The absurdity of speaking of higher and lower consciousnesses.
Eckhart Tolle once told his audience that they had a higher consciousness than the people outside of the conference hall. This struck me as rather an odd and silly thing for him to state, given his pretense as a modern-day sage. From my own knowingness, his remark is either a sign that he is not what he says he is, or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he has no idea what the words meant as they came out of his mouth.
Tolle seems to be helpful to many people, so I don’t want to make this article about him or other self-professed enlightened gurus from the West. Rather, I want to flesh out this idea of higher and lower consciousnesses to show its indisputable wrongness. To do this, we have to ask a number of questions, because if you want to know the answers then you have to do the work yourself. Wisdom, realization, and seeing is not something that can be given to you as if it were a shiny apple or an idea of how to make a snowball out of frozen fluffy stuff that falls out of a winter sky.
Where do you think the dividing line is between areas of consciousness? Can you find a place where consciousness begins and ends? Have you looked for this? Are you divisible as consciousness? Does anything exist in isolation so that it can be labeled high or low? Of course not.
Instead of quoting from Yogananda, Nisargadatta, Ramana, or any other sage, what is it that you know personally? What can you know? What have you found out for yourself? Have you tried to look, to see what the truth is, or are you relying on a library of facts, opinions, beliefs, and other secondhand knowledge? Show yourself where high meets low. Show yourself, for example, whether you can say that the space at the ceiling of the room you are sitting in, and the space at the floor, has a delineating separation that is noticeable, detectable, measurable, or knowable. Where does the higher space meet the lower space, and at exactly what point?
There is no higher self. It is only an idea. You can know this for yourself instead of relying on secondhand information. To know this takes self-enquiry, not just repeating what has been learned in a book or from a speaker. It may take years of searching, but eventually you come to know for yourself that there is only one single consciousness that is indivisible. The self of the egoic sense is no more than a belief, and therefore is neither “lower” or “other.” And the Self of consciousness is one single movement that comprises the totality of all that is.
You are entitled to your opinion, but if you are interested, you can look deeply into this to find what has always been available to you.
