Pure awareness experience

ABSTRACT

I am aware of the red and orange autumn leaves. Am I aware of my awareness of the leaves? Not so according to many philosophers. By contrast, many meditative traditions report an experience of awareness itself. I argue that such a pure awareness experience must have a non-sensory phenomenal character. I use Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments for assisting in recognising pure awareness. In particular, I investigate the gap where one cannot see one’s head. This is not a mere gap because I seem to be looking from here. Critically, I claim, the experience of looking from here has a non-sensory phenomenal character. I argue that this sense of being aware cannot be reduced to egocentric visual-spatial relations nor the viewpoint because it continues when I close my eyes. Neither is a multisensory origin sufficient to explain why I seem to be at this central point rather than elsewhere. Traditionally, claims of a pure awareness experience have been restricted to highly trained individuals in very restricted circumstances. The innovation of Harding’s approach is that it reliably isolates a candidate for pure awareness using methods which can be replicated at any time.

KEYWORDS:

• Buddhism
• Douglas Harding
• first-person methods
• pure awareness
• mysticism

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Miri Albahari, David Chalmers, Declan Smithies and Daniel Stoljar for helpful comments on versions of the manuscript. Thank you also to Robert Penny for insightful correspondence about Douglas Harding’s views on awareness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Here the term ‘object’ is used in a wide sense to include not just perceived objects, but also feelings, thoughts, pains and mental images.

2 James complains that with Kant and the neo-Kantians ‘the spiritual principle attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the ‘content’ of experience is known. It loses personal form and activity – these passing over to the content – and becomes a bare Bewusstheit (awareness) or Bewusstein uberhaupt (consciousness in general), of which in its own right absolutely nothing can be said. I believe that ‘consciousness,’ once it has evaporated to this state of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles’ (James 1904, 477). (Bracketed terms added).

3 A common reading of Moore in this passage is that he is talking about qualia (phenomenal properties) as being diaphanous: Block (1996, 26–27), Kind (2003, 229), Tye (1992, 160), Tye (2002, 139), Kennedy (2009, 574–577), Speaks (2009, 539), Stoljar (2004, 341). In fact, in the context of Moore referring to ‘consciousness’ as the ‘common element’ to all sensations it is clear that he is referring to awareness as diaphanous (yet distinguishable): see, Albahari (2009, 62–63, 70, 76–77, 83), Fasching (2008, 465), Forman (1999, 112); Metzinger (2003, section 3.2.7).

4 Harding’s book, On Having No Head first published in 1961 and updated in 1986 (Harding 1961), is regarded as a spiritual classic. Excerpts appear in Hofstadter and Dennett (1981).

5 For detailed overviews of the concept of luminosity as it has been used in Buddhist traditions see Mackenzie (2017) and Skorupski (2012).

6 Providing a definition of the unity of consciousness would go beyond the scope of this paper. See, Bayne (2010), Bayne and Chalmers (2003), Brook and Raymont (2014), Cleeremans (2003), Dainton (2000) and Tye (2003).

7 Contrary to what I said elsewhere (Ramm, 2017, 148). Thanks to Miri Albahari for making this point to me.

8 Stace (1961) makes a similar distinction between ‘introvertive’ and ‘extrovertive’ mystical experiences. ‘The extrovertive experience looks outward through the senses, while the introvertive looks inward into the mind’ (61). The latter involves ‘a state of pure consciousness – "pure" in the sense that it is not the consciousness of any empirical content. It has no content except itself’ (86). Shear (1998) eludes to the Object-Directed PAE where he says ‘after one’s attention has been drawn frequently to pure consciousness in meditation (with all other objects of awareness absent), it should become possible to recognize it at will afterward, even when the other ordinary components of experience have returned to one’s awareness … as meditation traditions often report’ (681). Forman (1999) refers to the ‘dualistic mystical experience’ as an inner silence that is experienced ‘concurrently with changing external experiences, including thinking and feeling’ (150) (see also Forman 1998, 193–197).

9 Experiment 1 is from Harding. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 are my own variants on his experimental method.

10 For a defence of first-person experiments, see Ramm (2018).

11 By ‘space’ I do not mean the space of physics, but rather I use it as a descriptive term in the sense of a gap or opening, and also in terms of it seemingly functioning as room or capacity (in a container sense) for the scene.

12 For examples of the pointing experiment see: Harding (1961, 42–43, 1990, 8–9, 41–42; 2000, 8–9), Lang (2003, 6–7).

13 I use the terms ‘looking’ and ‘visually aware’ interchangeably. A different sense of ‘looking’ is one in which I am actively attending. Active visual attention has its own phenomenal character such as the sense of effort in controlling one’s attention. Metzinger (2017) posits a model of mental agency (including controlled attention and deliberate thinking) which contributes to a phenomenal self-model. This is a different phenomenology from what I mean by ‘looking’ and ‘visually aware’. There is a sense of being visually aware even when one is not actively controlling visual attention, or so I claim.

14 Thanks to Robert Penny for highlighting these important points to me. See Richard Lang on the observation that I am self-evidently aware (Lang 2003, 8).

15 For further discussion on egocentric information see Peacocke (1992, chapter 3) on scenarios, and Bermúdez (1998, chapter 5) on self-specifying information in vision.

16 Colours are another example of monadic visual properties.

17 Casullo (1986, 1989) argues that objects have their positions in perceptual space in virtue of monadic position properties, while Falkenstein (1989) argues in favour of relations.

18 See Dainton (2016) for a similar proposal.

19 Technically speaking, according to physics, black and white are not colours at all. Black is an absence of reflected light, and white is a mixture of red, green, and blue light. I am using ‘colour’ here in the way it is employed in ordinary languages such that ‘black’ and ‘white’ count as basic categories of colour (Berlin and Kay 1969).

20 This type of non-duality by absolute unity is distinct from non-duality by extinction of the object as reportedly occurs for objectless pure awareness experiences. It is also distinct from non-duality by extinction of awareness (or the subject), such as in states of absorption in the object. An in-depth analysis of non-duality goes beyond the scope of the present paper.

21 For Harding on the first-person as zero, see Harding (2001, 14–15). There is a broader sense of ‘first-person experience’ in which is it is that which is had by me, whatever ‘I’ turn out to be.

22 See Albahari (2006, 2011) on the distinction between the subject and personal selves. I argue elsewhere that the gap is the subject of experience (Ramm, 2017).

23 For an argument that first-person science complements and completes third-person science, see Harding (2001).