8. I would change only for someone who loves me blindly.
9. I accept changes but it would be tough as I was made this way.
10. Give me time, support me in the meanwhile, I am a slow learner! Etc.
The basic realism is, as we have now the knowledge that the very mechanism of humanity is a life-long evolution. Our brain and mind evolve life-long and so does our consciousness, evolving to newer and varied experiences. This in itself is the core and cardinal answer of the above question. This is what we know as the journey of consciousness. From the single cell level to a mature person, this consciousness is there in different dimensions and domains. Just stay at the idea and let this sink in. Try to sit calm in a peaceful place and let your mind consciousness journey back to your earliest memory of yourself, when you were probably two or three years old. Try to recollect and actually live the consciousness you had as two-year old. Snap back and assess the same with your current consciousness. You shall definitely see, how magnificently amazing this journey of your consciousness has been. You shall see how this sense of one singular you being present throughout the journey looks a false idea. There may look like ‘you’ being there in parts in all different ‘yous’ but not one singular you in fullness. This is evolution and growth for you. Your consciousness, at any particular stage of life is a virtual agency, which is a function of your body state and the knowledge levels you have. As both body and knowledge keep changing and evolving, consciousness also keeps changing. Body is tangible and knowledge is intangible. As consciousness is a bridge between the two, it has intangible character. The body as tangible element in consciousness being the key constant, we feel a continuity of sorts – feeling a feeble sense of ‘we’ being present all along our journey of aging. However, our consciousness also having the intangible element of evolved knowledge in its composition, we feel only a part of we being there all throughout. This we are elaborating to bring home the fact that aging of body is not that important. Important is the evolution of knowledge as it is this component of consciousness, which essentially defines our consciousnesses. And as this major component is intangible, we feel unsettled and unresolved about it. That is why we keep saying that ‘self’ is the biggest mysticism and all external mysticism of life emanates out of this core mysticism. This also bring out the challenge for all of us. Body being tangible, we have the instinctive attitude to care more about it and its evolution, whereas knowledge being intangible, we usually miss its larger importance in shaping our consciousness. This needs to change. We are humans and we do have this definitive edge over other species. We always need to consciously accept the predominant influence of intangible knowledge in our consciousness. This is a must for our wellness and excellence.
As we said above, there can be a singular idea of a question and there can be one singular answer of the question too. However, this does not usually happen as the dualism of the cultured mind and consciousness colors and shapes the questions and answers in unending plurality. For those, who arrive at the non-dualistic consciousness, all questions and answers become singular and therefore easy to understand and accept. This is the core idea of the book. We all are ‘right’ in our subjective consciousness and that is why we have different answers of same questions. Our subjective consciousness, colored by different cultures and milieus, accepts different answers. This is primary reason, why we need to change this. The change is moving the consciousness from this state of dualism to the non-dualistic consciousness, which accepts singular answers of all major questions of humanity.
Naturally, this is not an easy process. What helps in successfully attaining it and arriving at this non-dualistic consciousness is knowing and accepting the mechanism. No doubt, humans are much more than their mechanism and even the knowledge of this mechanism is still evolving and probably shall evolve always. However, knowing helps. We shall deal with mechanism of dualism and idea of this non-dualistic consciousness in this book.
The core and unavoidable idea about our mechanism is that every person’s consciousness, which accepts a question and an answer, has a dominant shade of consciousness, even when other shades may well be there, not so active in the subconscious mind. Moreover, the mind consciousness keeps evolving and changing as brain pathways keep building, depending on the milieus in which a person lives and moves. This itself suggests that as an individual, we all have a consciousness, which keeps changing and evolving life-long and that is why, our consciousnesses shall always have newer questions and newer answers. This book is not about telling you why changes are inevitable. It is about making you consciously aware about mechanism and dynamics of changes, so that you could be in command of changes and not getting swayed and commanded by them.
Change is intrinsic in our mechanism and that is why a changing consciousness must be allowed to first understand and then accept changes consciously, as this is the way our consciousness evolves to larger wellness and excellence. If we block our minds and refuse changes in our personality, as per the evolving consciousness, we are actually hampering our own wellness and excellence. We need to understand this in detail. This book is all about that.
