I came across an article on pratityasamutpada (dependent arising) and consciousness today. The whole article is an exploration of the idea –
There is a growing consensus in Western thought and science that we may understand ourselves and our world more deeply if we think in terms of patterns of relationships rather than of reified essences or independent entities—if we think, that is, in the traditional Buddhist terms of dependent arising.*
He concludes
Our shared world, then, dependent upon our shared species-specific cognitive structures, is ultimately inseparable from our shared cognitive awareness, dependent upon our shared linguistic, symbolic structures. As Deacon declares: a person’s symbolic experience of consciousness…is not within the head…This [symbolic] self is indeed not bounded within a mind or body…[it] is intersubjective in the most thoroughgoing sense of the term. [Deacon, T.W. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.]
I have a feeling that this sharing includes far more than symbolic experience and that it is more than just consciousness, though that is complex enough. We are neither reified essences, nor independent entities. Use of the word ‘soul’ to signify the essential person does not help here – though it has a long tradition. We are like those plants, nettles are a good example, which above ground appear as individual but below spring from the same complex root system. At the conscious level we speak and interact as individuals, free to engage or to disengage with each other, free to help or to hurt, to love or to hate, unaware that at deeper levels we are all members one of another. We do not realize that in hurting, hating, or damaging others we are also damaging ourselves. And conversely, the good we do to others benefits us too.
However, the plant analogy only goes so far. The dimensions of human interconnectivity and intersubjectivity are many and various – some conscious, many unconscious; some material and physical, many relational and psychological. There is also a transcendent dimension. This is not part of our experience (at least at a conscious level), just as much of our interconnectivity is not experienced at a conscious level. As someone once said, ‘The Unconscious is not unconscious, only the Conscious is unconscious of what the Unconscious is conscious of.’
We are somehow aware that there is vastly more to being human than we can ever explain or articulate. And this more is the fact that our being is confined neither to the mind, nor to the body. It emerges from and extends into the being of others, as does theirs into ours. It is rooted deep in the elements of nature, the soil and the landscape, the sun and the stars. Deepest of all, deep, deep within, is the Spirit.
* The dependent arising of a cognitive unconscious in Buddhism and science, W. S. Waldron Dept of Religion, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753, USA.