But whether it implies a change in consciousness is debatable

Re: Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - I by Debashish on Fri 08 Dec 2006 12:19 AM PST Profile Permanent Link

As I see it, RYD's quote from Sri Aurobindo points to a reduction of the domain of reality to an engagement between the human reason and matter. In terms of evolution, this may imply enhancements of the physical basis of consciousness, but whether it implies a change in consciousness is debatable. One may easily conceive a bionic or nano-genetic internalization of machinery which humankind is already using - a race of super-humans with telescopes or microscopes (or both) for eyes but that is just an intimate internalization and individualization of dualistic instrumentations, an enhancement of operation but is it a change of consciousness? One of the problems here is that we can know only what we experience - once again, as in our earlier formulation, epistemology follows ontology. The Buddha, for example, is depicted with a "super-brain," ushnisha, which he is supposed to have been born with, and which gives him access to an experience of being different from those who do not have such an organ.

If we "knew" the consciousness that can express itself through the physical organization of an ushnisha, and the dynamics of such an expression, we could attempt the mutation, but without the experience of alternate ontologies, how could we even begin to guess what mutations will take us there? If however, what you mean is that tampering with our physical organization to the degree of enhancing our present dualistic operation may result in undreamed-of changes in consciousness, this of course is possible (though I don't know how probable)- but then we are invoking exactly those "other (known and unknown) travellers" that RYD is talking about. DB

by RY Deshpande on Fri 08 Dec 2006 07:22 PM PST Profile Permanent Link Let us go to the description of samjñana in The Synthesis of Yoga (pp. 863-65):

“…a fourth action of the supramental consciousness completes the various possibilities of the supramental knowledge. This still farther accentuates the objectivity of the thing known, puts it away from the station of experiencing consciousness and again brings it to nearness by a uniting contact effected either in a direct nearness, touch, union or less closely across the bridge or through the connecting stream of consciousness of which there has already been mention. It is a contacting of existence, presences, things, forms, forces, activities, but a contacting of them in the stuff of the supramental being and energy, not in the divisions of matter and through the physical instruments, that creates the supramental sense, samjñana. It is a little difficult to make the nature of the supramental sense understood to a mentality not yet familiar with it by enlarged experience, because our idea of sense action is governed by the limiting experience of the physical mind and we suppose that the fundamental thing in it is the impression made by an external object on the physical organ of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and that the business of the mind, the present central organ of our consciousness, is only to receive the physical impression and its nervous translation and so become intelligently conscious of the object. In order to understand the supramental change we have to realise first that the mind is the only real sense even in the physical process..."

Aren’t our senses miles and miles away from this true sense which alone can bring proper knowledge about the physical world to us? RYD