Consciousness, History and Memory
Here we reach the central philosophical issue.
From the Advaitic standpoint, Consciousness—Brahman—is memoryless and historyless.
The body-organism has a history. It carries the effects of everything that has happened to it. The mind has memory. A past event can appear now as a memory. But Consciousness itself has neither history nor memory.
A memory of yesterday is not yesterday appearing again. It is a present mental event about yesterday. Likewise, the waking thought, “I slept well last night,” is not Deep Sleep occurring again. It is a present cognition arising in the waking mind, based upon the present condition of the body-organism and the mind’s associations.
Consciousness does not travel backward in time to inspect what happened earlier. Nor does it wait for something in the future. It simply illumines what is present.
In this sense, Consciousness is historyless and memoryless. History and memory belong to the body-mind complex; they do not belong to Brahman.
A simple analogy may help. A room thermometer registers the temperature at the point where it is now. It does not have to remember yesterday’s temperature in order to register today’s. The analogy is only illustrative—Consciousness is obviously not a thermometer—but it helps make the point: knowing the present does not require Consciousness itself to carry a history of previous moments.
The body-organism may carry the effects of the past into the present. The mind may carry memories of the past into the present. Consciousness, however, is not a repository of either.
A Note on the Markov Analogy
This distinction also brings to mind the language of modern science.
A Markov process is one in which the relevant future behaviour of a system is determined by its present state, without requiring the detailed history of how that state was reached. The present state may, of course, contain information carried forward from the past.
The body-organism can meaningfully be discussed in such terms. Its present state is the consequence of its history, and that present state can carry information about what has happened to it.
But applying the mathematical concept directly to Consciousness would be misleading. Consciousness, in Advaita Vedānta, is not a dynamical process unfolding from one conscious state to another. It is the ever-present reality in whose presence all states are known.
So the more precise point is not that “Consciousness is a non-Markov process.” Rather:
The body-organism has a history; Consciousness does not. The body-organism may carry information from the past into the present, but Consciousness does not need a past in order to know the present.
This distinction prevents us from unconsciously transferring properties of the body-mind process to Consciousness itself.
Vedānta and Modern Science
There is an extraordinary meeting point here between an ancient epistemological inquiry and modern scientific investigations.
Sureśvara and the Advaita teachers were working within the conceptual and observational resources available to them. They did not have neuroscience, sleep laboratories, brain imaging, knowledge of neuronal physiology or the modern understanding of restorative processes during sleep. Yet they were probing, with remarkable subtlety, the epistemological problem of what can actually be known and remembered from one state while in another state.
Their concern was not to explain the physiology of sleep. It was to tease out the nature of knowledge, memory, the states of experience and, ultimately, the Knower.
Modern neuroscience approaches the matter from a very different direction. It studies what happens to the body-organism during sleep, how physiological processes change, and what consequences those changes have upon waking.
These are not competing explanations. They address different aspects of the same phenomenon.
One asks:
What happens to the body-organism during Deep Sleep?
The other asks:
What can the waking mind actually know about that state?
And Advaita asks the still deeper question:
What is that by which both the waking state and the memory of waking are known?
Had the neuroscience of today been available to the ancient Advaitins, it is conceivable that they might have incorporated some of these observations into their teaching presentation. We cannot know how they would have done so. But their epistemological distinction remains strikingly relevant: the physiological consequences of a past state can be present now without the past state itself becoming a present object of cognition.
This is precisely where the idea of the After-glow becomes meaningful.
Conclusion
The familiar experience of waking after a good night’s sleep may therefore be viewed from two complementary standpoints.
From the standpoint of the body-organism, Deep Sleep is followed by a changed physiological condition. The demands and energy expenditure characteristic of waking have been interrupted or altered, while restorative processes have taken place. On waking, the mind detects the organism’s present condition—a condition of relative ease, reduced fatigue and renewed capacity for activity. This is the “After-glow” of Deep Sleep.
From the standpoint of Energy Dynamics, this sense of ease is understandable as a reduction in the organism’s burden. When less of its available energy is required to maintain equilibrium and meet the demands placed upon it, there is greater comfort. When this comfort is sensed and appreciated, it may be expressed as happiness, relaxation or refreshment.
But from the standpoint of Advaita Vedānta, an equally important question remains: What exactly is known when the waking mind says, “I slept happily” or “I slept well”?
The waking mind does not recover Deep Sleep as a past experience. It encounters only the present consequences of that state. The body-organism has carried those consequences forward; the mind interprets them now; and Consciousness illumines that present cognition.
Thus, the past need not be present as an object for its effects to be known. Deep Sleep has gone; its consequences remain. The waking mind detects those consequences and calls them relaxation, refreshment or happiness.
This, perhaps, is the real significance of the After-glow.
Deep Sleep changes the body-organism.
Energy Dynamics helps us understand the resulting sense of ease.
The waking mind detects that condition now.
And Advaita reminds us that Consciousness itself carries neither that history nor its memory.
The body-organism has a history.
The mind has memory.
But Brahman, the ever-present Consciousness, has neither.
What has passed belongs to history. What is remembered belongs to the mind. What is present is illumined now.
And in that simple distinction, the ancient inquiry into Deep Sleep and the modern investigation of the body-organism may illuminate one another without being confused with each other.