The Primacy of Consciousness
The discourse on consciousness across all disciplines, especially, in empirical studies of psychology, neuroscience and physics are all stuck at the question of what David Chalmers once called ‘The Hard Problem’: How does something immaterial as consciousness arise from something unconscious as matter? Peter Russel argues in this lecture that they are stuck and staggered by the question, because epistemically, it is due to the failure of scientific approach to knowledge as one of the ways of knowing. He claims that understanding consciousness is transcendental to empirical measures of knowledge, because our experience of an object “is” the consciousness or awareness of the object in itself. Thus the primacy of consciousness established. He posits that the right question to ask is: How does ‘consciousness’ permeate and manifest in all phenomena, material and immaterial? He tries to explain from his purely meditative and spiritual seeking yet through a critical and cautious lens of reductio ad absurdum against the authoritative ‘science’ as the most dominant ways of knowing. The key to understanding consciousness is meditation, through spiritual seeking of the reality. This resonates with Osho’s criticism of philosophy and his placement of spirituality as higher and superior to philosophy. But that is another lecture or book to explore.
