User:Joshua Jonathan/Self-luminosity

Advaita Vedanta

Main article: Advaita Vedanta

For the Advaita tradition, consciousness is svayam prakāśa, "self-luminous," which means that "self is pure awareness by nature." According to Dasgupta, it is "the most fundamental concept of the Vedanta." According to Jonardon Ganeri, the concept was introduced by the Buddhist philosopher Dignāga (c.480–c.540 CE), and accepted by the Vedanta tradition; according to Zhihua Yao, the concept has older roots in the Mahasanghika school. According to Wolfgang Fasching,

For Advaita Vedānta, consciousness is to be distinguished from all contents of consciousness that might be introspectively detectable: It is precisely consciousness of whatever contents it is conscious of and not itself one of these contents. Its only nature is, Advaita holds, prakāśa (manifestation); in itself it is devoid of any content or structure and can never become an object.

Qoutes

• Murti 1983, p. 339:

The point to be reached is a foundational consciousness that is unconditional, self-evident, and immediate (svayam-prakāśa). It is that to which everything is presented, but is itself no presentation , that which knows all, but is itself no object. The self should not be confused with the contents and states which it enjoys and manipulates. If we have to give an account of it, we can describe it only as what it is not, for any positive description of it would be possible only if it could be made an object of observation, which from the nature of the case it is not. We "know" it only as we withdraw ourselves from the body with which we happen to be identified, in this transition.
That such a foundational self is there and can be reached by the right kind of discipline is taught by the Vedanta. The Sankhya view is not very different. Mahayana Buddhism implicitly affirms the existence of a deep underlying reality behind all empirical manifestations in its conception of sunyata (the indeterminate, the void), or vijnapti-matrata (consciousness only), or tathata (thatness), or dharmata (noumenal reality). Its spiritual discipline differs considerably from that of the Vedanta or the Sankhya, but the ultimate goal is remarkably similar.

• Isaeva 1993, p. 102:

Echoes of such an approach are easily traced in Advaita — if only because the higher reality , according to Sankara , was essentially non-verbal and ineffable , but also self-evident , self-luminous (svayam- prakasa)

Tonic alertness

• De Gutis & Van Vleet (2010), Tonic and Phasic Alertness Training: A Novel Behavioral Therapy to Improve Spatial and Non-Spatial Attention in Patients with Hemispatial Neglect:

Tonic alertness refers to intrinsic arousal that fluctuates on the order of minutes to hours. It is intimately involved in sustaining attention as well as provides the cognitive tone for performing more complicated functions such as working memory and executive control (Sturm et al., 1999; Posner, 2008). Functional MRI studies have shown that tonic alertness is supported by a supramodal network including predominantly right inferior frontal, inferior parietal, and anterior cingulate regions (Sturm and Willmes, 2001; Thiel et al., 2004) whereas neurophysiological studies have demonstrated the importance of the locus coeruleus (for a review, see Aston-Jones and Cohen, 2005). Patients with neglect commonly have lesions that involve this network and typically demonstrate low general arousal (Heilman et al., 1978), marked deficits in sustaining attention (Hjaltason et al., 1996; Robertson et al., 1997b), and a significant decrement in vigilance over time (Malhotra et al., 2009).

• Neurophysiology of Silence: Neuroscientific, Psychological, Educational and Contemplative Perspectives

• Enlightenment: Exploring the neural basis of pure consciousness. O Turjman - Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, 2018

Sources

• Isaeva, N.V. (1993), Shankara and Indian Philosophy, SUNY Press
• Murti, T.R.V. (1983), "The World and the Individual in Indian Religious Thought", Studies in Indian Thought: Collected Papers of Prof. T.R.V. Murti, Motilal Banarsidass Publ.