A different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotions

According to Buddhism, our consciousness (vijñāna) is deeply engaged with the flesh where, as a result, we have become emotionalized (for want of a better term) suffering under the precarious conditions of the body together with its unfulfilled drives. 

This suffering that we sense in the body which we have identified with becomes, automatically, an emotionalized burden for us.  And we have become the bearer of this emotionalized burden.  With a little bit of self-reflection we know what it means to bear this burden.  Moments of frustration, anger, passion, resentment, etc., arise from this burden.  We want to pin the blame on somebody else or some other kind of misfortune that has befallen us.  But for the recluse it is a different picture.

At some point the recluse understands that consciousness free of the body is a different consciousness than consciousness engaged with the emotional travails of the body. 

“Where consciousness is unmanifest, eternal, luminous all around, that's where earth, water, fire, and air does not exist.  Here long and short, fine and coarse, beautiful and ugly, name and form, cease with nothing remaining.  With the transcendence of [manifest] consciousness this is all ended” (DN 11).

This unmanifest consciousness, however, even for the recluse remains as yet unrealized (a Buddha has realized it).  In fact, manifest consciousness is always polarizing.  This condition makes the intuition of unmanifest consciousness that much more difficult because of the subtlety of this polarizing process.  We keep deceiving ourselves at ever finer levels.       

Comments

[Buddha]

“Where consciousness is unmanifest, eternal, luminous all around, that's where earth, water, fire, and air does not exist. Here long and short, fine and coarse, beautiful and ugly, name and form, cease with nothing remaining. With the transcendence of [manifest] consciousness this is all ended” (DN 11).

Yes. I realized this. But you don’t need to be a recluse to experience it. I was not a recluse. I was living and working for a Wall Street firm. What you need is a strong desire to experience atman and Brahma. And please note you can’t be in this world and experience nirvana at the same time, since they are opposite sides of experience. It’s not just a warm and fuzzy feeling, it transcends all feeling, even peace or bliss. It’s not a state of meditative absorption. its a spontaneous experience