Reflexive self-consiousness
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"Reflexive Self-Consciousness" - a concept, related to that of enlightenment, formulated by Eugene Halliday during the 1940s and 1950s in England.
Eugene Halliday, artist and writer, made a lifelong study of art, religion, philosophy, psychology and the concepts of science, binding the truths he found therein into a fully coherent body of ideas. His seminal work is his book “Reflexive Self-Consciousness”, in which he sets out the nature of consciousness and its relation to the world of phenomena, the nature of being, and in particular, to mankind.
In the Prologue to his book, Halliday examines the meaning of the related terms sentience, consciousness, feeling, sensation, awareness. All are related, and to some degree interchangeable; all refer to “that in and by which we know what we know, and that we know”.
If we ask ourselves what this statement means, Halliday explains, we can only say “we know what we mean. Consciousness is its own evidence”. He then goes on to say that we cannot indicate what we mean by one of these consciousness-related words “without appealing to that in us, which corresponds with their significance, that is, to that in us which knows that it knows”. From this fact, Halliday states that sentience, or consciousness, is ultimately infinite.
A N Whitehead said “there are no dead gaps in Nature”. Halliday states that if we do not posit sentience/consciousness as a property of that source which is present “from the very beginning of creation or evolution, we cannot find a point later at which we may logically introduce it”. Halliday does not accept the materialist view, wherein consciousness is a product of increasing complexity in matter, through evolution.
On the contrary, he sees a complex structure of cells, such as the brain, as “a vehicle for the expression of the complex processes of consciousness”. The placing together of a large number of non-sentient particles, however complex their arrangement, cannot give rise to consciousness.
On this basis, Halliday posits that the ultimate source and origin of our being is sentient and conscious – an infinite field of sentience.
In the writings of Carlos Castaneda, the shaman Don Juan says “we are perceivers”. Halliday says that the true nature of the self is consciousness itself. As beings with physical bodies, we are tyrannised by the limitations of our sense organs, by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, by emotional charges in the records of our experiences, so that we often behave in a reactive manner, as if we were no more than animals, with no free choice. However, if we learn to remember the nature of our true self, and our source in consciousness, we can free ourselves from this enslavement and become human, capable of free choice and action.
Halliday likens the activity of the infinite field of sentience, the source of all beings, of the universe, to that of the sea. Its internal movements, its waves, create vortices within it, which give rise to all the observable phenomena of the world. Atoms, molecules, cells, plants, animals, mankind, human beings, all are formed within this infinite sentient field, and all are sentient. There is no non-sentient level of being.
This infinite field of sentience, which is the ultimate source of the universe and all within it, is the Godhead of the theologians, the Absolute of the philosophers.
Before Evolution, Eugene Halliday posits an Involution, whereby the motions of this absolute sentience create the universe and all the beings in it. Sentience, in the place of each being, falls into identification with that being, right down to the grossest physical level of the mineral world. Through the process of Evolution, sentience evolves through mineral, plant, animal and human to rediscover its true nature as Consciousness itself, at one with the infinite field of consciousness. This return of consciousness to its source, is the “Reflexive Self-Consciousness” of the title of the book.
