Transcription from You Tube discourse recorded July 19 2019
What we are going to talk about today is modalities of consciousness. Different levels and modes of consciousness. There are many different types, modes of consciousness that we as human beings can experience. To begin with I am going to talk a little about the types of ordinary consciousness that we experience every day. In the course of every 24 hour period, everybody experiences at least 3 completely different modes of consciousness. Ordinary waking consciousness, deep sleep, and dreaming.
To explain these in terms of Buddhist theory, first I will introduce a concept from the Abhidhamma called bhavanga. Abhidhamma is this collection of Buddhist texts that are very technical, very precise and they deal with psychological states. The Abhidhamma postulates all together 89 different kinds of consciousness. The most basic of these is called bhavanga. Bhavanga is mind or consciousness at its most rudimentary level. I think a good metaphor is to think of it as the mind idling in neutral. It's the most basic level of consciousness that we all experience and in a state of deep sleep you spend hours continually in the state of bhavanga. So the mind is at its minimal level. This is to be distinguished from being completely without consciousness. Anyone who has experienced total anesthesia will know that is quite different from sleep. If you go in for an operation and you get total anesthesia they put the cup over your face and tell you to count backward from 10 and you go "10, 9, 8, 7" and then you wake up an instant later in the recovery room. There is no sense of time having passed. So you have been essentially turned off for that period of time. Whereas in sleep no matter how deeply and soundly you sleep when you wake up in the morning there is still a sense that time has passed. There is still that thread of consciousness happening (this is bhavanga).
In the waking state, the mind continually lapses into bhavanga. When an external stimulus, a sense object strikes the mind then it’s said that the bhavanga vibrates and mind rises to a higher level and takes an object. This can also be a mental object, if you are thinking of something or daydreaming then you are taking that object, a mental object. So the degree of wakefulness or mindfulness or alertness is inversely proportionate to the amount of bhavanga. So the ideal is if you stay continually awake, continually mindful. If you are dull, you know you are sleeping or tired or you are just in a dull state of mind then you are continually lapsing into bhavanga, you are not noticing very much, you miss things.
Then when we practice insight meditation we are trying to reach a point where we are continually awake, continually aware, continually mindful that each object is seen sequentially and we are not lapsing back into bhavanga. This is really an important aspect of the Buddhist path; wakefulness, being awake. That's what the word Buddha means; "the one who is awake" from the verb bodheti "to wake". So when you are in a waking state the mind is taking objects, sense objects, mental objects continuously, and the more alert you are the more continuous this is, the more wakeful you are.
The 3rd common state of consciousness is the dreaming state and the difference between ordinary daily consciousness and dreaming consciousness is essentially one of perception. We need to talk a little bit about how the faculty of perception sañña works and how that relates to consciousness or viññaṇā,. Consciousness is the simple awareness of an object. To take visual consciousness as an example, visual consciousness does not see a tree, a house, a man, or a woman. Visual consciousness sees only shape and color. This is like raw data, then the faculty of perception immediately kicks in and recognizes the object, classifies it, and names it, and allows us to perceive a man, a woman, a house, a tree, a car, a bird. Whereas eye-consciousness just sees color and shape. So these things work together very quickly and it's extremely difficult to actually discern the difference between the two. Sometimes meditators can more easily discern the difference with the hearing faculty. You can notice a sound just as a high pitched sound and then notice the perception that follows afterward recognizes it a bird singing. This is how perception works, and this is essentially how we create the world we live in. This is important to grasp that the world we experience is not essentially out there. What we are getting from out there, from the outer world are only signals, light frequencies, sound vibrations and so on and perception parses these, analyses them, and creates a mental map or a simulation that we live in. All we ever know directly is our own mind. So essentially we dream the world into existence but it's based on external signals and the key difference between waking state and dreaming state is that in the waking state we are living within our own perception but the perceptions are constrained or limited by external stimulus. So they have a sense of reflecting an outer reality. Whereas in a dreaming state the faculty of perception is set free from these constraints and creates a space, a world entirely from internally generated material but the faculty of perceiving is the same in both cases.
The Buddha spoke a little bit about dreams and dreaming and he said that there are different causes for dreams. He said some dreams are visions of the future. Some dreams are visions of the past (past lives). Some dreams are messages from devas and some dreams are wind in the belly. I would like to quote that stanza to people who make too big a deal out of dreams because most of your dreams are just wind under the belly. Just random shuffling of stored mental images and data, they don't really mean very much but there are those dreams that do have significance and they have a different flavor or feeling and you can recognize them. There are dreams that have great significance. For most people they are rare but they are different. They can be a vision of the future, a vision of the past, or messages from devas. The Buddha himself before he was enlightened had a number of significant dreams predicting the future. For example in one dream he said he was lying across the whole of India, with his head resting in the Himalayas and his feet in the lower ocean. He said that this dream meant that his teaching will cover the whole of India, the whole of the known world. He used Jampudīpa, the island continent, the whole world, it was the world to the ancient Indians. So dreams can be significant but mostly they are just wind in the belly, they are just random shuffling of data.
Seeing how we create the world in our dreams is a useful analog of understanding our waking life and how we create a world from information, signals coming in, we create a world in our waking life. That's actually quite a vital point to understand, to shake the simplistic notion of naive realism that we assume that what we see, hear, smell, taste is real. Whereas it's actually our mental construction based on limited data and people can have different perceptions and if you go outside of human beings and we think of animals (or other beings and other forms). They have quite different perceptions. Imagine the world a bat lives in. A bat is almost blind and analyses its space, its world by echolocation. A sense we can just barely imagine. It lives in an entirely different world because the signals coming into it are different so the perception that it creates, the functional simulation that it lives in is quite different from ours.
Ajahn Punnadhammo