May I refer the Buddha’s straight instruction to Bahiya - Ref: * Heartfelt Sayings 1.10 # With Bāhiya
“In that case, Bāhiya, you should train like this: ‘In the seen will be merely the seen; in the heard will be merely the heard; in the thought will be merely the thought; in the known will be merely the known.’ That’s how you should train. When you have trained in this way, you won’t be ‘by that’. When you’re not ‘by that’, you won’t be ‘in that’. When you’re not ‘in that’, you won’t be in this world or the world beyond or between the two. Just this is the end of suffering.”
Then, due to this brief Dhamma teaching of the Buddha, Bāhiya’s mind was right away freed from defilements by not grasping.
Consciousness is simply that which clings to perceptual objects. When perceptual faculties cling to perceptual objects, that and only that clinging is consciousness.
Remove the consciousness and you have effectively removed the clinging.
There are different ways to go about this. “Consciousness” - as it were, is “in the air”. It’s a “nutriment” … ie. we feed off of it.
We can willfully stop feeding on consciousness. This helps to break the cycle of craving and clinging.
We can also expunge the mind of consciousness … we can force it out by sheer will … or we can gradually let it go by close attention to the breath and the manner by which consciousness is liable to cling.
That results in a full-body emancipation.
Or, we can let it grow cold. By practicing virtue, by eliminating the sources which feed the mind with unwholesome states, we can let consciousness grow cold.
That seems to be the ultimate way of dealing with consciousness - to neither deny ourselves of it wherein we do not have it; nor to get rid of what we already do have; but, rather, to take what is there at the centre of the mind and deprive it of unwholesome kamma.
That, to me, is the definition of “cooled”. To think whatever thoughts ones wants to. And to not think when one does not desire to think.
In reality the stream of mano-vinnana’s is the stream of conceivings. When we are lost in this stream, absorbed by it, that comes with the impression that the truth about ourselves, others , the world is cinematic, a story.
Investiging in these stories as if that is the truth about ourselves, others, the world, as if that represents, reality, and represents ‘seeing things as they really are’, is the clinging due to avijja.
It is so easy to get lost in this story telling in our head. The brain is very strong and dominant.