Beyond Consciousness

While consciousness (viññāṇa) is often seen as the most intimate aspect of existence — the very core of experience — the Buddha’s teaching ultimately points beyond even consciousness itself. In dependent origination, consciousness arises in dependence upon formations and name-and-form; it is not independent, nor eternal.

The problem lies in identifying consciousness as self — mistaking the knowing faculty for something fixed, unchanging, or sovereign. Yet even the most refined states of meditative absorption reveal that consciousness itself is conditioned, arising and ceasing with its objects. Its continuous flow creates the illusion of permanence, but upon closer observation, it flickers moment by moment.

In the highest stages of insight, the practitioner comes to see that liberation requires releasing not only identification with the contents of consciousness but even with consciousness itself. This is the meaning of true emptiness: not the absence of experience, but the absence of any solid ground upon which a self can stand.

To go “beyond consciousness” is not to annihilate experience but to transcend the clinging that turns awareness into identity. It is to rest in the ungraspable — beyond arising and ceasing, beyond being and non-being — in the peace of the unconditioned (nibbāna).

This is not something to be imagined or conceptualised, but something directly realised when the mind fully releases its grasp and abides in the natural freedom that has always been present beneath the restless constructions of selfhood.

“There is, monks, that dimension where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor air… neither this world nor another world, neither sun nor moon. Here, I say, there is neither coming nor going nor staying; neither arising nor passing away; it is the end of suffering.”
— Udāna 8.1