Talking about the need to change our questions and answers and the way we look at our life-living troubles, the most crucial aspect is of understanding consciousness. The primary question of ‘who we are’ comes first and now, when we have enough scientific, objective and credibly singular mechanism to understand details about our consciousness, there has to be a major change in the way we perceive of our own being, our consciousness and our sense of life and living. Naturally, when this happens, the question, ‘why do you want to change me’, acquires justified importance and singular objective utility.
There is a major paradigm shift in how we have understood all the age-old questions and traditional answers of humanity. It is only natural that as we gear up to change our position vis-à-vis understanding them, we all get into the need to change. Let us understand it.
It is said, a very famous Russian writer, who won Nobel Prize for literature and is acclaimed as one of the best ever in world literature, renounced all his writings in his lifetime itself. In his last days, he almost abandoned everything, even his writings. He talked of compassion and things, which his writings probably had not accommodated. This is not unusual. Many people chase lot many dreams and even become hugely successful in their pursuits, garnering name and fame for them. However, in the last part of their journey, they discredit them as futile and talk of something, which they always neglected in their lives.
Since long, literature has been the prime source of presenting the conflicts of life and living and many of great literary works even suggested answers and solution. They were all subjective and as the literature never understood the core and objective mechanism of consciousness, questions and answers about life and living taken up by literature almost always started and ended in conflicts and more conundrum. We talked earlier about how you shall feel your own consciousness as partial realism as you go down memory lane.
The philosophy and religion also attempted unsuccessfully to raise questions and provide answers but they too failed. Philosophy and religion, like literature, only added conflicts and conundrum to all questions and answers of humanity. There is a reason to it. We shall talk about this issue here in summary only, as we wish to keep focusing on our core topic of consciousness and changes necessitated by new wisdom.
Thousands of years back, when humans started understanding key questions, which his instinctive mechanism of intelligent observations made him to, he started a practice of finding answers, which was the only way available then, given his level of brain development. All around him, things happened and he could not understand why? What he observed with the help of his six senses were in fact ‘effects’ of something. As many of these ‘effects’ either enhanced his survival or jeopardized it, both ways he needed the answers as why they happened. Some of them found a way. They started imagining about the whole chain of ‘effects’ and then speculated about the ‘cause’. This is ‘reverse intelligence’, which attempted to ascertain ‘cause’ from ‘effect’.
Observable realities are more than often, only ‘effects’ of something which is the cause but not empirically observable. The Sun was always observed as rising from east and then moving towards west to set. This effect of a particular cause was imagined and the erroneous wisdom that was created was that the earth was solid and stagnant whereas the Sun moved. The earth was observed as flat and it was accepted this way.
Both religion and philosophy accepted this ‘reverse intelligence’ and as ascertaining the cause from effects was a function of imaginations, same ‘effects’ were ascribed plurality of ‘causes’ and even the effects were interpreted in similar pluralities on the basis of opinion, conjecture, imagination, hearsay, dogma, ideology, fantasy and fiction having no measurable and proven basis.
This ‘reverse intelligence’ continued till very recently, may be till some 200-300 years ago when pure science started to come with proven, measurable and singular answers. Now we are at a stage, where science has made great headway in understanding the mechanism of consciousness, which has changed many popular cultural notions about life-living questions and the answers. However, it has to be accepted without doubts that this ‘reverse intelligence’ actually also helped ancient humans in a big way. Lot many learning and discoveries were made possible by this mechanism and humanity benefitted a lot. Farming and animal husbandry is one such boon. Humans observed plants growing from seeds and this effect they replicated with success.
The only trouble is, there were some effects, which they could not imagine right and still included them as part of their religiously sanctioned cultures. Evolution of humanity growingly provided right answers about this objective cause-effect mechanism. However, as culture and traditions are so deeply ingrained in human mind mechanism, it is still very hard for most people to accept anything that is new to this contemporary culture and ancient wisdom of religion, which is the largest chunk of a culture.
