CHAPTER 1
Object & Subject Consciousness
In order to understand the nature of responsibility - its meaning, its nature and its various modes of expression - it will be helpful for us to briefly explore consciousness itself.
The funny thing about consciousness is that most of us - most of the time - are not really aware of it. It is so normal to just simply be that we are not aware of our awareness of being. We take awareness for granted and thus never become consciously aware of who and what we truly are.
Our common daily consciousness could maybe best be described as dualistic. It is a consciousness that sees the world as fragmented. It perceives a "me" and "a world" which are inherently separate from each other. This feels "right" to us and so we rarely - if ever - question it.
Our life experience - which amounts to a kind of mind-training - begins with a process of objectifying all our experiences. When we are young we are increasingly confronted with a world full of objects. Thus, when we grow up, we perceive reality as an object or collection of objects. Everything around us is constantly labeled and thus objectified. When we ask our parents about the nature of something, the answer is almost always a name, a label.
Thus, slowly but surely, all reality becomes a single mass of objects structured and perceived according to our conscious and unconscious thoughts, ideas and wishes. As we grow older, our object-focused mind encounters still more stimuli in its surroundings which it objectifies (through labeling) in order to reinforce itself and its perception of reality.
I call this type of consciousness "object consciousness." It correlates to the dualism mentioned earlier. Most people most of the time are in a state of object consciousness. Being in that state means that we approach reality from a so-called objective perspective. Reality is seen as an object and our view on reality is therefore completely determined through "object" seeing.
This feels natural to us because traditional education plays a significant role in sustaining this approach to consciousness. In school we are trained to develop our objective thinking skills, often at the cost of developing other skills or modes of perception. Eventually, it becomes impossible to even conceive of alternatives. Objective thinking becomes the ultimate - indeed, the only - way of looking at life.
But an important question remains. Is objective thinking really objective thinking?
The conventional meaning of "objectivity" means a certain non-negotiable quality of truthfulness. That which is "objective" is correct. It is right, regardless of what we think or do. When we say "I will give you an objective opinion," it means we are giving a true and honest opinion. In our society, reality and objectivity are considered equal. In a sense, they are seen as the same thing. In science - which aims at knowing reality in the ultimate sense a high degree of objectivity is required. A scientist who does not practice objectivity would quickly see their work dismissed as "unscientific."
So it is clear what we mean by "objectivity" but that still does not tell us whether there is such a thing, such a phenomenon, as "objective thinking."
I do not believe that "objective thinking" exists. We may from time to time have an idea that comes close to objective thinking, but it remains a far cry from asserting that we can approach reality objectively. In fact, we cannot approach reality that way. What we think or see is not reality but rather our awareness of reality. The difference is not insignificant.
Object consciousness is consciousness of separation. It considers life as separate from itself. There is a 'you' and then there is 'life'. Object consciousness focuses primarily on object (the perceived) and actually ignores the subject (the perceiver). This means that it looks at the world and sees objects and does not consciously realize that it is seeing this object through its own vision - through a subject, in other words. Thus, object consciousness addresses reality as if it could address reality directly while in effect it is addressing reality only indirectly, through a subject.
Object consciousness is ignorant of its indirectness; that is perhaps its defining characteristic. It is also the dominant consciousness on the planet at the present moment, and forms the ground or essence of all our daily experience. It is our general state of mind with respect to almost everything we do, see, hear and relate to. It is important to realize and understand this because when we explore the meaning, function and effects of responsibility, we have to be clear that people generally act from this state of object consciousness.
Perhaps a metaphor will help us get a clearer perception of what we mean by "object consciousness." Object consciousness functions like a camera. With a camera, we look through a lens and see what we might call reality, the 'world' or 'life'. But what is the world? What is our life? Our life and world are the result of our experience of reality. They are not objects but perceptions. What is it what we do when we live, when we drive to school or to work, go shopping or jogging or skating? We are experiencing our life and our world. Our world and life are simply our experience of reality. That is what our lives are - they are our own experience of reality.
