Chapter One: Grounding
Most of us would prefer Peace on Earth to an endless fight over money and power. We don’t much dispute the desirability of a world of harmony, where everyone would be cared for and the planet beloved. The issue is whether such a world is possible and how to get there. Before all else, we need to truly believe that we are able — that we have the freedom — to transform our world.
We all want to be free. And those of us fortunate enough to grow up in democracies like to think that we already are relatively free. Free to think for ourselves. Free to choose our friends. Free to make judgments and decisions that affect our lives. No one likes to be told what to do. Even in hierarchical workplaces, we desire and seek participation. We celebrate the freedom to go where we wish, shape our lives, change our minds. Human history shows again and again, that even when we are not encouraged to talk and think about freedom, even when enslaved, we resist. We rebel — inwardly, even unconsciously, if not permitted to do so outwardly — against anything that feels like tyranny.
Why then would we doubt that we are free enough to create a new world? Because it’s one thing to bring down walls we can get our hands on, but quite another to overcome the obstacles in our own minds. After all, we’re talking about a world that we’ve scarcely been able to imagine. Other problems arise from our standard ways of making sense. Because we internalize traditional approaches to the world, we find it difficult to recognize whether we are acting on received ideas or out of our own best intentions. We interpret our experiences in ways that buttress rather than undermine our beliefs. In conflict, we tend not to hear what the other side is saying. No matter how obvious it is to others that we are doing harm, we don’t like to think ourselves wrong. We bend over backwards to tell positive stories about ourselves, even if it involves self-deception. These stories we’re telling, our narratives, may be the key obstacle to the fulfillment of our dreams.
If we want to dissolve these barriers to profound change, we need to go deeper than the roots of civilization. Deeper than our understandings ourselves, one another, our world and what we believe possible. We need to begin with the very ground into which we send those roots. Only by examining how our minds work can we accurately access the situation and choose the most effective means to our goal.
Consciousness: What Is It? How Does It Work?
Consciousness does not require us to constantly remind ourselves that we are conscious. Whether speaking, walking, driving a car or reading these words, we simply are aware. As Sartre put it, Consciousness is “pre-reflective.” We don’t “will” Consciousness into Consciousness. It is the immediately “given” state of our presence in the world. We can become aware that we are aware. But we do so by constructing an idea. And Consciousness does not depend upon that idea. We can’t go deeper than Consciousness itself.
Consciousness is not a thing. It is not an object or a quantum of something that we can put away for safe keeping somewhere. Nor is our Consciousness analogous to someone at a control panel. Consciousness is too characteristically free for the operator model to describe it. Our minds don’t mimic puppetry, even with our self in the role of puppeteer. We are a knowing, not a being known.
Neither are we quite like computers. Although our brains have neuro-networks, we grow, adapt and change our “connections.” We create and constantly refine our own goals. Our minds engage mystery. Computers “think” according to the fixed design of their chips. They use a set of mechanical procedures to make what appear to be decisions. But no matter how intricate the calculations, choice as we know it does not enter into the computing process. Imagination is non-existent. Possibility limited. In contrast, our smiles have meaning because we recognize them as free expression. You may “love” your computer, but in all likelihood will not feel that it loves you.
If we can refrain from thus objectifying our Consciousness, we can recognize that we participate in a Universe with subjectivity. Our minds emerge from the complex interactions and cooperation of billions and billions of living neurons. Like an immense symphony orchestra capable of infinite composition. Vast, complex, chaotic with creativity, yet patterned. We observe, for example, that Consciousness engages the world along four distinguishable avenues.
The first of these avenues is perception. Sensate information streams through our bodies. At any moment, we may turn attention to the experience of sensing. Through our five senses, Consciousness engages the wonders of Being here with us. There’s no end to the tones evening skies paint. No limit to the colors, shapes and forms minerals, flora and fauna take. No edge to the subatomic or the intergalactic. Our human art forms pay homage to the sculpting of landscapes, the fragrance of flowers, the songs of birds, the taste of life, the dance of nature. Perception clings to the moment and vanishes with the stimulation, but can have lasting effects. Depending on what we choose to sense, study or pay attention to, we shape our personalities.
Another avenue of Consciousness is emotion. Our emotional life informs us in a particular way about ourselves, the meaning of others and moments of our relationships. ‘The Heart knows things,’ we say, ‘that the brain doesn’t.’ The range of feelings from good to unpleasant runs endlessly deep and wide. We sometimes have difficulty sorting out exactly what we’re feeling. Clear or mixed feelings can linger, changing into moods. Emotions can assist memory, charging events so profoundly as to make them nearly indelible. Sometimes experiences connect and trigger emotions originating in our past. Other times, emotions can drive us to bury a memory. We all know emotions can be difficult to control. What we may not realize is that our culture makes control even more difficult by encouraging us to block, deny, devalue and underrate feelings.
