Monday, July 28, 2008

The truth about consciousness - what it is


I had many sleepless nights about the definition for consciousness (visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness ). The first sentence says it all:

Consciousness defies definition.

Doesn’t it just blows your mind? Sorry, according to my previous post, none of us actually have a mind. I should say, doesn’t it make you wonder what consciousness is? I came across the following concepts:
1) Unconscious mind
2) sub-conscious mind
3) conscious mind
4) super-conscious mind

Since from a scientific point of view, the mind doesn’t exist, and that consciousness defines definition, what the heck are the above concepts?

It is indeed amazing how we try to define something, the mind, that cannot be measured with man made inventions with one or more of our known senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch); to top it all of, we introduce a concept called consciousness, which according to experts, defies definition.

My point is, we tend to simplify matters but are concepts pertaining to the mind and consciousness something that can be simplified? When it has baffled experts for centuries, if not millennia, and we have no concrete answers as to what is the mind and consciousness?

You may ask why is it important for each and everyone to learn what defines the mind and consciousness. To me, the answer is simply because if we do not know what is the mind and consciousness, how are we going to fully harness the power of our mind and / or consciousness? Time and again I am bombarded by the media, internet, books and conversations with friends of the ugly truth that the average human being only utilize a tiny fraction of their potential (ranges from 1% to 5% of the mind’s potential).

That scares me – that the average human being only utilizes a tiny fraction of their potential. Assuming that we can increase our potential by tenfold, at most, we are only using half our actual potential – makes me wonder what can we achieve with that…. World peace perhaps? End of diseases maybe?

How can we increase our mind / consciousness potential to higher levels? The corrective action would be to continue to ask questions and seek for answers. One of my favourite quotes are:
‘Questions are eternal, answer changes”.
It means that questions remain the same regardless of time and context, but the answer changes with time and context. This is proven with the mind and / or consciousness question. Question remains unchanged, answers have been evolving throughout time and context.
The corrective action would to adopt an attitute of never afraid to ask questions.

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