A question to experienced meditators:

Is consciousness (Pali: viññāṇa) constant or inconstant?
If it is inconstant then how is it related to the pure non-dual awareness which is supposed to be constant?

What do you mean by 'constant'? Do you mean one of these definitions?



Here is what the the wiki entry says of viññāṇa



I'd say it would be ideal to figure this out for oneself within the realm of one's own practice. As me telling you what I see in my own experience will not give you the insight that liberates.

What does your own practice tell you about the constancy of viññāṇa according to their definitions above?

Thanks, Nikolai for the reply



Yes, that is what I meant by constant.

And, by viññāṇa I mean one of the aggregates that cognizes.


To my very limited experience and intuition consciousness is inconstant, and I expected that the answer to my first question would be: inconstant. So, my main question is:
how is consciousness (which is inconstant) related to the pure non-dual awareness which is supposed to be constant? Are they totally different form each other?

I am confused because according to many advanced meditators the pure non-dual awareness experienced by them is not inconstant (at least that is my impression) . But isn't awareness a function of consciousness? Then if consciousness is inconstant, how could there be a non-dual experience of unalterable pure awareness?

I am sorry if the questions sound more philosophical rather than pragmatic, but this question is pestering me while reading Daniel's book, and my stage of practice is still very far from the level required to get the answer based on experience.

Where does it say 'non-dual awareness' is constant? And what is the definition of 'non-dual awareness' that you are adhering to with these queries?



Who are these 'advanced meditators' and what did they say to give this impression of inconstancy? Perhaps the last question you ask be best answered by actually exploring those notions in practice. I personally don't see anything not subject to the three characteristics. An awareness drops away when I sleep and when a cessation of all the senses occurs. It can be interrupted. And that goes for awareness without a felt sense of inner and outer world (duality). The concept of 'non-dual awareness' seems to have a number of definitions depending on the person and tradition.



Can you quote Daniel's book so there is more light shed on the issue you have?

Yes, from this page:MCTB No-self vs. True Self



They are meditators in Buddhist or non-Buddhist tradition who talk about non-duality also. I used the word "advanced" just to emphasize that they are much experienced and many of them are teaching meditations too. Many of them say that pure awareness (sometimes they use the phrase "pure consciousness") is unalterable, conscious, and bliss.


That is my understanding too; that's why I am confused.

Again he also says in the same page:

Probably true. But this rational mind wants answers before experiencing.

You will get rational explanation if you want, but being right or intelligent or knowledgable isn't liberating at all. I've worked at times with both assumptions and with neither, leaving the issue alone seems best in my experience.

Try this:

While there is any experience of any kind, there always appears to be a quality of cognizance, or so it seems.

In this way, you could say that every time there is experience, there is this sense of presence, or consciousness, or awareness, or whatever, but notice how this statement is essentially saying that whenever there is experience, there is experience, or, in the same way, it is like saying that every time there are sensations there are sensations.

If we view the world one way, the way in which it appears that some sensations cognize other sensations, then it seems that there is a separate cognizance, or consciousness, or awareness, or experiencer, or watcher, or whatever.

When we see those sensations all more clearly, or more properly they just get more clear themselves somehow, the thing flips around, and now there seem to be only sensations themselves with no knower, no experiencer, no awareness, no attention that is different from those bare sensations themselves.

In the first mode, as every time there is experience there seems to be an experiencer, then it appears that there is something permanently there that is experiencing, cognizing, perceiving, conscious of, etc.

In the second mode, it still has some quality that is essentially the same, but the difference is that it seems to be intrinsic in sensations, or is just the sensations, by the very nature of sensations seeming to have been sensed, but in reality they are more fundamentally just themselves than that, with no sensor or knower at all, and yet, whenever there is the sense world obviously there is the sense world, and this gives a sense of this aspect of things being perpetual in some way, though more properly it is a redundancy to say this, an extra thing not needed at this point at all.

Daniel

consciusness is inconstant in the sense that it is changing(arising and passing away) continuously..Look at your screen..there is eye consciousness with contents of the screen and turn your head now , the eye consciousness of the screen drops instantly and accomodates new data...this mean that when you were looking at the screen , the sense data representing the screen was constantly arising and passing away..it lasts just one moment(not sure how long that moment is though)

There's no shortage of intellectual explanations of this subject if you're looking for them. Sartre is making roughly the same point in The Transcendence of the Ego. You could also look at the philosophical literature around the homunculus argument. I know this is something Daniel Dennett has written a lot about.

Personally, I found my mind inclined toward seeing things this way from a very early age, before I ever knew anything about philosophy or meditation, and so when I took up those practices (first philosophy, and then meditation many years after that), it just sort of made sense to me. I don't see it as being very mysterious or difficult to grasp at all. The implications are a bit baffling, though not any more baffling than the idea of a separate observer/homunculus.

Thank you, Daniel for replying in detail.
Also thanks to shashank and fitter for your input

Sam K R, there was once I too felt and thought that nondual awareness is unchanging. It is also seen to be some eternal super-Self. As insight progresses, that was seen to be false.

My progress is rather similar to this: http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.sg/2007/03/thusnesss-six-stages-of-experience.html