Intuition, a third avenue of Consciousness, often comes in a flash of insight. A dream or chance encounter somehow clicks with something and we’re suddenly aware of more than we were before. Intuition happens. “Aha!” When the intuition event is over, its effects stay with you. You have a bit of new knowledge. Sometimes a key piece. Like interactive websites that we call “intuitive,” such understandings don’t require lengthy explanation. We know exactly what to do by virtue of what’s given. We grasp the situation straightaway.
A fourth avenue, intellectual activity, commonly gets most of the credit for human achievement. Our minds’ representational skills not only make fantasy and imagination possible but have produced language, logic and mathematics. Literature, history, philosophy and such are called the “humanities” because they explore what it means to be human. Science and technology have permitted us to alter the appearance of our planet as we strive to make our lives easier and more comfortable. Although this has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster, reasoning could work as effectively in the opposite direction. Indeed, we couldn’t create a better world without imagination, reasoning and communication.
Although we can identify sensation, emotion, intuition and intellection as distinct avenues of Consciousness, we don’t experience them in isolation. Take the interior chatter that we carry on within our minds. The constant telling ourselves this about that and that about this, the rehearsing and replaying of scene after scene — interpreting, spinning, producing a “take” on what’s going on within and around us. Even when the narrative is fantasy, it’s usually associated with a sensate experience. Most likely carrying an emotional charge. And wanting an insight for deliverance. For we can easily get caught up in mental fetters. Our preoccupation with words can become so incessant as to overrun our senses altogether. We may not even notice wondrous music playing on the radio because we’re absorbed in a feeling, a thought, or a story we’re telling ourselves. Yet Consciousness always retains its freedom. We can get free of any mental state by moving our minds onto one of the other avenues.
Growing up and maturing, we acquire the skills to navigate the perceptual, emotional, intuitive and intellectual dimensions of our lives. As children, we often express our emotions with total disregard for others’ feelings or needs. As we mature, we learn to control outbursts by redirecting feelings, finding creative outlets. We learn how emotions can be replaced with stronger feelings and how feelings fade with time. We learn that we can choose to leave the inner storytelling behind and focus on our senses. We discover that we can alter the emotional charges associated with situations. We come to know that just because we feel something doesn’t make it true. And that no matter how many times you read or hear something, that doesn’t make it true either. As we improve our ability to concentrate and exercise our will, our Consciousness expands into ever widening horizons.
Exploring how our minds work grounds us with the knowledge that freedom characterizes Consciousness. Our minds are free. We can and do change them all the time. From the array of possibilities before us, we fill our minds with what we choose, decide how we will spend our time. Our choices and decisions develop and express our individual personalities. On one level, we always act according to our own volition, exercise responsibility. Only the mind limits the mind.
Yet this conclusion immediately raises a question. Is our Consciousness so free, so transcendent of the World, that we’re really not a part of its reality at all? If that were the case, it would carry significant implications for our responsibility as well as the efficacy of our efforts to change the world.
Consciousness and the World
Every civilization has some form of religion or philosophy that addresses the relationship between Consciousness and the World. Who are we? Where are we? Where from? Where going? The answers we’ve given these questions have bounded what we’ve been able to imagine.
Since ancient Greek philosophy informs contemporary understandings — including European, American and even Islamic worldviews — we need to briefly consider that history. Ancient Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales, focused almost entirely on the nature of things in the world, arguing for centuries over what the universe might be made of. Was it water? Fire? Idea? How could it all be categorized? Man with his psyche was associated with the gods, rather than identified with the place where the comedies and tragedies were happening.
Medieval philosophy deepened the rift between body and mind, matter and spirit. The Church developed a metaphysics that explained the visible world by virtue of an invisible one. An eternal and external God created the temporal Universe and maintained his Divine Order on Earth with papal authority, the rule of kings and the privilege of aristocrats. Medievals saw the hand of God in any victory and therefore believed quite literally that might makes right. Earth was a place that human souls, housed in bodies, passed through on their way to an eternal abode.
Modern European philosophy began when Descartes turned the original Greek inquiry inside out. “I think, therefore I am,” took the focus from the world and placed it almost exclusively on Consciousness. Philosophy began asking if there was a world ‘out there,’ at all. Or was it just in our minds? Such questioning ultimately gave rise to the Enlightenment and the political revolutions that overthrew kingships and conceived of democracy. But the eighteenth century did not displace underlying adherence to the Medieval worldview that justified violence, celebrated hierarchy and competition. Modernity maintained the matter/spirit, body/mind split. Whether consciously or not, we also continued to believe in promises of a better life after death, paradise somewhere else.
