Deepak Chopra – Consciousness Drives Evolution
And, so, in Eastern religion traditions go further. This is when you look at the traditions of Vedanta or Kashmir Shaivism, or what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy, or the transcendentalists. Then there’s such a thing as consciousness as pure awareness, prior to perception, prior to thought, prior to mental activity, and that is the ground of being.
That’s the ground of existence. That’s awareness. A simple way to say this would be perceptions are many, mental activities are many, but awareness is one. So, there’s a common ground of experience where Eastern wisdom traditions go. And that common ground is not only a common ground for you and me as human species, but for a bird, or for a tree, or for a bacterium, or for a paramecium, or for a plant, or for even a rock. In Eastern wisdom traditions, consciousness, or a very simple form of sentience – sentience means to feel and to respond, or to be aware and to respond – that sentience pervades the entire cosmos from atom to galaxy, and in between of course somewhere we are part of it.
This is not a new idea. This idea has existed for as long as there’s been philosophy. Plato spoke of it in the cave allegory, spoke of hidden reality, or the reality that is behind the observable world. Eastern wisdom traditions have spoken of the unmanifest domain of consciousness.
In the morning when you slowly open your eyes after a good night’s sleep, before you realize you’re Chris or Deepak and that you’re in the Four Seasons Hotel in Delhi, or whatever, there’s a moment of awareness where there is no thought content, no emotion content, not even perceptual content, cognitive content, but there’s some kind of a ground of being awareness. And then slowly, or rapidly, you suddenly become aware, “I’m Deepak.” “I’m in a hotel in New Delhi. This is what I’ve got to do,” etcetera, etcetera.
There is consciousness prior to experience, which is the common ground of all experiences in all species, which is the definition of consciousness that I have used all my life because I have been obsessed with the subject: what is existence, what is consciousness, what is the universe?