We live in the 21st century where modern science has unleashed an objective and singular wisdom about realisms. We all have to come out of the age-old culture, which still lurks deep inside our consciousness. This old wisdom of reverse intelligence has to give space to modern objective and holistic intelligence of proven and replicable causality. As we said above, the important constituent of our consciousness is the intangible element of knowledge, which needs to be upgraded and updated. We cannot have our bodies in 21st century and knowledge in 19th. This spells disaster for our consciousnesses. It has to be understood that most conflicts and chaos are inside us, well in our deep consciousness. The conflicts get enhanced if we have contradictions within our consciousness. The consciousness is a bridge, a virtual agency between the body and mind. If the two lack mutual harmony, symmetry and linearity, the consciousness is bound to be conflicted. Especially, if we have contradictory and conflicting ideas in our knowledge, our consciousness shall be conflicted and our wellness and excellence shall be missing. This we all need to change. We all need to consciously weed out conflicts from our consciousness and for this, there has to be perfect harmony, symmetry and linearity in our knowledge. For this to happen, we need to open doors, accept utility and fruition of newer questions and evolving answers, which collective wisdom of humanity engenders for us.
Our consciousness is predominantly intangible and it accepts utility of all intangible elements of inner and outer milieus more than tangible factors. We therefore need to change our perspectives in a way as to allow larger importance of intangible elements in our decision-making. As we talked earlier, you are in your perspective and your perspective is in you. For example, in a race for 400-meter sprint, there shall be ten people running for it. However, the winner shall only be one person and this person shall be the one who shall have better intangible elements of endurance, determination, sense of success, egoistic sense of superiority, et al. The physical strength of body being a constant, almost common in all those in the race. It is empirically observed by we all that success in life is almost always a function of intangible factors mentioned above. We all need to accept that and suitably change our perspectives to be in sync and tune with this realism of life-living wellness and excellence. In our lives, the physical tangible matters are only a common, constant and generic realism. What matters most and stands as a definitive decider of success, wellness and excellence, is the ‘intangible factors’, as they are discretionary, uncommon and specific. We shall discuss in this book as how we can arrive at the continuity and permanency of this specific consciousness, as against the generic consciousness, to be in perpetuity of wellness and excellence.
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The New Thinking Necessitates Changes
The question about wellness and goodness of life and living is ubiquitous. The question has been there in different forms since millions of years. They still are. However, new issues of wellness and goodness have been added, as we all are heading for a world, which is fast becoming complex – physically as well as mentally, resulting in far more conflicts and conundrum. This presents the challenge of updating our consciousnesses by upgrading our knowledge. It is the widening gap between collective and individual knowledge spheres, which causes more conflicts and chaos both for individual as well as the society.
The new millennium has heralded a new thinking. It was brewing up for over two decades but now as we moved into 21st century; we have a wisdom to answer many questions of wellness in a completely new light. The answers have come up, as there has been a change in perception about the three core notions, essential for wellness and goodness.
These three core notions are called: 3Cs – Cognition, Consciousness and Causality. The new thinking offers new and scientifically appropriate perceptions about the three notions and helps humanity in understanding them in a new light. This is a huge boost for confidence required for empowerment and wellness. We shall talk about them in the next chapter.
Every new thing is received with skepticism. It is only natural. Most of us have a narcissistic affection towards what we think as right and just. It is our mechanism and also, somehow this aversion to changes, if unexplained, offers egoistic comfort to our general wellness. No wisdom, no science, not even divinity are effective enough to open the closed doors of mind of a person if he or she is egoistically attached to his or her fixated subjective notions for his or her personalized wellness. This wellness is however very restrictive and often short-lived.
Millions of people globally are benefitting by this new thinking and new perceptions about the 3Cs. This new thinking emerges out of the experience and knowledge of humanity for the last millions of years. In the past, usually, all critical issues of life and living were addressed either with extreme ‘scientific positivism’ or with dogmatic ‘religious reductionism’. The right answers for wellness therefore looked elusive for humanity, be it relationships, faith or consciousness.
A ‘new thinking’ believes; answers are in the integrative and assimilative domain as both wisdoms have unbelievable commonality. Moreover, answers cannot be prescriptive but evolve within when one undergoes holistic option building. The new thinking is all about an assimilative and integrative approach and technique, drawing holistic resources from both traditional as well as modern wisdoms.
In complete acceptance of the traditional ancient wisdom, which said, ‘all realisms of this world and the world beyond can be attained only through body. The kaaya (Body), which is deeply entangled with maaya (external world) alone is the madhyam/ dwaar (vehicle and door) of moksha (emancipation from life cycle), the final attainment for humanity, as it is this kaaya, which is the effective karta (subject) of all karmas (actionable duties). But then, both religion and science warns us to understand the subject (karta – the wielder of consciousness) in totality and holism. It is where the trouble starts. The subject and his or her consciousness, which extends him or her the feeling of ‘self’ as separate and unique from others, has been muffled in the mist of mysticism, marvel and virtualism. Be it art and literature, religion-spiritualism or philosophy-psychology, every stream of past wisdoms only accentuated the mysticism and marvel. This mysticism then slipped deep into the popular culture, which in turn worked as a restrictive and dysfunctional milieu for consciousnesses of future generations.
