it is that aspect of us that is eternal. It was never born, and will never die. It never enters the stream of time.

At the amber or mythic stage of development, some spiritual traditions teach that "eternal life" is something God will give us after we die, if we live worthily. In the amber literalist view, the point of spiritual practice can be to become worthy to receive eternal life after we die. An understanding and experience of higher states of consciousness reveals that "eternal life" is already our true nature, and the purpose of a spiritual practice such as meditation or centering prayer is to reveal to us the eternal life that we already are.

Usually we think of ourselves as a body
in which consciousness comes and goes.
In reality, we are consciousness
in which a body comes and goes.

This state of having shifted one's identity from our individual relative self to the Witness or Christ Consciousness is what the Buddha called Nirvana, or freedom from suffering, and what Jesus called entering the Kingdom of Heaven. It has been called awakening to our True Self. When this happens, it is not the small, relative self that has awakened or become enlightened. Rather, Pure Awareness has woken up from its fusion and identification with the relative self. In this state, we are free from suffering because we no longer experience the individual egoic suffering small self as who we really are.

Turiyatita: Nondual One Taste

Experiences of higher states of consciousness have evolved since the time of the Buddha's awakening around 600 B.C. Between 200 and 300 A.D., we begin to find descriptions of the realization of a fifth state of consciousness beyond Turiya or Nirvana. This state of consciousness was first described by Nagarjuna in the East, and Plotinus in the West. Hinduism calls this fifth state of consciousness Turiyatita. Turiyatita literally means "beyond the fourth," because this is the state of consciousness that goes beyond the fourth, or witnessing, state of consciousness. This state of consciousness is also called nondual Awareness or One Taste.

When we are in Turiya or Witnessing Awareness a subtle dualism exists, in that the Witness is separate or apart from what it witnesses. When we enter Turiyatita, this separation collapses, and the Witness and everything witnessed become one. When this happens, there is no longer the sense of being on the inside of your face looking out at the world "out there." The feeling of this side of your face and the feeling of the world are one and the same.

Ken Wilber has described the experience this way:

"You are released into the All, as the All. You don’t look at the sky, you are the sky. If you look at a mountain, the sensation of being the Witness and the sensation of being the mountain are one and the same sensation. When you 'feel' your pure Self and you 'feel' the mountain, they are the exact same feeling. You are still you, and the mountain is still the mountain, but you and the mountain are two sides of the same experience.

"The entire World Process then arises, moment to moment, as one's own Being, outside of which, and prior to which, nothing exists. That Being is totally beyond and prior to anything that arises, and yet no part of that Being is other than what arises."

Like Turiya, Turiyatita is not a mutually exclusive state in the way that the waking, dreaming, and deep sleep states are. In Witnessing Awareness, we simply witness whatever is arising in whatever state we are in (gross/waking, subtle/dreaming, or causal/deep sleep). In Nondual Awareness, we are simply one with whatever is arising in whatever state we are in – gross, subtle, or causal. (In the deep sleep or causal state, the only thing arising is what the traditions describe as a very subtle bliss body.)

Click here to hear Ken Wilber talk about Turiyatita. To purchase the CD sets that are the source of the clips on this website (Kosmic Consciousness and The One Two Three of God) click here.

There are two known ways to experience Turiya and Turiyatita:

As a spontaneous, temporary peak experience.

Through ongoing training and practice in a contemplative spiritual practice.

Click here to hear Ken Wilber talk about spiritual practice. To purchase the CD sets that are the source of the clips on this website (Kosmic Consciousness and The One Two Three of God) click here.

When we have realized our true nature as the Witness or I Am-ness, we can then re-inhabit our gross, subtle, and causal bodies with fearlessness, because we know that nothing can hurt or kill us, because we can't die – because who we really are never enters the stream of time. Life then becomes Lila, or divine play, or luminosity.

Click here to hear Ken Wilber talking about life after the realization of Turiya and Turiyatita. To purchase the CD sets that are the source of the clips on this website (Kosmic Consciousness and The One Two Three of God) click here.

Two Truths

We have learned about two different faces of reality: the world of form, or the manifest realm of existence (including the gross physical realm, and the subtle mind/dream realm, and the causal bliss realm), and the realm of the Formless, the Unmanifest, the Absolute (the Witness, I Amness, Christ Consciousness). The manifest realm of form arises from and is an expression of the Unmanifest realm of the Formless. In experiences of Nondual Awareness, the Unmanifest collapses into the manifest, and the one Witness and its many objects are no longer two.

Each of these faces of reality (manifest and Unmanifest, or relative and Absolute) has its own truths – things that are true from its perspective. For example, from the perspective of the Absolute, everything in existence is a perfect manifestation of the Absolute, just as it is. It's all "God." There is no seeking, and no need for anything to be other than exactly as it is. From the perspective of the manifest realm, there is much work to do. Humans need to evolve and awaken, in order to manifest the love of the Absolute in increasingly wider circles in the relative world. Both of these are true, depending on which perspective one is looking from.

Next: Putting It All Together – Integral Spirituality