Writing and Embodying Consciousness
Being & Becoming through writing and yoga
Welcome back to Yoga Culture’s Yoga & Writing, everyone.
I’ve also recorded this week’s post on my Matterhorn podcast as a preview a couple weeks ago, which you can check out below or on other channels through Podbean.
Thanks for reading! We would love to hear your voice in the comments.
Exploring the concept of consciousness
What does it mean to be a conscious human being? To be who you are? Are our realities quite similar to each other’s and do we have agency in our own consciousness or state of being?
These are questions many philosophers, scientists, and artists have tackled for centuries. Probably all of us have thought about our state of existence and relation to the universe. Some more frequently than others!1
Art
Consider the trick of The Truman Show on Jim Carrey’s character (also relevant to Barbie). Is that not a fear we all have? That what we think we experience is not real or is constructed by someone or something else? We all seek some kind of freedom.
Other artists play with these ideas. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is both a historical-political novel and one that simultaneously explores consciousness and individual freedoms. It contains ideas such as these in the narrative:
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.”
“The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”
Visual artists have also tackled these ideas. An exhibit in London from 2016 called States of Mind attempted to bring these artistic ideas in conversation with the work of Descartes. The Guardian review asks: “Are we all somnambulists, our conscious selves mere patchworks of sensory information and memory that are full of holes and lesions?”
For example, look at the work of Austrian artist Katerina Teresidi and you will see ways of imagining the body’s connection to consciousness. Her paintings explore subjects looking at themselves or attempting new perspectives, whether upside down or with a virtual reality viewer. To some extent, every artistic expression is an exploration of consciousness and attempt to share one’s own reality with the rest of us.
Philosophy
To tackle these concepts, I’m drawn to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their ideas about Becoming — an active form of identity creation dependent on an Actualization of the Virtual — are empowering in considering our realities2. Although Deleuze may seem really ‘out there’, he was in part attempting to talk about a universal human experience and what that is determined also by societal constructs of realities. In other words: we are not as free as the Existentialists would like us to be. You can read an introduction to this idea from Adrian Parr (LA Review of Books) and also look at the work of Frantz Fanon, the beginning of postcolonial philosophy.
I consider these philosophers in discourse with others like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida as well as later responses and new ideas by Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, and Edward Said. The latter contemporary names mentioned here also bring ideas of our identities and consciousness into the realm of culture, gender, and race in interesting and even empowering ways despite the notion that Deleuze was trying to free us from these constructs.
Rather than go through the details of all these thinker-writers, the reason I bring them all up is to consider that many of their ideas are relevant in approaches by scientists to understanding consciousness3. As we begin to understand the brain more on a cellular and chemical level, we can also find reflections of philosophers and artists both relevant and useful in attempting to understand what it all means.
Neuroscience
Greg Dunn is a neuroscientist turned artist who compares his work to Zen artists. In an interview with The Garrison Institute, he tells Linda Codega:
When I was trying to wrap my head around how to communicate ideas about the brain, I decided to really emphasize that the brain is bordering on this knife’s-edge balance between order and chaos. It became apparent that when the brain is differentiating there are literally tens of billions of things happening.
The degree of sophistication that the brain has could not tolerate that amount of randomness if it didn’t have a compensatory mechanism. That aspect became very clear when I was trying to orchestrate half a million neurons and how they connect. It became apparent that this was a substantial problem that evolution had to solve at some point. Science and art became inseparable.
Another visual artist using neuroscience in her work is Marina Abramovic, who uses performance art as a way of understanding human connection and being. Instead of being a scientist herself, she collaborates with neuroscientists and technology experts to aid in her work, all converging in an institute. In a podcast with NPR, the artist tells us:
also explored Abramovic’s work in her post on The Gallery Companion on the nature of distraction.So the idea of this institute was an idea to create new platform where the science, new technology, art, and spirituality can get together and really have a new conversation how we can change consciousness of human being.
And how that consciousness changing can affect our society today because we know that things are not right in so many different directions? And we are criticizers but we have very little to do about individual, you know, personal level. So I think that artist's duty to act.
Professor Anil Seth is a neuroscientist who researches consciousness. He has a Sunday Times bestseller called Being You: A New Science Of Consciousness in which he talks about the idea that our realities are constructs of the brain. He understands our worlds as subjective spaces of being through “controlled hallucination.” Although the subjectivity may seem minor, such as the variations in the way we see color, the way all the factors of experience and observation come together in our minds are individual.
I find this concept rather freeing and closely connected to my experience as a writer. Do you find that your reality and your writing world become one? I don’t mean that I escape from the real world into my fiction. Instead, the merging allows me to find layers of truth and beauty in everyday life through the writing; conversely the writing attempts to explain my “hallucinations” to an audience — for example, my readers, the recipient of a letter, or my future self looking back at reflections from years ago or just yesterday.
Embodying consciousness and yoga’s stages of consciousness
The Mandukya Upanishad4 talks about four stages of consciousness5. These stages are:
Wakefulness (Jagrat) — objective consciousness based on sensory experiences
Dreaming (Svapna) — consciousness turns toward the inner world (one’s virtual)
Deep Sleep (Sushupti or Prajna) — unconscious, without desires
Pure Consciousness (Turya) — perfect awareness of one’s consciousness
This is a great simplification of the stages, and there is also a stage beyond — turyatita surpasses these states of consciousness. The ancient classification of the mind’s awareness is not dissimilar to what the neuroscientist says now.
