Mechanism of Consciousness During Life, Dream and After-Death

By Dukkyu Choi

Everybody understands the five consciousnesses which are recognized by the five organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin) contacting the five objects (color (light), sound, smell, taste, and tactile objects), respectively. To human being, even sentient being, that is not all. Everybody knows about the sixth consciousness, namely, mind. In Buddhism, the sixth consciousness is explained to be generated from contacting between the sixth organ and the sixth object (dharma). What is the sixth organ? What is the sixth object? No more detailed explanation in Buddhism yet. However, this book provides very clear understanding on the sixth organ, sixth object, and further, mechanism of all consciousnesses. Finally you will become to know about "Who am I?" and get Enlightenment. In addition, this book will contribute to the scientific progress on consciousness.
One of the author's friends, Mr. Anjan Sen, Patent Attorney in Calcutta, reviewed about this book, "I am really grateful to you for giving me this special opportunity to go through this excellent analytical and logically driven work of yours. You deserve special praise and credit for creating such a work inspite of your busy professional schedule which I found not only highly thought provoking but also directional and, most importantly, has been written in such a lucid form that would make it a ready treat for one and all to read and appreciate the discourse. I am overwhelmed by your stupendous efforts."

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456774066

Dukkyu Choi

The author is a patent lawyer practising in Seoul, Korea. In addition, he has practiced zen meditation at several Buddhist temples more than 15 years. He studied Buddhism philosophy at Dongguk University in Seoul for 3 years and received a master degree on the Mere-consciousness philosophy. In his masters thesis, he has tried to discover the sixth consciousness and the sixth organ and the sixth object, and finally he got. Since he met Buddhism, he has ranged over extensive studies on oriental philosophy such as astrology (saju), geomancy (feng shui), moxa treatment, etc as well as psychology and hypnosis.

Book preview

PART 1 What Is Consciousness?

Chapter 1 Certain Questions on Consciousness

Although consciousness is defined in many different ways, we may define it as perception or discrimination of an outside object. Consciousness is to perceive, feel or discriminate objective things. Despite that nobody denies existence of consciousness and everybody understands consciousness, the mechanism of consciousness how consciousness generates and disappears is not clearly discovered. We do not know how we memorize from our experiences or learnings. Up to now, we do know neither how happy mind arises nor from where sad feeling appears and to where it disappears.

When it comes to knowledge, Western civilization has made enormous strides, especially since the Scientific Revolution. We can take great pride and satisfaction in our many discoveries concerning the world around us. But one domain of reality in which we still remain scientifically in the dark is the realm of consciousness.1)

I classify consciousness into three categories i.e. sensation (feeling), thought, and mind. Sometimes the three categories are confusingly used each other due to their immateriality. However, when categorizing consciousness, the three categories will be deemed to encompass the domain of consciousness.

Sensation is a fundamental consciousness among consciousnesses. Sensation is to perceive or discriminate a particular, material object through physical organs. Sensation is divided into eye sensation, ear sensation, nose sensation, tongue sensation and body (skin) sensation by the respective objects, light (color), sound, smell, taste, and tactile objects, resulting in eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness and body consciousness. To look an object through eyes and to discriminate whether it is a book or it is a desk is a sensation. To hear a sound through ears and to discriminate whether it is a piano or it is a trumpet is also a sensation. Sensation is a fundamental prerequisite for life and criteria for distinguishing life and death. Accordingly, the physical organs relating to the sensations have been subject matters for study in the fields of medical and science for a long time.

Thought is a consciousness of cogitating something beyond sensation or discrimination. Thought includes all intellections such as discrimination, judgment, calculation, imagination, memorization and so on. Sensation is physical, but thought is mental. Sensation is a feeling or discrimination which is sensed by physical organs, while thought is a series of mental process by mind. The mind is a subjective organ which can carry out intellectual and cogitating process. On the other hand, when we talk about mind as one of consciousnesses along with sensation and thought, the mind does not mean the subjective organ, but a phenomenon arising from inside of us.

Thought as one of consciousnesses was regarded as dimensionally higher than sensation or mind. A French philosopher Rene Descartes at 17 c regarded thought as fundamental of existence for human being by declaring Cogito ergo sum. (I think therefore I am.) Thought has been a root for development and evolution of human beings. All developments on science and technology as well as civilization and culture are rooted from the thought of human beings.

