Consciousness, Self Awareness and Change...

"Consciousness...Going Somewhere?"

You can watch videos like Becoming One for a more complete view.

We can't really understand life without understanding consciousness. First I'd like to talk about words. We have, as people, a little confusion associated with life because we've forgotten something about words. Somehow we lost track of the role of words. Words never come first. Life is not defined by the word life. The word life is used only as a tool for communication. Other than that it's meaningless. Now one could say that we can't do without words. Is that true? Take away words and we'd cease to be? Most of the time when I introduce this type of stuff in a text it's just to get us thinking beyond the everyday scratch. It helps us look at things with less prejudice. The word life has a lot of emotional strings attached. Life is precious. The giver of life. They lost their lives when the barn burned. We say things that aren't true and use the word life to help us say them. Whether we say them, hear them, believe them or not the strings get built in our heads. We can say, well I don't pay any attention to such things. If you know it was said then you've payed attention. We refer to things going in one ear and out the other like it's possible. To be unaffected by words it's necessary to understand that words carry no weight. Life doesn't need them. They don't have significance other than tools. Like hammers and saws to construct pictures for each other. Then we look at the pictures. The pictures have some significance. But only in so much as through them we can examine an idea. These word images let us know what others are thinking. Words are always secondary. All words came by way of men. Words don't make things what they are. Words describe in the most rudimentary way a things known or imagined characteristics. How will we describe consciousness for each other? What pictures will get handed back and forth and passed around?

Can we say consciousness is life? Or life is consciousness? Or how about life is consciousness doing stuff? Life is consciousness moving? Is it going in a direction? History repeats itself. Does life? Does consciousness? This a big deal today. This consciousness stuff. Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.

H. P. Blavatsky

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.
David Chalmers

If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.
Richard Bach

Only when your consciousness is totally focused on the moment you are in can you receive whatever gift, lesson, or delight that moment has to offer.
Barbara de Angelis

Where you are in consciousness has everything to do with what you see in experience.
Eric Butterworth

This consciousness idea. If I wanted to find out something about consciousness who would I ask? How would I know that they knew? I say this as I am in the middle of the second paragraph of a writing titled consciousness. Getting ready to explain it. Define it? How about just give what I understand so far? That's probably best. So far I have seen some things that I relate to consciousness. What I have seen has removed the differences between consciousness and life - along with those differences that once separated my idea of me from life. This is the culmination of the data I've collected. I replaced the stuff that got in there before I had any firewalls or filters set up. I replaced the stuff that didn't add up. The stuff that wasn't true. This is what I've been suggesting as the solution to all troubles. Just in case you were wondering. I got to this point by adjusting my data entry and intake processes. It is common for one person to ask another person where they got an idea. You know, "Where in the world would you get an idea like that?". Most of the time the answer is, "I don't know". So there is the whole cause/solution formula. If we don't know where we got an idea, we need to go over it again. We'll want to examine it very closely and without prejudice. A large portion of our ideas sneaked in the back door - so to speak. My own solution has been to find them and get rid of them. Back to consciousness.

What is it and how would anyone know? The short answer is no one can and none does. The other answer is that we can observe life or consciousness and come to some understanding simply by watching. In the previous writing about life we saw that all we really knew is that it was growing and cycling. That this went on all the time as a continuing pattern. In the structure of life we saw that everything that is has a structure. We say "it is" if it's there, or in between what is there. Does consciousness have an observable pattern? Does it have structure. If consciousness and life are synonymous then yes. Are they? Can we observe a difference? Can we say that they are the same? Sure we can. There's no rule that says we have to be perfect. We don't have to be right. We know that it's more useful to others if we are sane, right? Making observations about what we see is sane. More sane and more useful than speculating about what we can't see. That right there is the difference between sane data and kooky data. So what can we see?

