Phenomenology of Nothingness
Edward Muzika
I am both mystified and troubled that modern spiritual teachers do not address the relationship between consciousness and nothingness in any meaningful way.
The way I see it, consciousness comes to nothingness, which causes data from the sensual apparatii of sentient beings like humans, to become aware of an apparent external world. Philosophers and spiritual teachers seem to talk endlessly about that external world, consciousness which causes or relays it to us, and then also “higher” realms of consciousness. But none really address the deep problem of how does consciousness arise spontaneously from within the “prior to consciousness” nothingness, lying before birth and after death, and before awakening in the morning and after going to sleep in the evening?
Spiritual teachers talk about our immortality, and the eternality of consciousness, without addressing the obvious fact is that consciousness is found in that world found in consciousness, is not eternal or permanent in any way. It comes and goes.
Some teachers say yes it comes and goes, but consciousness itself is always there in some temporary being or another. That is it’s always present somewhere in the world or the universe.
But this really doesn’t address the concerns of an individual, who may say hearing the above, “good for consciousness, but what about me”? I has a human and temporary. My body is temporary, my mind is temporary, and I certainly don’t have direct access to the consciousness of beings not yet born or long dead. So from my point of view, consciousness is a temporary thing, just like me. It comes and goes to all sentient beings.
So, I suggest that we investigate the phenomenology not only of consciousness, but of nothingness when it transitions into consciousness, and watch how consciousness arises, and when finally knowledge of the world is born within us. How does that happen and when does it happen?
In deep, dreamless sleep, there appears to be little or no consciousness. Yes, it appears we might be aware of the passage of time while in deep sleep, because we can often wake up before our alarm clock wakes us up, because many of us, much of the time, appears to be aware of the passage of time and sleep. But are we aware of anything else except dreams?
You can see here that were bumping up against the fundamental question of what is the relationship between life and death, existence and nonexistence, and the question of the part of nonexistence is not much discussed in spirituality. Many teachers seem to act as if consciousness were everything, and even my questions about nothingness occur in consciousness, which proves there’s only consciousness. But this is a willful ignoring of the truth that we know, is that we have each of us, long periods of not being conscious. So what do we know about nothingness truly?
Like I said above, I think we can begin to better understand nothingness versus something this, consciousness versus nothingness, if we examine the phenomenology of waking up in the morning and transitioning into sleep at night. What can we find?
Most of us I think, wake up rather abruptly, and are never aware of the phenomenology of the coming of consciousness to nothingness. Here we have to define nothingness, and I define that as a sentient being absent consciousness. I know, technically this definition of nothingness would not apply to the lack of consciousness before birth or after death, because sentient being may not have existed before birth in any form or after death in any form. In any meaningful way, we can only speak about nothingness before we wake up in the morning and after we go to sleep at night.
This limitation makes the investigation of nothingness much simpler and perhaps soluble, then generalizing two before birth nothingness in afterlife nothingness.
For me, I often wake up abruptly coming to consciousness. But there have been long periods in my life when I use to introspect processes of the coming of consciousness in the morning. Observing the disappearance of consciousness at night is a very different experience for me.
For me, observing the disappearance of consciousness into sleep it’s really hard to capture. Initially there’s the feeling one is falling asleep and losing interest in what’s going on around me. I thought slow down. They may disappear altogether. I may lose awareness of my body. But sometimes, just sometimes, I become increasingly aware of the background nothingness in front and all around me. Then suddenly, abruptly, and without warning my mind an awareness totally disappear and I’m asleep, no longer aware of anything.
On the other hand, often when I wake up, I have learned how to play with that transition between sleep and awakeness, and also to watch consciousness arise within me, apparently from my belly and chest, rising slowly as light so to speak, lightness, which when it reaches my head, explodes into the world, and I’m immersed in the world.