When the Master Hyega came and asked to the Master Bodhidharma Please treat my uncomfortable mind, Bodhidharma told Hyega, If you show and give your uncomfortable mind to me, I will treat that. Then immediately Hyega got enlightenment right there. Though Hyega was not comfortable that time, he could not put out from inside and show his uncomfortable mind to Bodhidharma. He became aware of that he made the uncomfortable mind by himself and destroyed it by himself, too. Finally he got enlightened that everything is fabricated by Mind.

Mind is the most complicated section among the three categories of consciousness. As one category of consciousness, mind may be referred to as a result of sensation or thought. Also we can explain mind as feeling, emotion or mood. If we hear pleasant speech, pleasant feeling arises, while, if we hear unpleasant speech, aversion does. Regardless of the mind of a human being, there is nothing changed outside world. Nonetheless, the mind such as feeling, emotion or mood may affect the physical body. In accordance with such mind, pulse pounds faster, blood pressure goes up and breath becomes harsh. Sensation or thought may generate mind, and the mind may directly affect the body.

Even if consciousness is schematically explained into sensation, thought and mind, we cannot exactly understand how consciousness arises and vanishes, i.e. mechanism of consciousness. Sensation which is perceived by physical organs can be stopped by not contacting the respective objects. For example, if we close eyes, sight consciousness can be stopped, and, if we close ears, sound consciousness can be also stopped, and further, if our five physical organs do not have any contact with the respective objects, i.e. color, sound, smell, taste, and tactile objects, the five sensations will not arise. However, although the five sensations will not arise, thinking in the brain cannot be stopped. We cannot stop thinking in the brain or in the mind, whatever. As long as thinking is not stopped, we cannot stop mind. Mind always arises and vanishes consciously or unconsciously.

From where and through what process does consciousness arise? How do we recall our past experience? Where is the information on the past experience stored? How is the stored information recalled in our memory? Why do we not recall some of past experiences? When we hear something pleasant, why do we have a pleasant mind? On the other hand, when we hear something unpleasant, why does our mind become unpleasant? What is the relationship between body and mind? How do body and mind affect each other? Although there have been extensive researches and discussions on consciousness in religion, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, medicine and so on since the dawn of human history, still not much could be concluded out of the same.

There have been enormous researches on consciousness in the aspects of science, medicine, psychoanalysis, psychology, and religion in the world. In the West, their researches on consciousness are more likely focused on the aspects of science and medicine, on the other hand, in the East, the researches are mainly focused on the aspects of philosophy and religion. The researches in Western can be classified into in the medical aspects encompassing psychoanalysis and psychology and into in the scientific aspects encompassing biology and neuroscience. In the medical aspects of psychoanalysis and psychology, we can say that remarkable outcome has been achieved by Sigmund Freud, C.C. Jung and the like at 19 c. They introduced new concepts on consciousness such as subconscious, unconscious, and collective unconscious. In the scientific aspects of biology and neuroscience, many aspects concerning brain and neuro systems have been traversed by virtue of progress of science, medicine and technology. Particularly, in the West, the scientists called corps of white clothes regard the brain and neuro systems as absolute requirements for consciousness because life is a prerequisite for the five sense organs which generates the five sense consciousnesses. Further, they believe that brain is a subjective of the five sense consciousnesses as well as of thought. They believe that brain is dead when a life dies and that all the consciousnesses never arise when brain dies. Accordingly, they have been trying to find out from brain mechanism of consciousness or mind. Nonetheless, the results were not satisfactory. Although many physiological problems on the brain or neuro systems may be solved through scientific researches in the aspects of biology, neuroscience and medicine, the secrets on mind or thought are not yet until now. I suspect that they are trying to find out the solutions on immaterial phenomena such as consciousness, mind, thought and so on from the material objects such as brain and neuro systems.

On the other hand, in the East, there has ever been no endeavor to get answers on the questions on consciousness or mind from brain. They have seen consciousness or mind in view of fundamental of existence of human being or of formation of the cosmos. At least they have not kept any position that consciousness or mind arises from brain. The explanations on consciousness or mind in the East like other oriental theories were prepared in totalism or through insight or intuition, unlike the Western theories which are analytical or logical. In both side worlds, the attitude on consciousness or mind are entirely different each other in the approach and manner of the solutions.