Can we see that we are more consciousness now than 500 years ago? I'm not drawing a conclusion I'm really posing a question. Are we? How would we know? What was going on 500 years ago? Was it consciousness that moved us from chariots to internal combustion? A lot has not changed. We replaced the coliseum with TV cop shows and freak-reality programs. As beings we provide a profitable market for pain and suffering. Conflict and retribution are huge hits. Things look different but how different are we? We say we are conscious. Are we moving towards a different higher, better, more useful type of consciousness? The truth is we haven't been at this very long. Just the tiniest tick at the end of a several billion year process. Keeping that in mind if consciousness is real, if it and life are one, then we can see that change is taking place now in the evolutionary blink of an eye. At the present rate of acceleration it will render the landscape unrecognizable in just a few years. If we were to look back 500,000 years, which is still just a flash in the evolutionary pan, you can truly see that consciousness, if that's what we want to call it, is racing somewhere at a crazy fast, and ever increasing, pace. So lets say we know that things are picking up speed and we're definitely rushing in some direction. If we want to call the instigator of that move consciousness, and we certainly don't have to, then consciousness would be cause in this evolutionary dynamic. We say we are conscious of ourselves. Self aware as it were. Is this the same consciousness as that which appears to be driving us forward? Is that consciousness becoming more aware? Does it have something in mind? Is it total awareness? Is it aware of all possibilities? Aware of the totality of life in the same sense of self awareness that we are now just beginning to experience? Is it a plan with an end in mind or just a becoming more? It seems to me to have a direction. Although saner is a direction. Better is a direction. I don't know what's going on past this point but I feel I'm being moved along towards something. I can't add much to that.

As a matter of fact I'm not even going to venture into the mystic guru field. This is really the summation of my journey. This is where I'm at. What I've come to. Not that I mind speculating a little as long as it's based on observable trends. Where would the current trend end up? Or at least be heading? Towards more awareness? More self awareness leading to a more conductive intuitive sense? I think so. How would we best take advantage of whatever it is that's taking place? If it's moving and we want to know where it's going and go with it, what do we need to do? Consciousness Video

"We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner,what you actually did in order to get to do the work."

Global Consciousness Project

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement. The project builds on excellent experiments conducted over the past 35 years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators (REGs), apparently "causing" them to produce non-random patterns. A description of the technical implementation is given under procedures.

The experimental results clearly show that a broader examination of this phenomenon is warranted. In recent work, prior to the Global Consciousness Project, an array of REG devices in Europe and the US showed non-random activity during widely shared experiences of deeply engaging events. For example, the funeral ceremonies for Princess Diana, and the international Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, created shared emotions and a coherence of consciousness that appeared to be correlated with structure in the otherwise random data. In the fully developed project, a world-spanning array of labile REG detectors is connected to computers running software to collect data and send it to a central server via the Internet. This network is designed to document and display any subtle, but direct effects of our collective consciousness reacting to global events. The research hypothesis predicts the appearance of coherence and structure in the globally distributed data collected during major events that engage the world population. read more... at noosphere.princeton.edu

"Consciousness"

from Author, Machaelle Wright "During an expansion of consciousness, our intellectual understanding of what we are experiencing is challenged because it is new to us. Like anything new, if we try to force an understanding of it through the framework of what we already know, we end up confused and possibly misinterpreting the experience. If we truly wish to expand our consciousness, that expansion can only serve to render our old framework obsolete. Any expansion we might have can actually be distorted if we try to force it through our old intellectual framework, such as would happen with a round handful of Play Dough squashed through a square shaping hole. Some of the Play Dough may get through intact, but it is distorted, while much has been left behind on the other side of the screen, hopelessly lost for use in the new construction.

If we attempt to use our old framework when tackling new material such as is here being presented, we will tend to experience what we think we are experiencing instead of what it is that is actually happening. Or, worse still, we will tend to read into things what it is we want to hear, rather than getting the truth from what it is we are reading. We need then just to put the intellect aside--to just be. Let this new experience, this new knowledge, integrate itself naturally into our being. Like a Zen master would proscribe, if we just get ourselves out of the way, life will show us what we need to know and what it is we need to be doing. In this way, we can allow the formation of a new and more logical or intellectual framework. As a result, we will then gain a completely different understanding. The experience itself will build its own new logical framework. So, as you read this work, just let the expansion or processing happen naturally. As you do, you will be surprised at how much easier it is and how much more you really understand."