Spiritual  Consciousness

Spiritual approaches to consciousness involve the idea of altered states of consciousness or religious experience. Changes in the state of consciousness or a religious experience can occur spontaneously or as a result of religious observance. It is also maintained by some religions and religious factions that the universe itself is consciousness.

In shamanic practices, changes in states of consciousness are induced by activities that create trance states, such as drumming, dancing, fasting, sensory deprivation, exposure to extremes of temperature, or the use of psychoactive drugs. The experience that occurs is interpreted as entering a real, but parallel, world. In many polytheistic religions a change in emotional state is often attributed to the action of a god, for instance love was ruled by Aphrodite and Eros in Ancient Greek polytheism. In Hinduism the change in state is induced by the practice of yoga. Yoga means "union" and is intended to produce a state of oneness between the practitioner and the divine. In Islam and Christianity, the change of state can occur as a result of prayer or as a religious experience.

The change in state of consciousness in Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam is reported to be quite similar. The pursuit of yoga and the Buddhist Jhanas involve feelings of oneness with the world that give rise to a state of rapture. This is also reported by those undergoing some forms of Christian (or Islamic) religious experience; for instance, James (1902) provides the following report:

I cannot express it in any other way than to say that I did "lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me." I gave up all fear of any impending disease; I was perfectly willing and obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought. My dominant idea was: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me even as thou wilt," and a perfect confidence that all would be well, that all was well. The creative life was flowing into me every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding. There was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness of time or space or persons, but only of love and happiness and faith.

Gangaji, in her book, the Diamond in your Pocket (p68), puts it this way 'consciousness is not an object. It is hereness itself. Our minds are usually involved with an object that appears and disappears in the hereness, and because of that, we overlook the nature of hereness. Pure consciousness is what these words appear in, what this book appears in, what all bodies appear in. It infuses all words and bodies, and it is conscious of itself, and it is you. In your recognition of yourself as pure consciousness, you awaken to yourself. Normally, when we speak of consciousness, we are referring to particular states of awareness - being aware of something or not being aware of something - rather than the awareness itself.'

Eugene Halliday also posits that consciousness is not an object, but that in which objects appear. "Nothing proves consciousness or sentience to exist other than itself. But the existence of objects in consciousness in proved only by consciousness. Without consciousness or sentience, even if objects existed, there would be no actual proof of their existence." (pii) In his book Reflexive Self-Consciousness, Halliday identifies consciousness with the source of all being: "To become conscious of our source is to become conscious of the source of all being and all consciousness. It is to become consciousness itself, and reflexively self-consciously so". (pvi)

Meditation is used in some forms of yoga such as Raja Yoga, Hatha Yoga, Transcendental meditation, the Buddhist Jhanas, the Buddhist Immaterial Jhanas (there are several versions of the jhanas in different types of Buddhism), in the practices of Christian monks and Islamic scholars such as Sufis. Meditation can have a calming influence on practitioners, as well as changing the state of consciousness. Theravada Buddhism views the Jhanas in a similar way that some yogic practices view the early stages of meditation - as a preliminary, in which it is demonstrated that states such as rapture are delusions (see The Jhanas in Theravada Buddhist Meditation: "With the fading away of rapture, he dwells in equanimity, mindful and discerning"). In most types of Buddhism, serenity meditation is followed by a philosophical "insight meditation" that focuses on the idea that the universe is consciousness only, one that is perhaps indistinguishable from Monism.
 

Books

Baars, B. (1997). In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 2001 reprint: ISBN 978-0-19-514703-2
Bar-Yam, Yaneer (2003). Dynamics of Complex Systems, Chapter 3.
Blackmore, S. (2003). Consciousness: an Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-515343-9
Block, N. (2004). The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-511789-9
Charlton, Bruce G. "Evolution and the Cognitive Neuroscience of Awareness, Consciousness and Language"
Cleermans, A. (Ed.) (2003). The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-850857-1
Corrigan J. M. 2006. An Introduction to Awareness [ISBN 978-1-4196-4889-2] / An Introduction to Awareness podcast - A philosophical treatment of Awareness
Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Press. ISBN 978-0-15-601075-7
Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little & Company. ISBN 978-0-316-18066-5
Eccles, J.C. (1994), How the Self Controls its Brain, (Springer-Verlag).
Halliday, Eugene, Reflexive Self-Consciousness, ISBN 0-872240-01-1
Harnad, S. (2005) What is Consciousness? New York Review of Books 52(11).
James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience
Immanuel Kant (1781). Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith with preface by Howard Caygill. Pub: Palgrave Macmillan.
Koch, C. (2004). The Quest for Consciousness. Englewood, CO: Roberts & Company. ISBN 978-0-9747077-0-9
John Locke (1689). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Libet, B., Freeman, A. & Sutherland, K. ed. (1999). The Volitional Brain: Towards a neuroscience of free will. Exeter, UK: Short Run Press, Ltd.
Metzinger, T. (2003). Being No One: the Self-model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Metzinger, T. (Ed.) (2000). The Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-13370-8
Morsella, E. (2005). The Function of Phenomenal States: Supramodular Interaction Theory. Psychological Review, 112, 1000-1021.
Penrose, R., Hameroff, S. R. (1996), 'Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3 (1), pp. 36-53.
Searle, J. (2004). Mind: A Brief Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sternberg, E. (2007) Are You a Machine? The Brain, the Mind and What it Means to be Human. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Velmans, M. (2000) Understanding Consciousness. London: Routledge/Psychology Press.
Velmans, M. and Schneider, S. (Eds.)(2006) The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. New York: Blackwell.