Explanation on consciousness such as mind and thought requires various hypotheses to justify. However, there is no evidence for proving that the hypotheses are absolutely right. The hypotheses are deemed as true because it is impossible to prove whether or not the hypotheses are true and because any new theory cannot defeat the hypotheses. If any, we suspect that the current hypotheses we believe true will nowadays be a barrier to discover of mechanism of consciousness or mind. I will first review briefly the hypotheses which we believe, are true without any doubt.

First, Belief That Brain Thinks

The belief that brain thinks seems to be likely an absolute truth in West as well as in East. In Western where brain is an important subject matter for research in the fields of medicine and neuroscience, they have endlessly tried to prove the belief that brain thinks. By studying what is happening in the brain during thinking, the Western scientists have tried to prove that brain is a subjective of thinking.

A Nobel laureate Francis Crick contends that your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells. On the other hand, many cognitive neuroscientists believe that consciousness emerges from the collective activity of those nerve cells throughout the entire brain and is a function of millions or billions of neurons firing together. However, Koch and Crick believe the secret may lie in the discrete firing of a much smaller group of neurons. They contend Evolution has created amazing specificity at the level of molecules and individual cells, and they think this will also be the case for consciousness. We’re looking for very specific neuronal properties that give rise to consciousness, rather than assuming it’s the collective activity of the entire brain.²) Francis Crick defines the neuronal requirements for generating consciousness as neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC). He contends, whenever information is represented in the NCC you are conscious of it. His goal is to discover the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms jointly sufficient for a specific conscious percept.³) If the NCC which gives rise to consciousness were discovered, it may definitely prove the belief that brain thinks. However, who knows when the NCC will be discovered.

The Western scientists have kept conducting researches on consciousness under the premise that consciousness or mind comes out from activity of brain, and disregarded immaterial subject matters such as personal experiences or spiritual phenomena on the reason that they are just unscientific.

In 1989, I interpreted for the Dalai Lama in a Mind and Life Conference with a group of neuroscientists in Newport Beach, California. Most neuroscientists believe that the mind is a by-product, or epiphenomenon, of the brain; mind vanishes when brain dies and that is all there is to it. The neuroscientists were disturbed when the Dalai Lama, a very intelligent man, discussed the continuity of consciousness from one lifetime to the next. The scientists pointed out that retrospective accounts of reincarnation, however numerous they may be, are not scientifically compelling due to lack of proper controls.4)

However, in the West, the scientific hypotheses were sometimes criticized. As William James pointed out more than a century ago, evidence for mind/brain correlations may indeed imply that the brain produces mental events, or that it has the lesser role of simply releasing or permitting them, or that it merely transmits them, as light hits a prism, thereby transmitting a spectrum of colors. In this regard, Allan Wallace criticizes that, with their bias toward materialism, most cognitive scientists simply assume that the first hypothesis is correct, despite the lack of compelling scientific evidence.⁵)

In the West, scientists who assert that the brain thinks by itself and the mind comes from the brain suggest experimental and material evidences that the brain is activated during thinking. But Deepak Chopra counterclaims that their assertion is a Western perspective based on our bias for solid, tangible things.⁶) In the West, scientists insist that the brain must be the source of mind because the brain is a visible object, which is like saying that a radio must be the source of music because it is a visible object from which music emerges. However, Deepak Chopra traversed, It may seem significant that the brain is active during thought, but a radio is active during a broadcast.⁷)

The Western assertion that the brain thinks and the consciousness and mind come out from the brain has met a serious confrontation nowadays. Although we do not know how much the scientific researches in West can traverse the confrontation, it will be necessary to introduce a new trial in regards to the correlations of the brain with the mind. This does not mean that all the previous correlations between brain and mind shall be denied. As one of new trials, we may set up a hypothesis, instead of that consciousness comes out from the brain, that the consciousness arising somewhere will simply affect the brain. In this regard, it will be worth to pay attention to the third hypothesis by William James in which the brain merely transmits mental events, as light hits a prism, thereby transmitting a spectrum of colors.

A person who had eaten plum can experience watering in the mouth only by thinking of it. Such fact shows that brain is a being like an idiot who does not distinguish between actuality and thought. If the brain is a subjective of thinking which can control thought and the following reaction, it should have given an order not to water in the mouth because the thinking of plum is just an imagination rather than an actual thing. Such example shows that brain is not a subjective of thinking but a thought-dependent organ reacting to thought.

As another example, hypnosis supports the hypothesis that brain is not a subjective of thinking but an organ reacting to thought. Hypnosis is a technique which reaches the subconsciousness or unconsciousness of a human through imagination so as to manifest something at the level of present consciousness. During remaining in hypnosis, the brain takes imagination as an actual event and we can recognize some information which is stored in the subconsciousness or unconsciousness.

