3 Why Consider Consciousness?
Daniel had been thinking about his own consciousness lately. Daniel didn’t know why. Indeed, Daniel didn’t know what to do with his consciousness. And that may have been why his consciousness was catching his attention lately. Something deeper within himself than his consciousness, perhaps what Daniel might call his conscience, was prodding him to do something with his consciousness. Daniel had exhausted his natural willingness to let his mind wander wherever it took him. Daniel wanted in some sense to direct his consciousness, or not simply direct it but to strengthen, grow, and mature it. Daniel wanted to be more conscious and not so aimlessly conscious, which was making him less conscious or even unconscious. But how was he to do that? How was Daniel to get a hold of himself and take control of his own mind?
Consciousness
The prior chapter showed that a significant first step in your psychological and spiritual maturity is to understand your genuine self. A good second step in that growth is to understand the role of your consciousness, on which exploring and developing your deeper self depends. Consciousness refers to the state of being awake to oneself, aware of oneself if not also of one’s surroundings. To be conscious is at least to be perceiving, thinking, and perhaps also reasoning. We know that we are conscious from the string of words our minds produce. Consciousness, though, also includes a quiet state without internal dialogue, yet perceiving a sense of self. Beyond that, though, consciousness is hard to understand, in that sense like the self is hard to understand. Don’t even try to explain consciousness physiologically. It is beyond material comprehension and thus beyond or transcending the material. Yet also like the self, we can approach consciousness from its attributes, the things that we know from our continuous personal experience of it.
Attention
Stimuli flood our mind, for instance, when we open our eyes to see. Yet we actually register in our minds only a tiny fraction of the light outlining the images before our eyes. And we can stare for hours on end without registering much at all of what we see, as when we are deep in reflective thought while driving, and we finally arrive at our destination realizing that we hardly registered the trip. The same is true with sound. We can hear an instructor or a radio or television drone on and on without registering the sound much at all, realizing only when the sound stops that we hadn’t listened. Consciousness, then, is different from simply seeing, hearing, or registering the other sensations of touch, taste, or smell. Consciousness instead requires attention. Something within the stimuli must capture our attention, while something within us must simultaneously direct our attention to certain stimuli. Otherwise, our reflections, our consciousness, will remain internal. We will attend not to our sense impressions but to our internal thoughts and concerns.
Concentration
We call concentration that swiveling of our mental processing or focus, back and forth between internal reflection and external stimuli. Concentration involves focus. If the effort is to address and resolve something internally, then concentration involves shutting out the external stimuli, the distracting sights, smells, sounds, and touches. If instead the effort is to respond effectively to stimuli, such as to navigate a tricky commute home in an ice storm, then concentration involves shutting off the internal reflection, not, for instance, to think about the day’s work but to concentrate on the highway home. Either way, concentration shuts off potential alternative subjects or objects for attention. The subjects are internal, while the objects are external. The subjects on which we concentrate internally involve abstract images and constructs of fleeting words and phrases, for which we are largely unaccountable. The objects on which we concentrate externally are real material conditions that can instantly hold us accountable. To mature psychologically and spiritually, strengthen both your internal abstract subjective thinking and your capacity to sense and closely track external conditions.
Navigating
As just suggested, we live, in effect, between two opposites. We have, on the one hand, our internal mind directing our attention toward various needs, desires, and purposes. Call it our purposive self, that with which we direct our attention and actions from the inside out, to accomplish our purposes. Yet on the other hand, we have our externally directed mind, letting our senses scan their stimuli to call things to our attention. Call it our reactive self, that with which we direct our attention from the outside in, to alter our purposes as opportunities and challenges arise from without. We may, for instance, be deep in thought about the day’s tasks as we navigate our commute into work. Those awaiting tasks are the very reason for the commute that we so diligently and earnestly undertake, right on schedule. Yet at the same time, our eyes scan the highway, our foot registers the pressure of the accelerator and brake, and our hands feel the sensations of the steering wheel, all providing feedback to monitor and process. Anomalous stimuli like a detour in the road, traffic jam, or hazardous driving conditions may require substantial deliberate thought and a reconsideration of purposes. Navigating effectively in the world involves choosing the right times and places to concentrate internally or externally. A healthy psyche and spirit can readily navigate between the two.
Balance
Our concentration thus swivels back and forth between internal reflection and external stimuli. We can concentrate either internally or externally, generally not both. Indeed, that’s the nature of concentration that it concentrates. Concentration does one thing, not two or three things. You have doubtless had outer-directed days when you’ve been so busy attending to stimuli that you’ve barely had time to reflect. You’ll then collapse somewhere for the evening simply to internally process all that happened during the day. Yet you’ve likely had days that brought the opposite, long periods for reflection with few distractions, when you’d need now and then to get up and go for a walk simply for the stimuli. Both types of day are good as long as you can balance them. Concentrate too much internally, and you may go mad with delusions, oblivious to your surroundings. But likewise, have too many external stimuli to which to attend for too long a period, and you may go mad with distraction, having lost the inner sense of yourself. A key, then, to psychological and spiritual health is to balance concentration. Both internal and external concentration are good. Too much of either is not good.
