Disclaimer: These notes will be edited as I learn.
The understanding of consciousness helps in many ways we look at life. Sound like a midlife crisis? :) Off late I'm realizing that some of the time I'd spent on understanding consciousness for the past few years is helping me in gaining clarity.
To experience the living & to deeply reflect on living is one of the many means to understand the consciousness. There are tools available to expand consciousness. There isn't any single magic pill but needing workout on every dimension.
To keep it simple, "Who Am I" can be characterised as my body & my consciousness to start with. Body which includes my conditioned brain, organs, memory etc. To use the body for my purpose of life is when my consciousness acts. My consciousness is the one which shapes my thoughts, my wisdom, my dreams.
During primitive ages the characteristics of consciousness (thoughts, wisdom or dreams) should have been hard to communicate with another human. Between human exchange of consciousness got revolutionized by the discovery of language. Hearing, reading, and writing was inevitable which would have resulted in evolutionary betterment of ears to hear, tongue/troat to speak and scripts/symbols to be hand written.
Communication resulted in expanding individual & collective human consciousness. There are probably other organisms with consciousness & it is still hard for us (human) to communicate with them.
An individual can expand the understanding about consciousness by body, out of body and other means.
The understanding of consciousness helps in many ways we look at life. Sound like a midlife crisis? :) Off late I'm realizing that some of the time I'd spent on understanding consciousness for the past few years is helping me in gaining clarity.
To experience the living & to deeply reflect on living is one of the many means to understand the consciousness. There are tools available to expand consciousness. There isn't any single magic pill but needing workout on every dimension.
To keep it simple, "Who Am I" can be characterised as my body & my consciousness to start with. Body which includes my conditioned brain, organs, memory etc. To use the body for my purpose of life is when my consciousness acts. My consciousness is the one which shapes my thoughts, my wisdom, my dreams.
During primitive ages the characteristics of consciousness (thoughts, wisdom or dreams) should have been hard to communicate with another human. Between human exchange of consciousness got revolutionized by the discovery of language. Hearing, reading, and writing was inevitable which would have resulted in evolutionary betterment of ears to hear, tongue/troat to speak and scripts/symbols to be hand written.
Communication resulted in expanding individual & collective human consciousness. There are probably other organisms with consciousness & it is still hard for us (human) to communicate with them.
An individual can expand the understanding about consciousness by body, out of body and other means.
Human body as a means
- Brain based techniques like Meditation. Meditation is a cliche term & hard to define what it is. I perceive meditation as something in which I'll live the life such that every moment you interact with a world, you keep a fresh outlook & feel things as if you're seeing/hearing/touching/tasting for the first time. Not by cutting off the external noises or sitting under a tree but by listening to all that & still be able to give that undivided attention to what I deeply care about. Every single day!
- Breath based techniques like Wim Holf's & Stan Grof's are a great examples. There're more in India like Art of living, Kriya yoga etc.
- Senses based techniques like Music chanting, Aroma around temple, Kuthu Ratheeb during ritual etc.
Interestingly most of the religious activities can be linked backed to these body based means to expand consciousness.
Out of the body as as means
If it was only body through which we can expand the consciousness, then we'll only be able to track it back till our birth. But while listening to Stan Grof interview podcast by Tim Ferris, Stan Grof covers some of these as a means to leverage tools to achieve expansion of consciousness beyond human body as a means.
In that podcast, Stan talks about the point of being able to take the conciseness out of the body thereby giving the framework for us to think about consciousness beyond the body. That alone highlights many aspects which helps in healing & gaining a understanding about universal consciousness with which the world continues to live.
Quoting the exact wording Stan used:
...
There was nothing biographical, no birth experiences, nothing archetypal. I was just facing this incredible source of light, for the lack of a better description. It was beyond anything I could imagine, in terms of the brilliance, the incandescence that it had. But I also sensed that there was this incredible creative intelligence going beyond any dichotomies.
I couldn’t say if it was demonic or divine. There was just off the scales that I had – and then coming down from that experience, I actually had the feeling I was dying. But the feeling that I was – not from life into dying, but from a place beyond death into a dying body. And then after a while, it became clear that this was not really dying, it was just the experience of dying. And for quite a while, I was in a situation where I was in an absolutely blissful kind of state. And I was having visions of streams of my past life experiences where I had feeling of dying and being killed in different situations. My body was acting out. The agony. There was shaking, twitching. Psychologically, emotionally, I was in absolute bliss. And then coming down for a week, I was in a state in which I would like to live.
...
Other means
There are definitely a lot more means like unconscious/subconscious, planets etc. which impact on our experiences etc.
- There is a metaphorical comparison which one of my friend shared which was to consider Samudra Manthan like events in religious scriptures as psychological scripts. Psychological because those got written with a story that can seep into conscious part of the mind but at the same time the metaphorical part will seep into the unconscious part. This is because unconscious understands only metaphorical languages and story was written by folks with expanded consciousness.
- Astrology which was used by people in the past to tell when to do what etc. also points us in those directions. But given that now we've (We as in Humans) a great control on the some of these magnitude of those means is lessened in enhancing the key characteristics of the consciousness.
Finally
Everyone wants to have a summary, our consciousness is a result of a lot of randomness. Any of the above means can take you through an exploration but won't be a fully rounded. It is just a mere single experience!