Thus, you could say life as we experience it is always experienced at the level of relative truth. We can only think from our own awareness, as subjects, and so we are always being subjective. But - and this is critical - we believe somehow that we are not being subjective but rather objective. We believe it is possible to take a neutral stand.
For the most part, we are not consciously aware that we experience our own reality. Objective reality is a reality that pretends to be unrelated to a subject. But the truth is that the experience of our reality is dominated or formed by the way we look at life, just like the way we perceive the world through a camera lens. It is important to understand that for the majority of us, this is the only way of seeing or experiencing life. At the same time, we tend to deny that this is what we are doing. In fact, we are not even aware we are doing it. Most of us act as if it is possible to see life outside of our own subjective awareness, as if we were capable of looking at life in a neutral way. But we are not. What we call "neutral" is not neutral at all.
So we might say the following then: object consciousness is the state of consciousness that believes that it objectively knows or is capable of objectively knowing, reality. One believes themselves capable of perceiving truly but at the same time one possesses absolutely no awareness of the overall process. Thus, object consciousness bypasses the subject. It believes - or acts as if - it can be aware irrespective of subject.
This, of course, is impossible. Object consciousness does not acknowledge subject as subject but rather as just another object. That means it perceives some kind of distance from the subject which in turn generates a false sense of neutrality or objectivity. True neutrality would be a very pure and open vision. It would be truly objective. But we mistake distance from that which we perceive with actually seeing in a purely neutral way. The truth is, we can never be aware of anything outside of our own awareness. Object consciousness is in fact a very lazy form of consciousness; not lazy in terms of thinking but lazy in terms of its awareness itself.
If we return to our camera metaphor, it is only when we know that we are looking through the lens of a camera that we can start to really look and see and understand what is happening. We start to look at the lens. We start to investigate how it functions - how colors and shapes and visions arise and change. As that happens, we begin to develop some insight into the nature of seeing and what is being seen.
But the question remains: why is this not obvious in our daily life? Why are we not aware of it?
Part of the answer has to do with the profound influence of science on our mode of perceiving. We like to think of ourselves as beings that look - or at least try to look - at the world in a neutral and objective way. Science vigorously supports this approach. There is nothing wrong in supporting objectivity, but there is a great deal wrong with misreading or misunderstanding this support. Ideally there is such a thing as objectivity but not as a result of thinking. Thinking is object-related. It is not "totality-related." Therefore, thought is limited by definition.
I am not denying that physical laws exist; they do. On a gross physical level science has performed important and useful work for which we can all be grateful. It has discovered all kinds of laws that function under various circumstances and conditions. Each law tends to lead to the discovery of more physical laws that further define physical reality. But we must never forget that the only way to address these laws, and the only way to recognize this objectivity, is through our own awareness. We cannot be aware outside of our own awareness. That means that our awareness would have to be exceptionally pure and extremely clear in order to see anything objectively. Object consciousness cannot do this because by definition it denies or ignores awareness. It tries to bypass the subject when it looks at life. Object consciousness does not deny awareness in the sense that it believes there is no awareness. Rather, its denial takes the form of its effort to bypass awareness altogether. It never consciously takes awareness into account.
For example, we often talk about the "facts of life," by which we mean all the things that are happening around us. But what are these so-called facts of life? We can have a general communal understanding of what we mean by that phrase, but that does not mean that it points to an either absolute or neutral thing.
Object consciousness likes to make things abstract and then mistakes that abstraction for neutrality. There is a sense in which this makes solid practical sense. We make things abstract in order to see them more clearly and gain a helpful mutual understanding. Without this implicit process, communication would not exist. Society would not exist.
However, even though it can be important and helpful when used rightly, object consciousness still does not reflect absolute reality. Object consciousness is not the consciousness that reflects reality. It reconstructs its own reality. Object consciousness looks at the world and looks at reality and believes that what it sees has a neutral quality to it, has an objective quality free of whatever the subject thinks of it. Even seeing itself is assigned a neutral quality. But the very seeing is the product of the awareness that is doing the seeing, and so it is not neutral at all. It is essential that we recognize and understand this.
