Without birth, without death-issues in the research of nondual awareness or consciousness itself.

The search for a single unifying theory or universal principle reflects a deep intuition that a singular essence—nondual awareness, or consciousness itself—underlies all experience. Contemplative traditions describe this awareness as free from mental constructs, uncaused, and relatively unchanging across experiences, metaphorically without birth or death. While scientific understanding of consciousness has grown exponentially, understanding nondual awareness remains elusive, with each generation contributing unique insights while repeating similar mistakes. The author previously distinguished nondual awareness from perceptual, affective, and cognitive contents, and from functions like attention and memory. This work sketches issues related to ontology, epistemics, participant reports, and experiment design in studying nondual awareness.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The drive to find one unifying theory, one overarching universal principle that would subsume and explain all, has been a common theme of human striving for knowledge for many centuries. It reflects, perhaps, a deep intuition that within every experience there is such a unifying singular essence, present yet ordinarily hidden, which when discovered would restore one to the wholeness of authentic being. Indeed, as contemplative traditions tell us, that singular essence is consciousness itself, that which is, and has been, aware or conscious in all our experiences. This nondual awareness, free from mental representations and their constructs, appears uncaused by anything other than itself and remains, once realized, relatively unchanged in different experiences. So, metaphorically, it is without birth or death. While the current increase in our understanding of consciousness has been, in many respects, exponential, our understanding of nondual awareness appears still elusive and more like a slowly ascending spiral, where each generation makes their unique contributions while still making largely the same mistakes. Like nondual awareness itself, then, many issues in understanding and researching it seem to be eternal as well. Previously, I have introduced nondual awareness and discussed why its non-representational reflexivity makes it unique and distinct from perceptual, affective, and cognitive contents, from various global states both natural and altered, and from functions of consciousness like attention, memory, meta-cognition, etc. Here, I will sketch out some issues related to ontology, epistemics, participant reports, and experiment design.