(Continued from yesterday.)
3. Franklin Merrell-Wolff and Consciousness Without an Object
This brings us to Franklin Merrell-Wolff, whose work you have placed among our important sources.
His title, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, points directly toward the question we have just raised.
Ordinarily, consciousness is understood as consciousness of something. I see a tree. I remember a conversation. I feel happiness. There is the awareness, and there is what the awareness apprehends.
But is that relationship between awareness and an object essential to consciousness itself?
Could consciousness be realized in a condition in which it does not know itself through an object, an image, a sensation, or a thought?
Merrell-Wolff reported a transformative realization that he interpreted in terms of a transconceptual awareness beyond ordinary subject-object consciousness. His philosophical work attempts to describe that realization and its implications.
We should distinguish two things here. His testimony is evidence of what he reported experiencing; his interpretation of that experience is a further matter. We can take both seriously without treating either as beyond examination.
Yet the question his work raises is extraordinarily important for our inquiry.
When we say, I am aware, we ordinarily seem to be describing a relationship between an observer and an observed fact: I, the observer, notice that awareness is present.
But what if the awareness does not need to turn itself into an object in order to be present?
Could awareness be self-revealing without becoming a thing that it observes?
We do not yet have to answer. We need first to appreciate the question.
Recall your own caution in our earlier discussion: you were willing to say that awareness is a property of the driver, but unwilling to assert that awareness is the driver. You would not claim to know more than your experience establishes.
We should preserve precisely that discipline here.
We can investigate the possibility of consciousness knowing itself without prematurely deciding what consciousness ultimately is.
4. Where This Leaves Us
We have arrived at three provisional conclusions.
First, intellectual understanding, direct experience, and realization are distinguishable, even though they can overlap.
Second, realization may involve the recognition of something already fundamental to our nature rather than the acquisition of an entirely new identity.
Third, the possibility of consciousness without an object challenges our habitual assumption that awareness must always be divided into a knower and something known.
None of these conclusions settles the mystery. They sharpen it.
And now I want to put a question at the center of our next step.
If realization reveals something that has always been present, why was it not apparent to us before?
Is the truth hidden? Is our attention directed elsewhere? Has the separate self mistaken its own limited perspective for the whole? Or is something more fundamental happening in the development of consciousness?
That question will lead us naturally into the relationship between realization and the ego—particularly the possibility, associated with Ramakrishna, that the ego need not be destroyed but can cease to be the master and become the servant.
For if we are indeed traveling from God to God, we must eventually understand not only what is realized, but what happens to the one who realizes it.
And that is where I propose we go next.
(To be continued tomorrow.)