WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS

~ Everyday wisdom ~

Consciousness – here we can look from the point of view of people at the consciousness of those who are awake, and who are still in that “sleep” phase. Of course, this would be a very beautiful division, but nothing would be further from the truth than if we gave our attention to this division of consciousnesses, as such.

Of course, consciousness is one of the most important aspects of life to which we should give our attention. It is that attention that is entirely dependent upon that awareness of one’s own reality. We create our own reality through consciousness, which is an instrument of that consciousness, just as our eyesight is used to identify certain aspects in our everyday life. Hearing, sight, taste, touch, smell, these are all tools of your body through which your consciousness gains all kinds of knowledge of the external as well as the internal environment in which it finds itself at any given point in its life and experiences everything associated with it.

Now you may say that I am going off topic, but how could I go off topic if I were to talk about something that makes up our entire life? Consciousness is one of the aspects we use to formulate a certain picture of life. But here we lose the concept of reality, for we become imprisoned in our own creation that we experience within our life. Our consciousness, then, is an information system that processes all of the data that is available to it at any given moment and what it focuses its attention on. It is as if we had a computer where we would turn on many, many programs that are all running simultaneously within one whole system, but the user has only one window open at any given time, one program that they are giving their attention to at any given time.

~ WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS ~

If we want to stay with the computer example, it is very useful to use three basic concepts – user, computer (hardware) and system (software). These three components form one complete reality. Just as a user alone will never play a game or run a program without a computer, so a computer with a system is completely useless if no one is using it. And that is what this world is all about. You are like them users, your body is like the hardware, and your attention is like the software that processes the information, the processes, and everything associated with it. But all of this must be brought into alignment where one is in harmony with the other, and there is no denial of access for that user to enter into that system and its individual aspects that make it up, as a whole.

We might now liken the development of that system to the development of a given person who is beginning to learn new things and recognize new aspects of life itself. It is far more complicated than that, but what is the point of describing it all in detail here, if all it would accomplish is that you would lose yourself and your view of the whole of life, instead of truly beginning to accept that you are the creator of your own life.

So what is this “consciousness”? That is indeed a remarkable question – perceive – PERCEIVABLE – it is something that we ourselves want to give our attention to and therefore we become aware of that aspect of life and we use the tools of that computer to properly analyze that aspect in order to actually experience it and therefore experience it as part of our reality.

~ CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SET OF SEVERAL LEVELS? ~

So, if we were to summarize what consciousness is, it is a collection of all the aforementioned aspects of life – the user, the computer, and the system that runs on the computer, so that it all plays a harmonious symphony. Once the computer is broken, the user has trouble running any program. If any program is overloaded, it may happen that the program in question “crashes” at some point and has to be restarted. If the user is ill, the computer is completely useless, as the user is forced to rest in bed and the computer goes completely out of his priority attention. We can talk in exactly this way about the fact that everything must actually work harmoniously, otherwise one builds on the other and thus the error starts to chain until the system as a whole collapses.

That is why I am dealing with this issue from a completely holistic point of view, where there is no need to divide human consciousness into certain phases, certain levels, such as conscious, unconscious, subconscious, superconscious and so on. It is still part of that consciousness as one whole system that experiences a given point.

~ WHAT DOES SCIENCE SAY ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS? ~

Consciousness (from věděti) is the headquarters of the integrated psychic activity of man and, to varying degrees, of other animals, encompassing everything to which they currently give their attention. Consciousness integrates and, to some extent, directs diverse mental or psychic activities (perception, thinking, feeling, expression, memory, attention, etc.).

(Taken from Wikipedia here https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C4%9Bdom%C3%AD)

~ WHAT DOES OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE SAY ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS? ~

Levels of consciousness can be thought of as different dimensions of consciousness that transcend the normal boundaries of any sense of reality or conceptualization of “God.” Humans can experience or be more connected to God through different levels or dimensions of consciousness. God is not the Christian god, the Muslim god, not the Buddhist god, etc., but a higher level of being beyond any church’s understanding. In a sense it is “One”, a Higher Power, a higher plane, the Almighty, if we want to use Christian terms. But no religion is a proper religion or has a monopoly on “God” – if it claims to have a monopoly on God, then it is a proclaimed monopoly on you, your being and access to your higher levels of consciousness.

God is with us, around us, the creator of life, death and the entire system we live in. And human beings have the ability to actually experience such things. This does not require any ecclesiastical approval or acceptance of certain dogmas. This is the true definition of “freedom of religion”.

(Culled from here https://sites.google.com/a/nau.edu/native_american_spirit/levels-of-consciousness)

Wisdom for the end

“If we want to talk about consciousness, we first need to combine all aspects of perception into one comprehensive picture that we can study further.

A picture composed of our emotions, our thoughts, our dreams, our experiences, our internal and external stimuli, and so on and so on and so on ….”

Marek Szweda