So there may be an objective reality, but our awareness of that reality can never be objective. Still, we believe that our awareness is neutral, and that the way to learn the world or reality is through neutral knowledge - through objectivity. This explains why we always want to know more and more things and it also explains why knowing more never brings about what we are looking for - it never delivers the totality of the truth of reality. Reality is reality and therefore true. But trying to be aware of reality without taking into account that we can only be aware of it through our own awareness is unrealistic and, in the ultimate sense, dishonest. It is the very definition of illusion.
Somehow we started to believe in this objective mind or consciousness without knowing or understanding anything about its actual functioning. We do not know but we do not know that we do not know. This very not knowing is what is being denied in the state of object consciousness. The study of consciousness, when compared to other fields of study, is still relatively barren territory because we do not really know what to do with it, or even how to approach it.
So we can say, then, that everything starts to become a little shaky when we deal with consciousness. The thinker is never separate from the thought that they think. This is a very complicated topic in science because it immediately shows that whatever we find is always confined to and by the inherent limitation of our awareness. Again, we cannot be aware of what is outside our awareness. Object consciousness tries to approach reality through knowledge and it therefore tries to reach the totality through the fragments that it acquires. The result is not a singular whole but rather more fragments. As far as actual objectivity is concerned, this is the wrong direction.
Because object consciousness sees reality as an absolute that is separate from itself, it keeps its main focus on object. Subject consciousness could be defined as the part of consciousness where one is aware of the fact that all it ever sees, it sees through its own awareness. Subject consciousness is therefore automatically subject-orientated. Therefore, the difference between object consciousness and subject consciousness is direction. They "look" in opposite directions. Object consciousness is the consciousness of exchange - it sees the exchange between subject and object as an exchange of separate entities. It always believes that one plus one equals two. In object consciousness, subject is also object. Thus, we could say that object consciousness is the consciousness of materialism.
But this presents a challenge because, as we have seen, the subject can only see or perceive through its own awareness. It would therefore be more realistic to talk about a subject and a subject-perceived object rather than subject versus object. As object consciousness focuses on outer change, subject consciousness focuses on inner change. In object consciousness we address the world as an object and place ourselves in that world as an object. Therefore, the main activity from a state of object consciousness is that of quantifying life. This is its materialistic quality.
We are obsessed with form and we are not aware of the fact that the only way we can approach form is through our own "awareness," which of course is subjective. In subject consciousness we address the self not as an object but rather as a subject. Thus, subject consciousness is the consciousness of qualifying life. When I talk about object consciousness and subject consciousness, I am not talking about two different absolutes but rather referring to different areas or aspects of awareness. Object consciousness and subject consciousness are not clearly defined existing phenomena but rather descriptions of consciousness that can give us insight into the way that people choose to take - or not take – responsibility.
In our traditional understanding and use of language, subjective refers to personal and often means unreliable while objective means universal and reliable. A subjective perspective is very limited and therefore not true, while an objective perspective is unbound and therefore true. If we believe that we, as subjects, are capable of having an objective perspective then we are already starting to drift. We have managed to capture a great deal of the physical world in its complexity of governing laws and this enhances our sense of objectivity. But consciousness is not governed by physical laws. Object consciousness is the state of consciousness that approaches life as if it is governed by the physical laws. Subject consciousness does not. The difference between object consciousness and subject consciousness is not that one is only looking at object and the other only at subject. The dualism in object consciousness is not the result of its awareness of subject and object; in subject consciousness one is also aware of subject, object and dualism. Rather, the difference is in how the subject and object are valued and recognized.
Being subjects ourselves we must learn to realize that we cannot bypass the fact of our subjectivity. That is our mental reality! As long as there is a "self," then awareness will always be subjective. However, the way in which we are aware will define how we will see object or subject. This is exactly where subjective responsibility comes into the picture. The way in which we see object or subject is the essence of our response - our responsibility - and it will determine the degree of joy, peace and contentment that we experience.
