About Being Conscious

Consciousness is described from the materialistic, dualistic, sociocultural and spiritual viewpoints. The materialistic view, led by biologists and natural scientists, is based on the evolutionary notion that consciousness is generated when matter, that is, the nervous system, reaches a certain level of complexity. In the dualistic school of consciousness where psychology predominates, mind and matter occupy separate worlds that somehow interact. Consciousness is independent of matter and matter does not have consciousness as its basis. Both the materialistic and dualistic views usually define consciousness in terms of its content, that is, the impressions, emotions, dreams, logical thinking, etc, where it can be exchanged with the term ‘awareness’ or ‘empirical consciousness’. Collective consciousness view considers the shared subjective experience of reality. Sociologist Durkheim says that individual desires are shaped only by external social forces. Vedanta holds transcendental, unitary, integral and non-dual view of consciousness. Vedic wisdom suggests that search of truth involves harmony with self and existence. The whole of human life and nature is spiritually significant, and anything that threatens their harmony is non-spiritual or evil (anarta). A person can live at a very narrow self-consciousness, as an atomistic individual, or can be conscious of being integral to the universe. Spiritual journey is essentially a journey of transcending from the lower level to a higher level of consciousness.

Source: Economic Times, 3/10/2018