Yesterday I landed at a web page where my attention was drawn to a video titled Primacy of Consciousness. That was the first time I realized consciousness is not just a word meaning the state of the mind being aware of certain thing happening at present and responding to it. It has an even wider area which I have never thought of until I watched this documentary video presented by Peter Russell of Cambridge University. One of the question raised in his speech was "Who am I?" I know this is not just a surface question; is not intended to ask "who you are?" or "What's your name?", but to challenge you to pin down the nature of the thoughts that are going on, and being processed when you are asked "Who am I?" The interesting part is at the ending of the speech when the conclusion is set by saying "I Am" is God, and God is everyone. To me as a Buddhist, this is equivalent to "I Am" is the Self and the Self is in everyone. This becomes more understandable to me.
Having finished listening to the video twice, I revisited my inside and paid closest attention to any part of it with the best imaginary power I could get, and I honestly told myself: here has nothing I can use to define "who am I". Then how about the exterior appearance of my physical body? Isn't it looking unique from anyone else in the world and should be good enough to define me just right? But having realized from my previous learning of Buddhism that I am not the same as I was one moment before, so I agree the exterior look of me can not define me as "Who am I". And the same argument can apply to everything in the universe, and so I have now sensed the deeper meaning of the four sentence verse the Buddha put at the end of the Diamond Sutra as a summary of that sutra:
The statements in the verse taught about 2500 years ago by the Buddha are proved to be true by scientists today. The Yogacara I am learning now, which was developed 300 years after the Buddha's residence supported the same theory which I have just heard from Mr. Russell's speech-- the universe is empty but only consciousness.
all of the worldly matters are like dream, delusion, bubble and shadow they transform like the dew and thunder they should be viewed so
But as time goes by, and I have digested the material I watched from video or read from internet forums further, the process of testing the various theories I learned from here and there moves on to see which one is closer to or completely matching what the Buddha concluded about the truth of the universe as quoted above. I tend to believe Mr. Russell's consciousness theory matches the verse a lot, however, his theory is based on the nature of the eight types of consciousness. The Monas must have the other 5 plus the last one, Alayes, to work together as a system to manifest any phenomena. If my interpretation of this theory is correct, it will not help a practitioner in achieving enlightenment.
--to be continued
