Is consciousness intrinsically divine – is it the same as the mind?

Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
ok so when we say I am conscious of you, you are conscious of me so then what is divine consciousness and is the mind separate from consciousness or how are they related so basically you could say that consciousness you could call this as the soul the seat of consciousness and this is the root of consciousness and this is the route of consciousness so the root is from where it originates, the route is along which it travels so because of attachment or fixation, the consciousness currently travels along the route of the mind only, so in that sense we can’t just innately understand the difference between the mind and consciousness because we might think there is only one thing inside us in reality but the two are different and we could do a simple thought exercise actually I was planning to do this exercise on the Sunday class but maybe we can do it briefly right now so wherever you are seated you can just close your eyes and after closing your eyes you can take three deep breaths now as you feel yourself being relaxed by the deep breathing with your eyes closed look ahead in front of you because your eyes are closed you can’t see whatever is physically in front of you but still there is some kind of screen inside you on which you might see this room you might see your car you might see your phone you might see a loud one or you might see a series of things coming and going or you might see just a dull haze of colors whatever it is that you see you see that on a screen inside you now while you are observing that inner screen try to take a step back and catch sight of who is it that is observing that screen while looking at the inner screen try to look at the inner seer now if you step back what you will notice is that the seer steps back with you so you the seer are the soul and the screen on which you see various things is the mind you can take one deep breath and you can open your eyes so basically thank you so there is the outer scene which we are seeing right now there is the inner screen which is the mind and there is the inner seer so for most, for us most of the times the inner screen and the inner seer gets conflated and that’s how we get carried away by our emotions some thoughts pop up inside us and we get carried away so but by self observation, by meditation by introspection we can understand that there is there is the screen and something is popping up on it and I have a choice whether to focus on it or not in fact we have this understanding even in our common parlance we consider say the word thought we use it in two distinct senses one is I just got a thought and the second is I have given this a lot of thought I say I just got a thought that means you could say on the inner screen something has popped up it’s like say if you are working on a computer and some notification pops up and I have given this a lot of thought that means I have systematically contemplated it, analysed it so I have paid focused quality attention to this so in these two senses of the word thought what we are doing is we are recognising thought as a event and thought as a action so where does this indicate the two levels the inner screen and the inner seer it points to that so now when you talk about divine consciousness what it means is that it can mean two things first is that because the soul is a part of the divine so in that sense consciousness in it’s subject in it’s source in it’s seat is divine but in it’s object in what we are focusing on consciousness may not be divine we might be focusing on sensual things, on unethical things, on selfish things so and when the consciousness becomes divine that means that the default disposition of our consciousness becomes towards divinity towards ennobling things towards uplifting things now currently what is the default disposition of our consciousness one way to find out find that out is to think what do we think of when we have nothing to do where does our consciousness gravitate towards for some of us it might gravitate towards money, some of us gravitate towards sensuality, sports power, position whatever it is so right now the object of our consciousness may not be divine but by spiritual purification the consciousness will gravitate towards the divine object and that’s why we can say the consciousness at that time has become divine okay