Attention to Consciousness

I started this post to explore consciousness and what it meant by breaking up it into concepts. I learned quickly that goal was overambitious. What follows is an explanation of one aspect of consciousness and is by no means exhaustive. With this post, I explore three specific types of inputs into our consciousness and the importance of focusing attention on any one of them. To begin with, there are the five senses (6 if as in Buddhism you include the mind as a sense) and the inputs that we receive from these senses.

Each moment of each day, we are receiving inputs into these senses. There may be an infinite number of inputs that reach our senses each day. One function of consciousness is to filter out these sensory inputs so only the important ones reach our minds. Our brain is constantly filtering sensory input so we are not overwhelmed with too much incoming information. Sensory Integration issues happen when the brain does not filter these inputs well enough and the individual is overwhelmed.

Now imagine these sensory inputs happening all the time. At any given moment, there would be a number of sensory inputs and your brain would filter most out and let a few in.

As we age, we remove ourselves from direct experience of these sensory inputs. We build a framework around ourselves based on who we believe we are. We build a personal mythology and all sensory data gets filtered based on this mythology. Before the framework as a child, we hear a sound and react to the sound. As adults with a framework built up, we hear a sound and decide where it fits within who we think we are then and then experience it. To be more esoteric, these frameworks we build around ourselves also include the concept of time. Experiencing a sense input at any given moment in time has no inherent element of time' we add time as part of our mythology.

We add another layer to our experience of sensory input as we age. As we get older and experience more emotional and dramatic moments, we store those moments in our minds and our mythology. These moments can be joyful or traumatic, but any highly charged emotional experience gets stored into our mythology. We end up carrying around these experiences with us every moment of every day. We attach ourselves to these past experiences; they become baggage we drag with us.

Therefore our experience of sensory input from any given moment now is filtered through our mythology or framework that defines who we are AND it gets filtered through this baggage of past experiences. Moreover, as we experience each moment, we are not looking forward open minded toward the new moment, we look back to all the baggage we drag with us and only experience the new moment through the old baggage.

It is possible to let go of these attachments, this baggage we carry with us each moment that dramatic effects how we experience the world. Any one of the numerous kinds of therapy could help us let go of this baggage.

It is also possible to release the framework or mythology we build for ourselves. This work is much more difficult and enters into the territory of meditation and enlightenment. The process requires one to see one's own identity and then release from it. Let go of who one thinks one is, how one defines oneself and even let go of the framework of time. With this framework removed, the individual is once again simply and directly experiencing sensory inputs and filtering them without frameworks or attachments.

Unfortunately, this kind of work and release is only the beginning. There is a completely second set of inputs to our consciousness outside of the senses. This is our mind. Our mind is an amazing beast. Besides doing all the things we know it does, it also is constantly generating thoughts; thoughts that may or may not have anything to do with reality. You can think of the mind as an infinite thought generator. It is simply what the mind does. A funny thing happens to these thoughts that are constantly bombarding one's conscious every minute of every day. We attach feelings to some of these thoughts. For instance, I am walking down the street and the thought pops into my mind about flying on an airplane and I feel a sense of excitement and joy from that thought based on flying a lot as a child. So from nothing, I was just walking down the street comes a thought and then a true emotion, a feeling with all of the chemical reactions that happen biologically when feelings happen to humans. I then turn this feeling into a generality, like the world is an exciting and fun place to live in. And if I go through this process of thought-feeling-generallity enough, I turn this generality into a belief. This is true alchemy. A random thought generated by a mind that is constantly spewing out thoughts, gets turned into a personally help belief that informs our framework or identity and how we experience the world. Now a thought about airplanes, excitement and the world is a fun is one kind of belief. But this process gets insidious when the thought is that I am worthless and it generates feelings of worthlessness and the generality is I have no value as a human being and this over time turns into a belief.

We can short circuit this thought process with therapy again, but it also may require a discipline like meditation or prayer where one quiets their sensory inputs enough to truly see how their minds are constantly generating thoughts that have no connection to reality. In terms of consciousness, each moment we are experiencing sensory inputs and filtering them and we are experiencing our mind's constant thought generation.

Our third and final input into our consciousness are messages or communications from another realm. You can call this realm, heaven, angels, spirit guides, source energy, anything you would like. But we definitely feel hunches, gut feelings and we have intuition that guides us. All of these things come from some place. I don't know where, but I know they happen. And I know people who focus their energy on experiencing these communications and get an immense amount of help from them.

We can now expand our diagram of what we experience each moment to include this communications from source energy.

We are left with three completely different inputs that come into our consciousness at each and every moment of the day. Our choice as humans is which one we want to focus our attention onto. One limitation we have as humans is that at any given moment we can focus on only one thing. We can focus quickly, so we could focus on 5 things in a minute, but we can only focus our mind one thing at a time. We could focus only on the sense inputs. This would be survival of the loudest sense and we would experience the world through the senses that were strongest.

Or we could focus our attention on the constant stream of thoughts our mind generates. We could learn the nature of our minds through meditation and inquiry and with this knowledge short circuit the process of turning these random thoughts into personal beliefs.

Finally we could focus on communications from higher source. We could become saints and/or channelers and work toward a higher path and purpose with divine help. This requires an immense amount of quieting of the previous two consciousness inputs. If our senses are too loud we will not hear these higher source communications and if we are too wrapped up in the garbage our mind produces we will not hear. The still, small voice of divinity takes focused attention, peace and quiet to hear.

This just one aspect of human consciousness. The joy of being human is that we get to choose how we experience our consciousness. The goal of course is to be happy whichever path you choose.

Many of the ideas from this post are from Buddhist psychology, the teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn as compiled in Wanting Enlightenment is a Big Mistake, published in 2006, and Neal Stephenson's book Anathem, published in 2008.