The new thinking based on objective, holistic and singular ideas of consciousness, cognition and causality goes ahead to unravel the objective mechanism of what popular sense of religion or spiritualism enunciates in subjective terms. The new thinking holistically describes the kaaya, maaya, karma, karta and moksha in an objective, singular and systematic perspectives. This is big help in understanding key questions as, ‘who we are’, ‘why we act/behave the way we do’, ‘why this self is usually conflicted’, etc.
Of course, in describing all this, the new thinking attempts to unravel completely new perspectives on the notions of cognition, consciousness and causality, which are the factors essential in the understanding of the ancient concepts of kaaya, maaya, karma, karta and moksha.
The traditional ideas are offered to be understood in different light so that an average person can have different objective ways at understanding them better and use them for its own and societal wellness and goodness. The fact remains and it seems like a very available common sense that even if realism is approached from different perspectives, the realism does not change, the way different people look at it may change from person to person. The intelligence is in accepting all perspectives towards singular realism and investigate it with a compassionate mind. This is one common prescription, which all wisdoms of humanity offers. That is why; it is a ‘common sense’ for all of us.
Of the three Cs, understanding and accepting the ‘Consciousness’ in the light of this new wisdom is crucial for all of us as this itself shall present a case for change in all of us. There are certain aspects of this subjective consciousness, which we all know from our own experiences and self-observation. However, so far we have used the old wisdom of ‘reverse intelligence’ by ascertaining a cause of ‘why we are what we are’ and other key questions from the effects, we observe empirically. We need to change this and see ourselves and our consciousnesses in a new light.
An average person is often floating in a ‘soup’ of sensation, emotion, impulse/desire, imagination, thought and intuition. There is a reason to it. There are seven conscious and unconscious elements of personality: The lower unconscious, the middle unconscious, the higher unconscious or super-conscious, the field of consciousness, the conscious self or "I", the higher self and the collective unconscious. All seven elements are within an individual and operate simultaneously. The life journey is shifting gears from these consciousnesses. Most of us therefore are in a state of ‘flux’ – conflicted and confused. This is our mechanism.
Then, there are eight intangible affecters: Sensation, emotion, impulse/desire, imagination, thought, intuition, will and the central point ‘I’ or personal self. An individual is often split and conflicted between these. Often, we put in ‘more’ or ‘undue’ weight and importance to one aspect; often justifying it, which is psychosis. The requirement however is synthesis of all these psychological functions by the ‘Self’. The higher consciousness needs to strike harmony and balance. This poise is the destination.
Few people recognize that their own personhood is a mystery. Fewer still care enough about the mystery to understand it. The ‘Pop-Belief’ is – Life is more about living it than it is about understanding it. However, shouldn’t we ask ourselves, ‘who are we?’ The answer needs knowing and it needs allowance to some knowledge, other than what we hold dear to our heart. That is why change is optionless.
The trouble is; the process of understanding one’s ‘self’ is pitted against one’s own beliefs about one’s ‘self’. It is not an easy task to determine which of these beliefs are true and which are mere ideas. We are in the error of believing that our ‘Body’ and ‘We’ are the same things. We are not aware that each of us is a virtual agent, a ‘self’, that speaks for his or her organism.
There are two subjects within ‘you’. One is the GENERIC SUBJECT, which is your innate body mechanism. It accepts only tangible things and is mostly reactive and self-initiated. The other subject is SPECIFIC SUBJECT, which leads a thoughtful action. The self, the ‘you’ is a functional relationship between the two subjects and is a ‘virtual agent’. You are a bridge between the two ends of the two subjects.
The ‘I’, which exists and performs in each layer of consciousness is not ‘singular’, rather it is the summation of different ‘MEs’ of different layers of consciousnesses. So, there are different ‘Is’ when you are rising in the morning, playing with your kids, praying in the church, dealing finance with your colleagues, watching an opera in the evening, dizzy after boozing and finally in bed with your spouse.
