clear distinction with having an image or an experience of unity. Hermes stated: ‘If you make yourself not equal to God, to the One, then you will not able to perceive God. Because equal can only be known by equal’. The center as space The middle is not the center, but a space in which many centers appear and disappear. So we say for instance that many people are in our midst. All the different interlocutors and the many subjects form temporarily a center. They are everywhere and nowhere in a middle that forms an open space in which the interaction takes place. As outside so inside: the open ground together with its participants create a representation of our life-consciousness. This also forms a field in which thoughts and experiences come, make connections and disappear. Consciousness is the open center where alternatingly our perceptions, thoughts and experiences form the temporarily center of the I-form. Shankara said: ‘There is only one thing that never leaves us: the consciousness deep within us. That alone is the constant factor in all our experiences. And this consciousness is the real, absolute Self’, the One. For a good understanding, it is essential to make a distinction from the contents of our life of consciousness: of our thoughts, experiences, in short of the ‘ten thousand things’. With the statement ‘I am consciousness’ Hermes does not mean ‘I am the contents of the consciousness’. Besides, this distinction is not accepted in Western philosophy. E. Husserl emphasized that consciousness is always being consciousof-something, so of a content. When he later withdrew from the conclusion that all appearances find their source in one
constituting consciousness, there was nobody who followed him in his line of thinking. The concept consciousness is equated to our world of perceptions, thoughts, experiences, phantasies, etc. By studying it as a ‘thing’, we make it an object. But consciousness can never be a subject of study, it cannot be perceived, observed, it is always the perceiver, the observer. If we want to grasp this observer, we make it the observed. Our seeing cannot see it. That is why we try to approach what consciousness is not, as a ‘knowing of not-knowing’. The misunderstanding that we have consciousness, that our reality is a world outside us, and that we are an independent ‘I’ that is situated opposite to the world, shows that we have not yet surpassed the stadium of objectifying consciousness that is making an object of consciousness, which we will call object-consciousness. That is why our perception of reality is false. Object-consciousness and beingconscious are of fundamental distinct order, and of a different quality of being, representing another reality. I do not have consciousness, no ‘I’ and no reality. This trichotomy shows that my consciousness is divided within me and that I can only observe division. Consciousness as a unity is as the Eye in which these three appear; it is the one source in all division, the Seeing in seeing the All. That is why self-consciousness, self-knowledge is so essential: it shows the difference between self-consciousness and object-consciousness: The difference between who I am and what I am.
Vivek Vilasini, Include me out II (Triptych), 2011-2014. Digital print on canvas
One and inseparable Who am I? This question was posed – maybe for the first time so explicitly – in the seventeenth century by René Descartes. In his search for the truth, for a fixed
point in a continuing changing (consciousness) world, he subjected his whole reality to a radical fundamental doubt; at least that is what he thought. What remains when I doubt everything? Ultimately the doubt that doubts itself, one could say. But Descartes was not that radical. He found his final fixed point not in the doubt but also not
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The Center