While metaphysics investigates the fundamental nature of reality and ponders what exists, epistemology asks how we can even know what exists. Do our experiences truly grant us access to ‘reality’? Can our judgement of the world be justified? From Socrates declaring all he knows is that he knows nothing, Descartes worrying if the world around us is real, John Locke insisting there is no such things as innate knowledge, through to the more technical arguments of the modern day around whether evidence can rationally constrain or inform our beliefs: philosophers throughout the ages have endlessly debated questions around our capacity for and access to knowledge. These issues remain central to both continental and analytic philosophy, in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, respectively. Western philosophers have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and how it fits into a larger picture of the world.
The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690. Locke defined consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind”. His essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samuel Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary (1755). “Consciousness” (French: conscience) is also defined in the 1753 volume of Diderot and d’Alembert‘s Encyclopédie, as “the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do”. In the late 20th century, philosophers like Hamlyn, Rorty, and Wilkes have disagreed with Kahn, Hardie and Modrak as to whether Aristotle even had a concept of consciousness. Aristotle does not use any single word or terminology to name the phenomenon; it is used only much later, especially by John Locke. Caston contends that for Aristotle, perceptual awareness was somewhat the same as what modern philosophers call consciousness. These confusions are in a large degree caused by the lacking of practices with deep mind focused introspection in the tradition of western culture. As a result, western society so far remain perplexed with the concept of “What is our true self“.
Spiritual teacher Krishnamurti once said, “We are facing a tremendous crisis; a crisis which the politicians can never solve because they are programmed to think in a particular way – nor can the scientists understand or solve the crisis; nor yet the business world, the world of money. The turning point, the perceptive decision, the challenge, is not in politics, in religion, in the scientific world; it is in our consciousness. One has to understand the consciousness of mankind, which has brought us to this point.” Socrates, the Greek Philosopher who had a solid feeling of ethics and laws, once expressed, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” For one to find the reason and work of his life, this statement emphatically asks one to examine himself first and after that others in the society to find the meaning and happiness of life.
With these line of thought in mind, I want to share with you the article Wheels of Fire: The Buddha’s Radical Teaching on Process by long time Buddhist practitioner Lila Kate Wheeler . In this article, she talked about how Buddha define consciousness, and how Buddhism teaching has merged into the Western philosophical thoughts in the last one hundred fifty years. She wrote in such clarity about Buddhism teaching in the context of a westerner, offering a much needed bowl of chicken soup for the soul transformation in a time of many social crisis.