Reply To: Witness consciousness and Buddha nature

#52723
taryal
Participant

It’s like asking “How do I know that consciousness exists” or “perception “exists while denying it because can not be “seen” yet it is experienced all the time

I think it has to do with fear of death and uncertainty. I remember telling an evangelical that a theory/doctrine that can’t make reliable predictions lacks credibility. Then they said it can’t be predicted whether I “love” my wife or not and foolishly connected it with the idea of Jesus dying on a cross. “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth..”, unfortunately, the universe is not made up of heaven and earth, but of innumerable planetary systems and galaxies that the Bible does not even come close to explaining.

This got me thinking though, of the mechanism necessary for “consciousness”. The following conditions need to line up for eye-consciousness to manifest:

object (arammana) + light + physical eye + Peripheral Nervous System (PNS) + Central Nervous System (Brain/mana indriya) + chakkhu pasada + hadaya vatthu (attention)

  1. Light reflects off the object
  2. Photons are received by eye ball
  3. Neurons from PNS transfer electric signals to Brain
  4. Brain converts it into a form that chakkhu pasada can receive
  5. Mana indriya sends ray signal (kirana) to chakkhu pasada rupa
  6. chakkhu pasada impinges the hadaya vatthu
  7. If the person is attentive, awareness manifests at this step

So far it is a plain awareness (vipāka viññāṇa). But if it is an object of interest, the initial attachment is automatic. Then the person can choose to generate conscious thoughts about the object or try to avoid it by distracting themselves. I think this is what causes the perception of ‘I’ or ‘me’. But if a single condition above is removed, awareness of the object can not occur. So it is worth noting that “conscious ability” is never constant. It is virtually non-existent while asleep and highly limited in the embryonic stages, but gradually goes up after birth as the baby grows by consuming food. It is sharpest in adulthood but will go down again in old age. This clearly suggests that there is no well-defined essence like a “soul”.

But I am curious about the mechanism involved in conscious thinking (the part after initial vipāka viññāṇa). A human has a large dense brain but cittas are consciously generated in the hadaya vatthu. Is it possible to know how that works?