Consciousness is a term from the average American's tongue that can easily elicit flowery imagery of New Agey Bullshit. Or mind luminaries in the field of awareness—something that once permeated the American cultural landscape in the 60's via Buddhism, Sages, and Yogis injecting themselves into Western Consciousness.
When I talk of consciousness, I speak of the latter rather than the former. I invite you beyond simply being aware of awareness—as many mistake as the broad scope of consciousness. The consciousness milieu has journeyed abysmally into the trenches of reductionist autonomous activity and steel-clad observational discovery, popularized sometime after World War I, when pragmatism spread from the European to the American intellectual substrate to make too much order of too much chaos. However, I will leave the discussion of the failures of over-rationality to first discuss a vital manner of consciousness as a precursor to our most essential duty: to lift the consciousness of the masses.
The Famous M.C. Escher Painting asks, who controls the world and reality? It seems that the human-like figures do, by going about their everyday business, show no desire to change it. Escher may be trying to say something about conditioned human nature. As long as these beings can eat, walk, read, and go about their everyday lives, they are content to go along with their distorted world. This painting also shows what humans consider to be their daily reality. People are indoors, cleaning, in love, eating, watching everyone else. In Escher's mind, we control reality. If we care enough to wake up and see what's going on, we can change it.
Though you cannot see what I see. My mind and your mind, in its solitude, all but capture the secret theatre stage of our minds. Yet our perceptions are formulated and enforced through the observational field of shared reality. This cementing process of judgments is often the dance of psychological projection, non-verbal queues, raw feels, intuitions, and sense data. They filter perception from the intro-cosm of the essential self to the micro and macro-cosm of self through others. Continually so, the outer branches of the selves of our communities, towns, cities, states, countries, world, and astral plane.
While we view ourselves as "our" "self," in my view, family, community, city, state, nation, and world can be seen as an "Outer Self." The outermost form of selves, being the world, elicits a rational pummeling of overt apathy. Maybe it fills the space by pop-culture consumption of astrology, while the silent majority simply ignore "heady" notions of "The Heavens" and remind one another to "keep their heads down," displaying a narrative both enforced by culture and politics as some virtuous sign of proud level-headedness.
In a critical sense, moods, waking states, affections, our attentions, and volitions mark a small segment of what constitutes mind, for even simply put it is inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business which it so faithfully attends.
Certainly, one way to solve all our problems is to deny the existence of higher consciousness itself. This is precisely what our current hierarchal structures do when taken to task by a reluctant, docile culture on complex questions of our outer selves. Complex questions we should be engaging with as a society. Questions that seek to address the relationship of mind to matter, questions of oneself connecting to each individual life in their network, a web of multiple selves, and the invisible mind that reveals its tangibility through the recognition and interaction of another. What we soon see are the implications of mutuality.
If we begin to treat the invisible threads that connect us as we treat the people we willingly care for out of love. When you understand that consciousness is not simply the lone theatre of autonomous behavior but the evidential reality of another, you can take one step back and see a larger image unfold from your awareness. Can your little "me" simply be? Without the recognition of your inner "me" from another? Is it not the recognition of a self-knowing oneself through another, just as important as the collection of memories you store at will to do with as you wish in the theatre of mind? But alone, we stagnate; we are social creatures because we need people to affirm and develop our souls, push our ideas, and exercise our strength in character.
The Elites are so well informed of the outer layers you could say they have not only developed some method to traverse this at a greater rate than you, inherit some knowledge of this, but even have highways to drive at full speed ahead, bending outer layers to their will and influence. This is the problem of limited collective consciousness. It allows unchecked Elites to dominate our ring of selves so that our common faculties are but hallow vestiges for exploitation. Of course, all that exploitation is challenging to maintain. It's much easier for individual selves to self-manipulate through ideology. It is much easier for individuals tasked to bottom-level frequencies to herd others near them, along with the many tools in chests proven as effective manipulators of thought and behavior. The Elite's work is done, and they've hardly worked to keep you isolated to your essential self, cordoned off by the walls of fear, desire, lust, envy, and corporate deity worship and obedience.
This is the problem of limited consciousness, and in America there are no shortages to the active limiting of yours.
