CONSCIOUSNESS
The phenomenon of consciousness has been a tough challenge for biologists and psychologists. It seems that consciousness (awareness of ourselves and the world around us) allows us to have a mind that can use language to generate thoughts and make choices. For some scientists, there is a mechanistic view that it is our nervous system that develops our capacity for memory and language. We can then produce a past, present and future dimension that makes our reality structurally determined and coherent, so we can produce a mental map of interconnections and make sense of the environment we find ourselves in. But where do our felt senses fit in? Science cannot deal with subjectivity, which is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. This is the realm of metaphysical and philosophical thought which seeks the unconscious connections between cause and effect. Some new thinking is needed to understand the connection between instinct and intellect.
Consciousness exists in the actor, not the action. Consequently is embedded in the capacity of individuals and cultures. For example, there is a depth of consciousness in indigenous cultures because they have not lived in a mechanistic world. In their world, everything is interconnected, where the material and spiritual dimensions merge that knit their world into a living whole. They are not averse to using drugs and trances to step outside daily thinking. When we love something or someone deeply, we are conscious of the essence, not just specific bits. There is an inner meaning and an outward expression.
My take is that consciousness is our capacity to create and expand reality and give it wholeness through the interconnections between language, moods, emotions and the body i.e.our REALITY CREATORS What consciousness also allows us to do is understand the relationship of events well enough to manage and manipulate those events. These events occur through our own thoughts and what occurs in our environment. In this way, our actions are structurally determined.
Consciousness is the fundamental quality of the mind, understood as an event that occurs rather than a thing that exists. As such, it is always present when any kind of experience takes place. If mindfulness is about being aware, then we would always be mindful, automatically, in all circumstances.
Mindfulness cannot just mean attention, because we are always paying attention whether we are aware of it or not. Attention is the mental factor that gathers all the other mental factors together and directs them to a single object, bringing coherence and focus to each moment. Our attention may wander from one object to another, and it may be unable to stay on the same object for multiple moments in a row, but it is always directed somewhere.