Recently we meet the plasticity theory of brain in which the structure of brain can be changed by the mind. According to Norman Doidge’s achievement, one reason we can change our brains simply by imagining is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound. Doidge asserts that, when people close their eyes and visualize a simple object, such as the letter a, the primary visual cortex lights up, just as it would if the subjects were actually looking at the letter a, and that brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated.⁸) Alvaro Pascual-Leone is chief of Harvard Medical Center, and his experiments have shown that we can change our brain anatomy simply by using our imaginations.⁹)

What is important is still whether brain thinks or not. The fact that the brain is activated during thinking does not tell us yet that brain thinks, because the activation of the brain may be a result being affected by thought or mind aroused from it.

Another hypothesis that we can establish in the correlation between brain and thought is that the brain is a subjective organ of thinking by itself as well as a thought-dependent organ reacting to the thought. However, this hypothesis is not justified even by the plum example. Imagination on plum activates brain and the brain stimulates an endocrine organ, resulting watering in the mouth. The activation of brain by imagination supports that brain is a thought-dependent organ. If the brain is a subjective organ which can think by itself, the brain would have discerned the imagination from actual events, so resulting in not watering.

If the hypothesis that brain is not involved in thinking but a thought-dependent organ reacting and responsive to thought instead is correct, we can establish a hypothesis that there will exist a subjective organ which thinks, not depending on the brain. Further, if we prove continuity of consciousness after death, it will definitely support the hypothesis that brain is not a subjective of thinking. Although it will not be easy to prove that, I will try my best to do so in this book.

If brain is not a subjective of thinking and if there will be an organ or a system which might generate a process of thinking, the strong belief that brain thinks might be one of the greatest errors which human beings have made from the dawn of human history.

Second, Belief on Only Five Sense Organs

The organs generating primary sensations in the life body are eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body. Eye is necessary for sight consciousness. Like this, ear, nose, tongue and body (skin) are necessary for sound consciousness, smell consciousness, taste consciousness and touch consciousness, respectively. The five organs are physical organs for generating physical sensations. However, the five organs are not enough for generating consciousness. In order to generate consciousness, the respective objects are required. The objects are light (color or form), sound, smell, taste and tactile objects. When the organs contact the respective objects, the primary sensations arise with the help of brain and neurosystems.

However, we do not think that the five consciousnesses are not all of our consciousness, especially in the fields of psychology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, religion and so on. Because, besides the five consciousnesses by the five organs, we know the existence of mind or mind consciousness. So, where does the mind such as intellection, thought or emotion arise from?

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, said, The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation. The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world. The modules’ basic logic is specified by our genetic program.¹⁰) According to his assertion, our physical organs owe their complex design to the information in the human genome, and so, I believe, do our mental organs.¹¹) Further, Pinker said, The combinatorics of mentalese, and of other representations composed of parts, explain the inexhaustible repertoire of human thought and action. A few elements and a few rules that combine them can generate an unfathomably vast number of different representations, because the number of possible representations grows exponentially with their size.¹²)

If we agree with Steven Pinker, we have a question which is Is the brain an organ that generates consciousness like the five organs? Of course, brain is an organ of human body because it has a material structure like the five organs. However, although we can say that the mind including intellection or cogitation arises from the brain, we are not willing to agree that brain will be the sixth organ which can generate a sense consciousness like the five organs.

If brain is an organ for generating consciousness like the five organs, the brain should have its own object, like the five organs have their own objects, and the brain could have contacted the particular object so as to generate thought or mind. What is the particular object for brain? What will it be without the light (color), sound, smell, taste and tactile objects? No answer to this question is given up to now in medicine and physiology as well as in psychology and psychoanalysis.

The brain does not recognize the five objects without help of the five sense organs. In other words, the brain does not recognize the five objects independently. By the way, we sometimes recognize something like telepathy or experience reading dimly other’s mind or thought. If so, what organ in our body will experience such telepathy or other’s mind? Will the brain do this? If the brain can carry out such experience, the brain must be one of sense organs like the five organs. However, even in the West where they have a view that the brain is a subjective of thinking, they will not think that the brain is a sense organ which can recognize a certain subject matter beyond the five objects.

If the Mind is a subjective which can recognize a certain subject matter such as telepathy or other’s