When I say I observe consciousness coming to me, is different than I would observe my cat coming towards me. When my cat approaches me, I am fully aware of the world around me, and things triggered by one of my cats coming to me, like a feeling of love. I can talk about how the cats coming is observed and how it affects me emotionally and all the other kinds of things that are very subtle. But when I speak about consciousness coming to me, it is a very different experience altogether. That is, I don’t see anything like an object approaching me. It’s more like feeling terms, that it feels like something like a fog bank appearing cloud of sentience is approaching me, and when it gets very close, suddenly I am within it in the world appears along with my body, my sense of presence, and my mind.
However, I noticed that the rising of the world within me that consciousness brings itself is staged. First I am aware of sense data such as seeing the room around me, feeling the mattress, etc. In this moment of non-mental awakening can last a second or two or three, until my mind suddenly pops into existence, and I recognize where I am and who I am, and what situation I’m in, and memories may arise as to what I have to do this day.
I call this transitional state “the gap.” This is how my teacher Robert Adams referred to the state. He told us to try to as much as possible become aware of this gap and to rest in it as long as we could, and it we would find ourselves.
But even before this gap state, I .in consciousness. It’s more like a fog bank of light that’s not very bright, but which is very welcoming, approaching towards me, but mostly it appears to becoming from an area below me, which when I was awake, I would call my belly or chest. But it sleep I don’t have those words were even that sense of location my body. But consciousness feels like a benevolent sentience is coming towards me the observer or witness, who myself is no sense of location or time. I am just observing this arising of sentience within me that has a quality similar to that of light, but also of well-beingness.
That is I, in nothingness was totally unaware of anything until I began to become aware of the sense of this consciousness coming to me and nothingness. I had no location and no time, then when consciousnessfinally reaches me, nothingness disappears in the world, my body mind explode into existence and I am born anew along with the world.
Now, I need to find out whether this is a universal experience, would all people experiences same if they took the time to practice being aware of the waking process happens to them every morning. Do they experience or will they experience the sense that consciousness comes to me, the witness of consciousness, residing in nothingness with no awareness of myself until consciousness comes?
If this is the case for a large number of people, I would assume that this would be proof of the concept that consciousness is a very temporary sort of thing, and what is really aware is something that resides in nothingness, something that is not aware of itself until consciousness comes. We could call this mysterious function “sentience” or the self as Nisargadatta calls it.
Truly this is the mysterious subject. Even those who studied Nisargadatta for years are unaware of how important that which is prior to consciousness was to Nisargadatta’s teachings. For him, anything that happened in consciousness, or any teachings about consciousness were unimportant, they were only serving as entertainment for that unknown sentience inside. And that sentience could never be known, because it lay outside of consciousness, we can only speak about things in existence meaning only those things in consciousness. Talking about things outside of consciousness would be merely speculation. That’s why I chose to examine the transition between consciousness and objects into nothingness and no knowledge because the latter is a big part of our lives and mostly unexamined.
Such a point of view as many important conclusions. First, there is no witness within consciousness, it lies prior to consciousness in nothingness. But nothingness is not a state of existence, but a place where all existence arises from and disappears into.
Somehow, the world arises when there is a peculiar conjunction of living body, the nervous system, the presence of the mind, and that apparent entity comes into the presence of consciousness. At that point, I am revealed to myself as a body and a human being, living in an apparent external world, with other entities, trying to make sense of that world. And here, it is very rare for me to look inside and to find my root so to speak, into the relatively eternal nothingness.
Now, when I practice introspection, more specifically the way Robert Adams presented, as diving deep within, ever deeper, it seems like I can go downwards forever and never reach bottom, or the root. Try it for yourself and see if you can reach bottom. For me, I could not reach bottom even after 40 years. It always felt as if I were going inward sin downwards into myself lower and lower. But then I noticed that suddenly many times, my diving would stop, and it’s like I would turn around and wake up to my body in the world. It’s as if all my attention was directed downwards and inwards and I dove and dove into going through endless layers nothingness, and when I reached bottom, I would no longer be looking inwards, but would suddenly be thrust into the world of man looking outwards at all of creation.
Gradually I came to realize, that I had reached the root, I had become the witness witnessing the entirety of my consciousness laid out before me.
Now, what I want to do is to throw the discussion open to a discussion of this topic of the origin of consciousness in the relationship between consciousness and nothingness, and our place as humans within it.
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