Initial draft:
I mentioned Ken Wilber’s appendix on energy and consciousness to a friend, and how it makes a great deal of sense to me, at least as far as I understand it.
Energy and consciousness are two sides of the same coin, and in mutual influence and support. A change in consciousness – from for instance centaur (body-mind whole) to nature mysticism (sensing the sacred in all form) to deity mysticism (seeing all as God) to nondual (absence of I and Other) – is followed by a corresponding change in energy, and the other way around.
For instance, diksha works on the energy side, inviting corresponding shifts in consciousness, and the same is the case for, for instance, kundalini yoga. And meditation and inquiry works on the consciousness side, inviting a corresponding shift in energy.
So far so good, but what is really what we here call consciousness?
It is certainly not pure awareness, nor is it Ground, nor is it Big Mind awake to itself.
Rather, it seems to be a filter. One that is within the content of awareness, and filtering this content, making it appear a certain way.
So instead of talking about energy and consciousness, which is confusing at least to me, we could talk about energy and filters. And these filters have at their core beliefs.
They are stories we take as absolutely true at some level, which then filter what arises in certain ways. They make it appear, in our world view and/or direct experience, that psyche and body are two different things, or that they are aspects of a very tangible whole. They make it appear that there is a separate self here, clearly separate from or one with the larger whole. And when these beliefs and filters fall away entirely, at least as something taken as real and substantial and in the world itself, Ground awakens to itself, absent of an I with an Other.
More accurately, we can say that the energy/consciousness unit acts as a filter, and the consciousness side is how what arises appears after the filtering.