In this week‘s lesson of the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment Course we look at both the empty and the full nature of Firstness, the layer of our Body & sensual Being. The following text is an excerpt from the course material — it is not meant to be a sophisticated discussion of Buddhism and modern Western psychology but meant to give you some understanding of perceptual consciousness and maturation processes in infancy wherefore it helps to make up a dichotomy between two worldviews. In order to fully comprehend the Blog Post it is helpful to read my freely available eBook on The Stages of the Path that you receive upon subscription to my newsletter.
The Preconscious & the States of Firstness
Before we explore the nuances of the four earliest states a bit we have to take a short detour into Psychoanalysis:
Because, when we attempt to look into the processes of or consciousness and brain that developed earliest within our journey as sentience on earth, namely through infancy and the first fifteen to eighteen months of our lives, we might find nothing at first. We have in a sense lost contact with them, just as neuroscience finds the degeneration of grey and white matter in the brain, which is nerve cells, blood vessels, and the isolation of our pathways, our consciousnss of these realms degenerated. And so it can take some time to actually make them conscious again.
Sigmund Freud in his book on the Ego and the It differentiated three layers of consciousness: the unconscious, which is the dynamically unconscious repressed that we can not easily access without deep, psychoanalytical work; the preconscious, which latent, only descriptively unconscious, and capable of consciousness; and the conscious itself.
Though, Freud related these terms towards our relationship to potential and actual objects of our minds – such as memories that are either repressed and cannot be accesses by will and thus unconscious, easily available such as what we ate for breakfast and thus preconscious, or just float through our minds and are thus consciousness – we can use these terms for our awareness of the transcendental media and their form expressions, for example the various states, as well: we might have completely repressed certain states or aspects of states such as one of the basic emotions, we simply might not be aware even if an aspect of a state plays out automatically though we could easily be aware of them, or we are consciously aware of how a certain state operates in our consciousness. And of course there are various degrees of skill to this.
The states which evolved earliest in our lives then in a sense have mostly become preconscious: we potentially can access their workings but generally we are simply not aware of their workings, their workings happen below the conscious threshold and on autopilot because we don‘t direct our attention towards them unless something irritating happens within the sensory realm such as having mislaid our keys or mistaken a rope for a snake.
Given the submergence of conscious processes into preconscious ones, the transpersonal psychologist Brian Less Lancaster points at the insights of the Abhidhamma, the basket of the higher teachings in Theravada Buddhism, to raise these early processes back to our consciousness. But why should we do this?
The Origins of Karma & the Imaginary Nature
The Buddha, as depicted in the Madhupindika Sutta, states that understanding our early perceptional processes frees us from producing Karma, and therefore their understanding brings a ball of honey‘s sweetness to our mind. Subsequently he outlines five states to become aware of and thus undo our attachment to perceptions. The simple delineation of five states in The Ball of Honey, the translated form of its Pali title, was later brought into a more nuanced scheme of seventeen states that we won‘t consider here.
The five states the Buddha mentions relate to the 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 States and culminate within the 2.1 State where finally a sense of aware self is posited that is beset by sensory objects and our biases towards them and respectively produces attachment or aversion towards the sensory objects that become delineated and charged with ideas of pleasure and pain throughout the earlier four states. The text of the Sutta is as follows:
Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition there is feeling. What one feels is that one perceives and thinks about. What one thinks about is that one mentally proliferates. With what one has mentally proliferated as the source, perceptions and notions tinged by mental proliferation beset a man with respect to past, future, and present forms cognizable through the eye.
The States of Firstness as named by B. Less Lancaster
The process of perception described in these few lines became later known as the imagined nature or imaginary characteristics of reality in the wisdom of Buddha, The Samdhinirmocana Sutra. There it is stated that by being not bound to conventional designations and because we become free from predispositions towards our conventional judgments, we can realize cessation, which is Nirvana, in this lifetime. The Buddha Asanga in The Compendium of the Mahayana writes: “‘Now what is the imaginary characteristic?’ It is mere cognizance‘s appearing referents, though there are no referents.”
As an example for this, Asanga uses the old idea of a rope which in darkness seems to be a snake. Since the snake is not there it is recognized as an illusion projected onto the rope. Yet, if you reject the notion of a snake for the rope you still fall into the convention of seeing a rope, which itself, as soon as we reduce it to its elements, is only a series of characteristics that we combine: such as color, shape, odor, flavor, and tangibility. In actuality all we see is nothing but mere consciousness, dreams that appear as the aspects of all kinds of referents, while in actually there is no referent in dreams, illusions, mirages, or blurred visions.