A manufactured or curated citizenry inherits layers of consciousness by age five. It's why "the diet" in some families and circles isn't considered just what one eats for cellular sustenance but what you allow your mind and your children's minds to consume. So whether it is the media you watch (just below the threshold of awareness), the many queues of mind pathogens of culture enter your awareness. It's how collective narratives are not only shaped but passed down.
soul>family>peers>community
The fourth layer of consciousness of our reality is our communities. If you've noticed, Americans are not doing as Jesus said, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' No commandment is more significant than these.' [Mark 12:31] Instead, the culture of winner takes all has worked to inform us of our worldview narrative of 'us vs. them' in America. That is not to say one should be a victim when virtues are essential to develop to overcome one's challenges in life, but the propaganda used to take from the many to serve the few is a real dimension of American life that makes them think they are losing something by giving others what the rest of the developed world has. I'll be the first to say the benefits of capitalism; I am a capitalist, after all, and a proud American.
The unknowingly, unwittingly participation with our shadow, influencing the dimensions of essential mind, dominates our consciousness when the people we live near and may not even know become the monsters we keep within. By externalizing our fears, they no longer exist within. But the power this gives us is, of course, a false kind of power. It's the illusion of power. Power over another is as corrosive as a fluoroantimonic acid eating our soul from within and doesn't solve the original inner conflict. Too many Americans have been lied to for so long that this rule of largely unconscious life governing what we define as consciousness has been the predominate realization of the 19th century. However, this focus on the instruments of mind, that of the eyes, the ears, and the capacity for pleasure, need not rule a human being unconsciously.
If we become contentious of our awareness, we experience the real-time symbols of the outer and the inner—reflexing like a sine wave muscle. The practice of awareness requires maintenance like any part of your body. Suppose you didn't use your arms or legs for months, as astronauts experience this in space and endure lengthy therapy to recover muscle loss when returning to Earth.
This is because not working out (stress & recovery = strength), one experiences atrophy, and your faculties experience long-term deterioration via inertia. So goes your ability to widen your retina, steady your breath, control your base moods, and see the interaction of collective consciousness that is as alive between multi-layers of what we call dimension.
A world as complex as the coelenterates on the ocean floor—but so uniquely ours to ponder. "Consciousness cannot be the mere assemblage of molecules and cells as we know for now in the totality of what we know. Human beings are the only living creatures to experience its experience in such a manner that a chasm exists between us and the animal world. Following the path of minds meeting minds, history shows all its flair. Often, narratives are remolded to hide what happens when people interact with the layers of consciousness. Through healthy virtues in our culture, Imagination and our experience are born. One can hardly make a case for the eternal energy archetypes—the primordial pools from which each soul pulls its essence—without a thoroughgoing of one of its most profound inquires. Buddha once said, "Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity."
To explore systemic change, you must first examine the mind, your inner realm of learning and reflection. So, If you want to change the world and, more importantly, the world you consider yours, you must first start with mind or what I refer to as 'essential self.' If you want to build as freely inside your own thoughts as you do daily with each private consideration and investigation, you must allow your understanding to guide you to others resonating beyond their inner realm—do so at a frequency that pulsates just above or below the rate of your frequency, both can be teachable moments as your awareness expands from its cocoon. With each experience, our personal consciousness will grow, and our shared consciousness will grow. The directional field will move one towards net positives of choice that come in the forms of idea building, collective actions, mutual goals, and especially, challenges that seek to both build you and take you down: resiliency is what is experienced as wisdom, and our country would benefit most from wiser individuals.
Some of my closest friends were neighborhood kids who were different in culture, speech, class, and race. Through ups and downs, some here, some gone. I always regard them as the catalyst for my consciousness, for if I were isolated by peers of homogeny or class, I would have been very safe in my mind but very alone and terribly less resilient and less wise. Different consciousness made me resilient and wiser. It was there when I first read the lines from Mathew 22:36-40 from a Catholic Italian neighbor. Sometimes, the best material you read comes on slow. Loving thy neighbor brought me closer to Godliness. God is the most high experienced through your actions. Your actions can transcend your needs. When a man has visions that are beyond his sense memory, he is envisioning through the God-head.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The most precious necessity of others asks us to some service of its workings, as a garden that grows food to nourish. Carl Jung once said, "The personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term "collective" because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us."
Whether you're an Atheist, a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, or Jew, exploring consciousness outside our waking mind we face every morning, we will see others who are seeing themselves. The most precious necessity of others asks us to some service of its workings, as a garden that grows food to nourish. When a nation does that across demographics and narratives, it yields the power of a functioning consciousness—a collective consciousness that is made conscious and less reliant on propaganda and actors. The evidence is sown under our restless feet; so much of the history of the world shows both ruins and monuments—the mighty fall. What is more mighty than the structure of thought? When consciousness shifts the grid of reality, the collective mind can replace the hive mind and inform reality to higher consciousness.
