From the The Ascent — Book One of the Sacred Metaphysics canon.
The full chapter, and the twelve that follow it, are at sacredmetaphysics.org — and if you visit, The Bhagavad Gita: In the Voice of Adi Shankara is yours free, no charge, no catch. Come for the question. Stay for the climb.
You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot know the knower of knowing.
— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
Consciousness is the most misunderstood thing the human mind has ever tried to address, and it is misunderstood for one reason, which once seen will not let you go: it is the only subject that is also the one doing the studying.
Everything else in the world can be set on a table. You can hold it, weigh it, turn it over, take it apart, and give it a name. The name is never the thing — the word fire has never once been warm — but the name at least points at the thing, aims your eye toward it, and that aiming is what we call knowledge. All knowledge has this shape. There is a knower, a knowing, and a known: I see the tree. Subject, verb, object. Every fact ever established, every science ever built, every word ever spoken, stands on that three-legged grammar.
Consciousness cannot be set on the table, because it is the one looking at the table. It is not the knower, for even your “I” is something witnessed — you can watch your own thoughts arrive and leave, which means there is something prior to the thinker, watching. It is not the known, for the moment you make it an object you are holding a reflection and not the thing. It is not even the knowing. It is the light in which knower, knowing, and known all appear. You cannot get behind it to look at it, because every standpoint from which you might look is already inside it. There is no place to stand outside consciousness from which to examine consciousness. It is the one referent that can never become an object — the seer that cannot be seen, the knower that cannot be known.
Available at sacredmetaphysics.org
This is not a difficulty to be overcome by a cleverer instrument or a later century. It is the nature of the thing. And it means that the entire modern project of building a knowledge of consciousness — measuring it in the firing of neurons, hunting it through the rooms of a dead brain, modelling it, ranking it, naming it as one names a chemical — is not merely hard. It is a category error committed against its own premise. You cannot draw a map of the mapmaker. You cannot photograph the camera with itself. You cannot bite your own teeth. The science that measures the brain is measuring the instrument, never the music; it studies the pointing and mistakes it for the thing pointed at. And when it opens the skull and finds no tenant, it concludes there was never a tenant — when all it has found is that the witness does not appear among the objects it witnesses. Of course it doesn’t. It is the one looking. So let us say at the outset the thing this whole book is built to honour, and let us say it plainly so that no one mistakes the silence that follows for ignorance: we will never explain what consciousness is, because it cannot be explained. Not yet-unexplained. Not too-complex. Unexplainable in principle, forever, by the structure of what it is. And this is not a wall we have struck by accident. It is the door. For what is left when explanation ends is not ignorance — it is a different faculty altogether, older than the intellect and reaching further. The traditions called it realization. We will come to it. But we cannot come to it through the front door of knowledge, because the front door of knowledge is built of symbols, and consciousness is one of the only two things no symbol can ever reach.
The Other is God.
And here we must be careful, and we must be honest, and we must refuse the fight that the age wants to drag us into. This book does not argue that God exists. It does not argue that God does not. It places the question, deliberately and permanently, at fifty and fifty, and it does this not from cowardice but from discipline — because the moment you make God the prize in a tribal contest between believers and unbelievers, you have already made God into a thing, an object, a possession to be won, and God is no more an object than consciousness is. To argue over God’s existence the way one argues over a fact is to have misunderstood the category before the argument begins.
What we will say is something the argument cannot touch, because it is not a matter of faith but of logic: if there is an absolute, then everything relative depends upon it, and the relative world is the proof that the absolute is required. Nothing in this world means anything by itself. Near means nothing without far; light nothing without dark; better nothing without worse; self nothing without other. Every thing in form is one half of a pair, defined entirely by what it is not. The whole material world is built of these contradictions, these opposites held in tension — and a world made wholly of relatives must be relative to something, or it has nothing to be measured against and dissolves into noise. The relative requires the absolute the way a wave requires the still water beneath it to be a wave at all. You need not call the absolute God. But the absolute is not optional. It is the silent ground that the entire trembling, contradictory, relative world stands on, and the traditions that called that ground God were not being primitive. They were being precise. God, before God is ever an article of faith, is pure logic: without the absolute, there is no relative — and there is, manifestly, a relative. We will leave the name at fifty-fifty. We will not leave the logic.
And notice what binds God and consciousness into a single category. The material world is built of symbols, and every symbol carries a contradiction inside it, because every symbol points at a referent that is one half of a pair. But the absolute — the eternal, the ground, consciousness itself — has no contradiction in it, because it is not one half of anything. It is not relative to a thing. It is the undivided, the whole, the one referent that does not need its opposite in order to be itself. And that is precisely why no symbol can hold it. Symbols are instruments built to handle the divided world, the world of pairs and opposites and contradictions. The absolute is the single thing that is not divided. So the symbol always carries the contradiction the absolute does not have, and the two can never meet. This is the deepest meaning of the oldest discipline: the symbol is not the referent — and here, at the top and the bottom of everything, the symbol cannot even reach the referent. There are only two such referents. They may, in the end, be one. Note carefully what this does and does not claim. It does not yet say that your consciousness simply is God, the highest teaching of the East and, to a careless ear, the oldest heresy of the West. It says something more modest and harder to escape: that the two are the same kind of thing — each a referent that no symbol can reach, each known only by being and never by being pointed at. How far that sameness finally runs is the question the whole ascent exists to answer; here we only set the two side by side and mark that they share one nature.
Sacred Metaphysics, Consciousness, Nonduality, Vedanta, Spirituality, Philosophy, Self-Realization, Ancient Wisdom
God is Love. Love is Truth. Truth is Consciousness. Consciousness is Brahman.
Amen. Namaste. Om Namah Shivaya.
— The Architect.