Transcendence
A much bigger key to psychological and spiritual growth, though, is to develop the capacity to direct our concentration toward transcending our internal and external musings. To mature psychologically and spiritually, we need to shift our concentration from either in or out to above. We need to turn our concentration toward examining our concentration, examining that about which we think and the way in which we think. We need to develop, strengthen, and exercise the capacity to think from above ourselves, examining ourselves. In education, the term is metacognition, encouraging students to think about how they are studying, how they are thinking and learning. But psychological maturity isn’t simply to improve learning. It is instead to improve the psyche, to improve how we think about ourselves as a living being within a world that supports and stimulates consciousness. We need to think about consciousness itself, which is a strange but powerful activity.
Growth
Thinking about your consciousness is already an awakening of transcendence. When you do so, you have placed yourself above yourself, transcending yourself. We’ve already seen above that consciousness is being awake to oneself. But what if you were not merely conscious, awake to yourself, but also awake to your consciousness, that is, awake to your awareness? That transcendence from mere consciousness to consciousness of consciousness is an awakening of transcendence. It is, in a sense, one’s first spiritual act, one’s first move above the self to the consideration of the self. Notice that for the move to be above rather than below, one desires the growth of consciousness, indeed the transcendence of consciousness. One could do the opposite, which would be to move below consciousness into the material desires of the senses, which is not in itself bad. We all need to eat and breathe, and we should often get to enjoy doing so. But to grow in transcendence is to move in the opposite direction up and above, toward the consideration of how conscious one is and of what one is conscious.
Conscience
As the brief story with which this chapter began illustrates, something within us must generally prod us to begin to take this transcendent stance. Consciousness itself wouldn’t generally do it. Our internal subjects and external objects occupy our consciousness. Why would our consciousness prod us to examine our consciousness? That’s not its role. No, to transcend our consciousness takes something like a conscience. Conscience generally refers to our inner guide telling us whether what we are doing or about to do is good, bad, or indifferent. In this instance of transcendence, though, the good or bad judgment has to do with consciousness itself, not the actions flowing from consciousness. Psychology and spirituality aren’t particularly studies in morality, although both have a great deal to do with morality. They are instead studies in transcendence, in examining and adjusting the mind, spirit, and soul, including identities and personas, to produce a better, stronger, healthier, more-integrated, and more-awake self. You don’t have to grow psychologically or spiritually beyond whatever point you’ve currently reached. But your conscience or inner self may be prodding you to do so. And you may discover that it’s well worth responding to the prod.
Self
Growing in consciousness has a lot to do with growing more aware of your inner self. Growing in your capacity to transcend your thinking, in order to adjust your thinking toward what your conscience or inner self recommends, is to become more like yourself, more in tune with the deeper aspects of who you are as consciousness reflects you. The transcendence that consciousness reflects is a gift of the transcendent realm. Consciousness is, in a phenomenologically real and experiential sense, transcendence itself. You are giving up yourself to transcendence, to the above, as your consciousness becomes more aware of itself. You are participating in the divine or higher realm. If the breath of life that God breathes into humankind is the Logos, Word, and Spirit, embodied love, reason, and rationality himself, then our transcendent consciousness is our participation in that Spirit. Growth in the transcendent self diminishes self-seeking of the worldly sort. We die to the world and rise in the Spirit, participating in consciousness as the breath of full life.
Beyond
In this process of growing in consciousness, though, we must respect that our deeper selves must always remain beyond our full grasp. Our mental act of discerning and perhaps even describing in part our inmost self limits the transcendent self, when that self is not subject to limit. Claiming that we can discern and describe ourselves may even deny or transgress ourselves. Growing in consciousness is a humbling, not an exalting, process. As we awake to ourselves, we may see that we know less of ourselves rather than more of ourselves because our transcendent self lies above and beyond. The process of awakening to transcendent consciousness is thus both an advance and a withdrawal, moving forward into greater consciousness of our selves while moving away from the proposition that we know ourselves and can define, grasp, and control ourselves. We do not know where the Spirit will lead us, and we welcome that we do not know because we cannot adequately imagine the transcendent realm.
Reflection
How aware are you of your consciousness? Do you catch yourself thinking about how you’re thinking? What gets most of your attention, that which is inside you or that which is external to you? Are you more inner-directed or outer-directed generally, or do you easily and fruitfully change back and forth? Are you able to direct your attention either inward or outward as the need and occasions arise? Or are you instead more prone to be too inwardly reflective or too outwardly distracted? Which do you prefer, the solitude of an inward-turned day or the engagement of an outward-turned day? Can you sense when you have a good or poor balance of the two? Do you occasionally step above to consider whether you need to be more reflective or less reflective, in other words taking a transcendent stance? Do you sense within you a conscience or metacognition encouraging you to be more of one or the other? Why are you reading this guide? What or who caused you to take it up? Could that stimulus be your conscience or inner self calling you to awaken?
Key Points
Consciousness is that awake or aware state necessary to the self.
Consciousness enables attention, both inward and outward.
Concentration is the act of turning attention inward and outward.
Navigating the world requires both reflection and observation.
For a healthy self, we need to balance reflection and observation.
For spiritual growth, we need to transcend reflection and observation.
Psychological growth involves increasing attention to transcendence.
The inner self or conscience spurs us to transcend our thinking.
The self transcends limitation and is beyond our complete grasp.