A Teacher
Franklin Merrell-Wolff
Consciousness without an object
The transmission
Franklin Merrell-Wolff (born Franklin Fowler Wolff; 11 July 1887 – 4 October 1985) was an American mystic and esoteric philosopher. Trained in philosophy and mathematics at Stanford and Harvard, he left a promising academic career to pursue what he regarded as the central human possibility: the transcending of the ordinary limits of consciousness.
After exploring a range of mystical teachings, he committed himself to the path of jnana yoga and to the writings of Shankara, the chief expositor of Advaita Vedanta, marrying that Eastern nondual orientation to the rigour of his Western philosophical and mathematical training.
In his best-known book, Pathways Through to Space (first published 1944), Wolff records a profound transformation of consciousness he underwent in 1936, documenting in journal form the roughly one hundred days that followed.
He went on to articulate his realisation philosophically in The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, developing the idea of an awareness that is not directed at any object and is not itself an object, a pure consciousness that is the ground of both knower and known.
He continued writing and teaching from his base in the eastern Sierra Nevada of California until his death in 1985, leaving a small but distinctive body of work that joins first-person mystical record to careful conceptual analysis.
What they gave
“Consciousness without an object”: Named and analysed a mode of pure awareness prior to the subject-object split, giving Western philosophical form to a nondual recognition.
- First-person record of transformation: In Pathways Through to Space, offered a careful, dated journal of a transformation in consciousness, treating inner experience as data worth precise description.
- East-West synthesis: Brought the jnana-yoga and Advaita orientation of Shankara into dialogue with Kantian and post-Kantian Western philosophy.
- Introceptualism / epistemology of gnosis: Proposed that direct, supra-rational knowing (“introception”) is a genuine avenue of cognition alongside sense and reason.
In their words
Consciousness-without-an-object is.
Within the bosom of Consciousness-without-an-object lies the power of awareness that projects objects.
Consciousness of objects is the Universe.
Consciousness of absence of objects is Nirvana.
Within Consciousness-without-an-object lie both the Universe and Nirvana, yet to Consciousness-without-an-object these two are the same.
When consciousness is disengaged from objects, Liberation from the forms of the world-containing Space, of Time, and of Law is attained.
Attachment to objects is consciousness bound within the Universe.
The GREAT SPACE, or Consciousness-without-an-object, is the Sole Reality upon which all objects and all selves depend and derive their existence.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Adi Shankara and Advaita Vedanta; the path of jnana yoga; the Western philosophical tradition, including Kant, which shaped his analytic vocabulary.
- Influenced: The Franklin Merrell-Wolff Fellowship, which preserves and studies his work; transpersonal psychology and later strands of American nondual philosophy that treat mystical states as objects of serious enquiry.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Pathways Through to Space1944
- The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object1973