The Phenomenological Tradition of the West
Likewise, in the west the phenomenological tradition culminating in Edmund Husserl was aware of these states. In his late work Experience and Judgement delineates Husserl writes on the general structure of receptivity as the lowest stage of ego-like activity that leads toward the tendency of interest in certain sensory objects and their synthesis into predicated, propositional, named, and referencing wholes.
However, in contrast to the Buddhist logic of ridding oneself of the imaginary nature he attempts to understand how, already within the stages of receptivity, within the passive activity of our sensual Being the evolution and continuation of the entire perceptual reality is woven. He concludes, that our ability to denominate and project our phantasies into the phenomenal world increases our Horizon: everything that we give being to carries and expands the world horizon with it through the unity of perceptual and practical activity – namely, perceiving can likewise mean enacting and decreasing the difference between phantasy and reality by modifying the sensory material.
His four stages that relate to those of the Madhupindika Sutta are:
- 1.1 Identity: The contemplative intuition which precedes all explication, the intuition which is directed toward the object “taken as a whole.” This simple “apprehension and contemplation” is the lowest level of common, objectifying activity.
- 1.2 Inversion: The higher level of the exercise of this interest is the true explicative contemplation of the object. Explication is penetration of the internal horizon of the object by the direction of perceptual interest.
- 1.3 Reciprocation: In contrast to its internal determinations or explicates, relative determinations arise which display what the object is in its relation to other objects: the pencil is beside the inkwell, it is longer than the penholder, and so on.
- 1.4 Synthesis: The predicative judgment combines the sensory whole with a proposition. The sensory object is no longer just it, but “is” something else and therefore “exists once and for all” and the process of perception reaches its end.
The Road Towards Attachment Theory
Right at the time of Husserl the US American James Mark Baldwin could have been coined the father of developmental psychology. Very similar to Husserl but based on his observations of human infancy he pointed out a process which culminates in what he calls memory control. Properly speaking the ability to match experiences with references and thus stabilize and control the arising and passing of the phenomenal world. Just right after that stage Baldwin posits the Inside-Outside Dualism or better known as the Subject-Object Dualism where the infant becomes aware of a separate self that is opposed to or springing from the sensory world. Much of Western developmental psychology explored the graduations towards the establishment of this split between inside and outside as well as self and other and the establishment of a verbal, narrative identity which Lancaster in alignment with Abhidhamma calls running consciousness in his article On the Stages of Perception:
The interpreter indeed constructs an ongoing work, namely a narrative which places the individual in meaningful contact with his or her world. This corresponds to the Freudian secondary process, which is reality-oriented and primarily verbal. The two poles of this narrative are I and the real world. […] The translation of the Abhidhamma term as running well conjures up the normally incessant flow of phenomenal experience which arises through the drive of the interpreter to set an egocentric context on the world. It also relates well to the subjective running commentary of thought which seems to form a central dynamic to this flow of experience.
A comparison of various models from developmental psychology that describe the stages within Firstness and the underlying processes that constitute our Body & sensual Being
Especially in contrast to the early Theravada psychology where attachment is connected to suffering and the solution is the experience of cessation, coupled to looking through the imaginary character of the phenomenal reality, developmental psychology moved towards analyzing the origins of human attachment and how healthy attachment can dimmish psychological suffering and foster basic trust and a flourishing live.
So, while Buddhism tends towards the deconstruction of the earlier stages formations through insight — the Via Negativa or Cognitive Mode towards Firstness during meditation — Western philosophy and modern psychology comparatively foreground the development of a healthy self and evolution of the object realm and our relationship to it.
Both approaches tend towards the reduction of suffering, the Via Negativa through the dissolution of representations and attached biases that beset our narrative self and the Via Positiva through a healthy sense of verbal self, with a high degree of basic trust, that seeks emotional closeness to others, is able to establish emotional intimacy, is comfortable with mutual dependence as well as with being alone, has a positive image of itself and others, is balance in its emotions, and able to cherish as well as to sustain stable relationships. However, this self described by attachment psychology is likewise able to self-reflect and self-observe as well as to receive criticism and engage into the conscious revision and letting go of fixed ideas, identifications, and attachments — thus nothing in opposition to the cognitive skills but befriended and ultimately one with them in their distinctness: a part of the dynamic kiss between voidness and bliss.