The ultimate is in allowing these all to exist and the hallucination to continue to reach this beyond that is unclassifiable. Perhaps relatedly, long term meditation practitioners have been found to alter their brain states. They have an easier time “recovering from stress” and even a better “quality of life and functional health status.” If meditation is that pure consciousness or even the beyond for some people, the turyatita, then it might teach us that awareness of our conscious selves can give us the power to live a better life.
Our worlds are created through perspectives, which means we have the power to change our existence. It doesn’t mean it’s your fault if you’re having a shitty day or you’ve been handed a difficult situation, but it does mean you have some power to change that experience of it.
Yoga helps us reach both a calmer state of reality through an idea of unity where we are open to what’s around us rather than focused always on our inner mind (fears/worries, trying to impress, anxieties, etc.) and paradoxically helps us to also experience emotions more deeply. But in allowing that vulnerability and acknowledging its validity, we can start to make sense of who we are and our place in the world6.
The act of writing
What if writing could share that state of being and also help us develop these layers of consciousness? The act of writing is something philosophers like Derrida link to active identity creation, that is, the power to Become and emerge as an identity rather than simply what we are born with.
It feels to me like we both assert our realities through writing and explore its possibilities7. We discover ourselves but also propel ourselves forward into the unknown each time we sit with pen or computer.
We also share or create perspectives for others to understand our realities - or ‘hallucinations’ and virtual worlds. What is the purpose of the sharing? Part of it is that primal desire for human connection. It’s also some notion that the ideas might be worth sharing, placing into a dialogue of the human condition in its attempt to seek deeper understanding and truths.
Is the writing self, then, more real than that self I present to others ‘in real life’? Maybe. Not because I’m hiding that truth or identity that comes out in writing but because it’s almost impossible to recreate and share on the surface. We can reflect what we have discovered. However, it would be overwhelming to simultaneously live or experience and attempt to pin it down for what it is.
Writing in this way is my inner world unmediated. But that doesn’t make it better than the daily life in between. That world is in interaction with the writing world.
How do you interpret your consciousness? What does writing have to do with your experience of the world or your identity? Share your ideas in the comments and join our discussion.
Guilty as charged!
See - for example - this article in Epoché as an introduction to Deleuze: “Thus, actualisation of the virtual is creation, and creation is determined by difference. Bergson’s concept of élan vital (vital force or vital impetus) is used by Deleuze as an example of the creative nature of actualisation through difference. But how can we understand this speculative concept? In its most basic form, we might say élan vital can be seen as the common tendency of life to diverge, create, and adapt to its environment in such a way that doesn’t need to rely on any mechanistic or teleological explanations. Deleuze states that élan vital is ‘always a case of virtuality in the process of being actualized, a simplicity in the process of differentiating, a totality in the process of dividing up’”…etc.
I go into all these thinkers’ ideas and use them for my own consideration of identity and its connection to cultures, places, and laws in my dissertation which you can read here (if you have a lot of time on your hands :) ).
See here for a brief description of this Upanishad, part of the origins of yoga.
Two good explanations from Hridaya Yoga and Yoga U (with illustration)
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One might also take a look at the introduction to this translation by Swami Satchidananda of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (as well as the Sutras themselves!):
Traditionally the word Yoga by itself refers to Raja Yoga, the mental science. With the current burgeoning of interest in expanding consciousness and in mental science in general, it is natural that we turn to Raja Yoga. primary text of Raja Yoga is called The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.
There are, of course, many Western approaches to the study and control of mind, each advancing various different concepts and techniques. Compared to these, however, the ancient yogic science is a great grandsire. For thousands of years the yogis have probed the mysteries of the mind and consciousness.
Sutra literally means “thread,” each sutra being the barest thread of meaning upon which a teacher might expand by adding his or her own “beads” of experience for the sake of the students. There are almost 200 sutras, traditionally divided into four sections.
This piece is filled with Ideas of the sort that strike a chord so true that they vaporize when I try to look at them directly. It’s not easy for me, but it’s worth letting some favorite questions hang in the air in the periphery and see what happens in my creative life. You’ve done such an amazing job with this, Kathleen. Many thanks.🌿
When you consider the stages of consciousness and the fact that effectively we are all creating our own realities, it's amazing that we humans manage to interact as well as we do. We are constantly taking in data, interacting with other creatures, interpreting it all and then, in the case of writers, using this, plus such skill as we have, to try to create something truthful. It is truly mind blowing. I am reminded of the film "Iris" when Iris Murdoch, lost in the wilderness of her dementia, has a moment of clarity and says to her husband "I wrote". The recognition of that loss is like a body blow. That brilliance and creativity, philosophy, supreme skill as a communicator, all lost because the organ that facilitated it all had malfunctioned. It's the combination of the tangible (the brain) and the intangible (the mind) that enables us to create in our own unique way. When one is missing the result is silence. That is why I am driven to write when I can, even if I doubt my skill or relevance. It took me years to find anything to say, and I don't know how much more I will be able to say, so I write to plant my flag and say "I was here", regardless of whether anyone reads it. Sounds very narcissistic come to think of it, but really it is an attempt to connect with something or someone.
Thank you for another major brain workout, Kate! That's quite enough thinking for one day!