Chapter 9 - Consciousness

Consciousness arises through the 5 sense organs, or sense doors, as they are called, producing sense-consciousness in the brain. There is another door, called the Mind Door, when you daydream or think of something not based on the 5 senses; Mind consciousness arises through the Mind Door.

There are 5 kinds of sense-consciousness. When a visual external stimulus makes contact with the eye organ, there arises an impression. At first it is an impression followed immediately by the eye-sense-consciousness. 

Different external stimuli are competing for attention. An eye-sense stimulus may win, or it may be an ear-sense stimulus, or it may be a smell-sense stimulus, and so on. These impressions have to build up to a certain threshold to produce the sense-consciousness. Only when the impression is of sufficient strength will it he registered in the brain as a sense-consciousness. It is the attention that builds up the sense-consciousness and this is helped by interest. But whilst a sense-consciousness about something or other is about to fructify, distracting sense stimuli may rush in; large noises are the most distracting and push themselves into the brain to cause aural or hearing-sense-consciousness.

But as soon as a unit of consciousness arises, it disappears immediately, to be immediately followed by another unit of consciousness. The new unit of consciousness may be of the same character as the immediately past unit of consciousness, namely, a visual-sense consciousness, or it may be followed by another kind of consciousness, say, by an aural-sense-consciousness.

The Mind can be conscious of only one kind of consciousness at a time. With the arising of each unit of consciousness there also arise certain consciousness-accompaniments (cetasikas), otherwise known as thought constituents, or mental concomitants, or mental factors, such as love, hate, anger, fear, compassion, worry, etc., which accompany consciousness.

These thought-constituents arise in groups, and some are mutually exclusive like love and hate. These groups form in many combinations, depending on whether the thoughts are selfish thoughts or unselfish thoughts, and so on.

A child’s dominant instinct is the ego instinct, which makes it completely selfish. It has desires and wishes, which cannot be fulfilled and are "repressed". They are the cause of much trouble in the form of nervous disorders, nightmares, hysteria, depression, and a host of other ailments. Also, certain "complexes" are developed.

Your present character is the outcome of impressions formed in early childhood, and was moulded by your environment, and the attitude adopted by you towards your environment. Much of you behaviour, and even your thinking, is motivated by emotions and by repressed infantile desires.

At the moment of conception, your resultant karmic forces, in being translated into the new life, have already endowed the new embryonic cell with its genes, and its chromosomes, and DNA and RNA and its heredity. If it is your Karma that you should be born blind or deaf, etc., all this has been fashioned at the moment of conception.

Every person from the time of conception has certain good and bad tendencies, which have been implanted by the karma of past lives. It is up to him to change his future karma, to live with the basic good conduct towards a more moral and spiritual life, or to go down the gutter leading an immoral life.

The new life is also endowed with good and bad animal instincts in varying proportions as a result of the karma of past lives. Again it is up to the person concerned to overcome his animal instincts and lead a rational life through concentration and meditation.

In Part I of the Book is mentioned that the functions of the human body are carried on automatically. No amount of conscious command can enable you, for example to raise the rate of beating of your heart. But the least fear or anger will subconsciously make your pulse rate shoot up. Throughout the 24 hours of the day, whilst you are sleeping or you are awake, your body is receiving its orders: for example your heart and your stomach and your kidney and your liver and the results are automatic. As your body grows, it builds up a wonderfully intricate system of nerves which also function automatically.

In the Universe, there are 3 Realms of existence:

1. The Realm of Sensuous Desire, ranging from the Purgatories through the Plane of Animals and the Human Plane to the Planes of Higher Beings within the Sense-World.
2. The Realm of Pure Form, where the Senses of Taste, Smell and Touch are eliminated, and only the mental, visual and aural senses remain. (The Mental Faculty is taken as a Sense).
3. The Realm of Non-Form, where only the mental sense is present. (The Mental faculty is taken as a sense).

In all, there are 89 consciousnesses:

• 1. Sensuous Realm 54 consciousnesses
• 2. Pure Form 15 consciousnesses
• 3. Non-Form 12 consciousnesses
  
  Total 81
   
• 4. Supra-Mundane 8 consciousnesses
  
  Grand Total 89 consciousnesses