You are consciousness ...you don't become consciousness.
Some Yogi's, great tapasvis, believe that you become pure Consciousness through a process of long hours of meditation as the unrelenting, persistent uninvolved witness, wherein all stored impressions of this birth and previous births are destroyed.
Traditional Vedanta points out that you are pure, independent, indestructible, timeless, formless, attribute-free, consciousness at all times - even in the presence of conscious or unconscious or subconscious thoughts/ impressions of this life or previous lives. You don't know it, therefore you suffer. You identify with what is in the mind, being produced by the mind, and therefore you suffer. Know the mind-stuff to be mithya, imagination, or projection of your ignorance,which is illumined in your ever- presence, and empowered by your identification with it. You give absolute reality to the mind, which it does not have. Know the mind stuff to be mithya and so let go of your identification with your mind, knowing your self, the self-evident Consciousness to be the reality, which is never negated in any experience of waking, dream and deep sleep. Live from this knowledge of your wholeness.
Meditation as the witness, is useful for letting go of identification with the mind and recognizing oneself to be independent of the mind, even when the mind is present. Meditation in Vedanta is not for becoming consciousness. It is for owning up your nature of being pure attribute-free, non-conceptual consciousness at all times.
Om That Sat
