Becoming Aware of Consciousness Independent of the Body, Life and Mind

What is consciousness? How can we understand consciousness separate from what we believe to be ourselves, the body, vital force and mental framework that we identify with? Philosophers, scientists and religious leaders have all tried to develop a definition of “consciousness”. Rene Descartes famously declared ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Subsequent researchers in the field of consciousness have challenged this statement, and spiritual practitioners experience pure awareness without the movement of thought in the mental field. Exploration of consciousness now has recognised that consciousness cannot be defined or limited by mental conception. It must be experienced. Seers and rishis have described an experience of pure, undifferentiated awareness, unified with pure existence and pure bliss, and have termed this “Sat-Chit-Ananda”. The Mother proposes a method to aid the seeker in experiencing pure consciousness as separate from the ego-personality, the mind, the life-energy or the body.

The Mother writes: “It’s one of the most indispensable things to do if one wants to succeed in having self-control and even a limited self-knowledge: to be able to localise one’s consciousness and move it about in the different parts of one’s being, in such a way as to distinguish between one’s consciousness and one’s thought, feelings, impulses, become aware of what the consciousness is in itself. And in this way one can learn how to shift it: one can put one’s consciousness in the body, put it in the vital, put it in the psychic (that’s the best place to put it in); one can put one’s consciousness in the mind, can raise it above the mind, and with one’s consciousness one can go into all the regions of the universe.”

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth, Exercises for Growth and Mastery, Becoming Aware of “Oneself”, pp. 124-126