Different life situations, requiring diverse sets of ‘action-thought-behavior’ patterns, as commensurate with ambient milieus, engender different ‘layers of consciousnesses’. In all these layers, the ‘I’ may be different but there is one ‘I’ in ‘higher consciousness’, which is always sort of commanding all the former ‘I’.
This ‘Master I’ is not singular and independent, rather a summation of the all other ‘Is’. The ‘I’ in the higher consciousness is not something aloof from an individual. The higher self is not a rejection of individual’s baser selves or instincts. This ‘Master I’ is a mind positioning within, which accepts conflicts of the different personality aspects and functions – the different ‘I’.
It is a super state of mind awareness, which recognizes all aspects; be it in any state of unconscious or subconscious. It attempts to bring them to the layer of higher consciousness for harmonizing them into a fruitful whole. This higher consciousness must be in harmonious relationship with all aspects and functions of an individual personality, like a true master and always be in control.
Spiritualism gives us a metaphor of ‘Master I’ being the driver of a chariot with six horses, reigning in all of them to a singular path of ‘appropriate’. The core issue is to understand the higher consciousness in detail, as, it is this ‘I’, which has the definitive role of being the master of an individual.
This ‘Master I’ is the media for exploration of an expanded experience of human identity, capacity and potential. This ‘I’ leads ‘self’ to a journey into transpersonal dimensions. These dimensions encompass the higher levels of the energy spectrum: realms of higher consciousness that transcend the everyday awareness of the personality.
Many psychic phenomena are strictly emotional or delusional, tinged with fears, personal prejudices and wishful thinking. These are moments when one of your ‘I’ may take off on obsessive flights. This is the test of your ‘Master I’ navigation controls. The ‘Master I’ must always be evolving and as it evolves, the dimensions of consciousnesses get enlarged and the ‘Master I’ is empowered more.
The above descriptions about consciousness are aimed at bringing about the importance of understanding consciousness and its mechanism in details. Once we understand and accept the intricate mechanism of consciousness and how it is primarily instrumental in our wellness and excellence, we shall happily accept all questions of change and all new answers.
The mechanism of our own mind consciousness is designed in such a way that it excels in reacting to things in its ambient milieus. We are essentially a reactive genius. However, we are no more purely instinctive beings. We live in societies with cultures, which define our choices. The consciousness is bound to be wavering between what is our ‘nature’ and what comes to us as ‘nurture’, in the form of milieus. In the milieu we live, we are always faced with newer questions as well as answers. Our wellness and excellence depends on how well we manage the incessant process of learning and unlearning. The unlearning is far more important than learning in the process of our evolution to wellness and excellence. That is why we have to be consciously opened up to evolution and changes. We need to accept unlearning as something good for us, even when our instincts and cultures keep persuading us to hold up our egoistic self-resisting new learnings. We shall talk about the issue in detail later.
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Understanding The Rainbow Of Consciousness
Seeing consciousness from the perspective of brain mechanism and then relating our own subjective feelings with these objective facts can best present a matrix for understanding the agency called consciousness. This is our primary step to arrive at the question – Why Do You Want To Change Me?
Consciousness is termed as “an intangible emergent property of information processing.” Consciousness is intricately a two-way processing agency. First, it works as a storehouse of information, which are gathered from sensory organs. These info it matches with the milieus around and creates an imagery of physical model, for the body to deliberate on a decision for appropriate action. This imagery is intangible. This is first part.
Simultaneously, when these models lead to tangible actions and behaviors by body, it also stores those experiences, emerging out of these set of actions of body and converts them into processed information for future decision-making. Therefore, consciousness works not only as warehouse but also as agent of gathering multi-dimensional information. As deliberating imagery of workable models out of the previously stored information is an intangible facility, whereas storing information from actual actions taken by body is a tangible work, the consciousness as a dual mechanism is intangible, emergent and virtual processing of information.
Its dual character makes consciousness a virtual agency. It is not body, not purely brain, not entirely the full spectrum of what we know as mind, but a part of mind. That is why consciousness has an emergent and virtual skin and flesh. At best, it is a bridge between the body and brain, very much part of mind and always evolving. This mechanism makes consciousness a virtual agency and that is why there is so much of mysticism and marvel associated with the idea of consciousness. It is because of the virtual nature of consciousness – the sense of ‘I’, mysticism stands as instinctive first choice of acceptance of realism. That is why the old wisdom as well as science maintains that God, ghosts,