The early twentieth century movement of Existentialism attempted to leave behind the long standing division between mind and world. Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir instead attempted to describe the phenomena associated with being here. What do we actually find ourselves doing? What is our responsibility for such evils as the holocaust? To what extent do we create the set of ideas that we call reality? What is the meaning of meaning? Left unresolved, the subject/object dichotomy followed us into the third millennium.
In this, the Post-Modern epoch, philosophers and scholars have turned their attention to the systems we use for thinking and communicating. Words, gestures, codes, grammar rules and structures. And their elaboration into the stories we’re telling ourselves. These sign systems and narratives affect what we are able to perceive, feel, imagine and think. Their power has led some to ask how free we really are. Meanwhile, the old belief in a hierarchicalized divide between spirit and matter, time and eternity, heaven and earth, body and mind continues to inform mainstream ethics, morality and culture.
Most schools of psychology assume a World without awareness except for human Consciousness. Scientists continue to probe the Universe as though it were an object. Historians shrink from seeing any universality or direction in the documents they scrutinize. And most theologians maintain the Medieval worldview with little or no modification. Today, this outdated perspective allows us to consider Earth a kind of monopoly board where we play out our time. The problem is that if we believe, consciously or unconsciously, that we truly belong somewhere else, we will never treat Earth as our home. And our dreams of paradise will never materialize.
However, various fields of study have also produced models that integrate body and mind, matter and spirit, Consciousness and the World. In the sixteenth century, Spinoza suggested that Substance — that which exists — has two attributes: thought and extension (spirit and matter). In an intriguing way, this model prefigures the findings of twentieth century physicists. At the subatomic level, the world exhibits qualities of both energy and matter, wave and particle, visible and invisible — depending on how one looks at it. Biochemistry and neurophysiology have observed the physicality of our mental activity. Psychology has affirmed the eighteenth-century philosophical argument that if mind and matter were of two completely different worlds, we could never perceive.
The concept of dimensions may prove a useful tool toward understanding the relation between Consciousness and the World. Most of us live a practical understanding of dimensions. We locate airplanes with longitude, latitude and altitude. We say that objects have height, width and depth. Einstein added time, resulting in our four dimensional description of the world. We easily grasp how each of the dimensions are unique, yet make up our world together and without contradiction. Recent mathematical and physical models suggest our universe is actually composed of several more “curled up” or interior dimensions. If we associate the Mind with one or more of these non-specified inner dimensions, then the World and Consciousness become integral, like breadth to depth. We are no longer dealing with separable realities: the World something out there and Consciousness a distinct something else in here. Both are phenomena associated with our existence in a multi-dimensional Universe.
This perspective permits us to question any metaphysics other than a profound identification with our world and the confidence that we can change it. This may not be what physicists meant when they defined dimension as “a degree of freedom.” But associating Consciousness with inner curled-up dimensions can help set us free of a restrictive metaphysical tradition and offer an analogy that opens a gateway before us.
We take our first steps by learning how to negotiate spatial dimensions of floor, furniture, walls and stairs. Likewise, we learn to think as we acquire the information and logic to navigate the world of meaning. We supercede our childhood forays into language as we grasp what and how things mean, become skilled at metaphor, denotation and connotation. We learn that we play a role in creating and altering meaning. This matters because transforming our world will involve giving new meaning.
Meaning
Meaning fits the myriad pieces of our experience into the larger picture of the world. Meaning sorts out the inconsequential from the significant. Meaning produces priorities. Meaning constructs what we call “reality.” It is constantly contested or accepted. It meets with resonance or conflict. Meaning bonds us. Meaning confers purpose. What things mean emerges as much from our interaction with others as it does from individual experience and reflection. When we look back over our lives, we can see how meanings change. Our regard for one another and nature, the importance of various activities, even our own self-understandings can make dramatic shifts, slowly modify or remain fixed for long periods of time. Meaning is constantly in flux.
The meanings we accept as true limit the possibilities we can imagine. It may have been the ancient Egyptians who first articulated that what we believe is what we see. This notion contradicts the story we tell ourselves with the saying, “Seeing is believing.” Now that Post-modernism has exposed the workings of our storytelling systems, however, we can more accurately access the relationship. What becomes real for us is what we believe is real.
This raises the point that Consciousness does not exist as if in a vacuum. We are born into a Universe already fully assigned with Meaning. Whether we think Peace on Earth is possible, what it might look like and how to get there hinges on the Meanings carried in the narratives that we engage. Seeking a pathway to a better world, we need to investigate the nature of narratives in general. Then we can more effectively interrogate and transform the particular narratives that lie at the root of our present unhappy world.