4
Transformation:
Awareness and Consciousness
Awareness and consciousness are central concepts in understanding personal transformation and multicultural awareness/consciousness [MA\C]
AWARENESS
Awareness is difficult to define. It is like defining life, electricity or spirit. Most definitions try to explain awareness operationally e.g., referring to a sort of behavior that would provide public or external evidence for awareness, in terms of its function – how it works—or in terms of self-knowledge or self-reflection e.g., personal experiences and anecdotes. Science, theology and philosophy are equally challenged to provide a comprehensible explanation of something we all experience to degree or another. But that experience continues to defy an explanation that satisfies; that is agreeable to the clergyman, physicist and metaphysician, to say nothing of “everyday people.”
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Be that as it may, the apprehension of certain aspects of awareness, mentally and intuitively, is central to understanding personal transformation generally and multicultural awareness/consciousness [MA/C] in particular. While a comprehensive definition of awareness is beyond the scope of this essay, a preliminary definition of awareness which may be useful as a point of departure is:
Awareness is the state of being characterized by many levels of conscious and unconscious processes and activities including sensation, perception, feeling, cognition and volition.
Robert E. Ornstein (1985) in his classic study, The Psychology of Consciousness describes awareness as
a repository [a place where things may be put for safekeeping] of “our plans, the automatized functions, our expectations and assumptions, all those “things” and more that make up our world, and of which we keep track” (Ornstein, 1986, p. 66).
Put another way, awareness may be said to be a “space” within each of us where our memories, beliefs, values and attitudes are stored as the “controls” which monitor and regulate our automatic bodily processes and functions, where we participate in the moment to moment creation of reality.
For others, awareness is much more than a repository or space, etc. Jan Keppel Hesselink (2003) describes a personal experience of awareness:
We were standing in the Zendo, in the middle of the Brazilian jungle, with the sounds of insects and birds all around us, the air pure and pregnant with many subtle fragrances. I had no clue about the effects of Dynamic [meditation], having never read or heard anything about its structure and its effects. After a short explanation of the phases of this meditation, the music started. I will not describe the various phases, but only focus on the moments of altered and expanded consciousness, which were triggered by the sudden change in the meditation.
We were jumping up in the air, and yelling "Hoo...Hoo" every time we hit mother earth with our feet. After a while of my jumping like this it became a flow, a beautiful rhythm, and instead of me actively jumping, the feeling emerged that the jumper (me) and the jumping kind of became one. This flow became more intense with each jump, till the stop sign was given and we froze exactly in the posture of that particular moment.
In that moment I felt an intense, sudden expansion of my body and mind awareness, an expansion of my inner being into the environment. The "I" disappeared completely, the borderline between me and the rest of the world dissolving totally.
I did not feel my own body as restricted to the physical space, as I normally do. There was no restriction at all; the expansion of consciousness was centrifugal and explosive. There were no thoughts at all, only pure awareness — an awareness of light, of air and sounds, hand in hand with an awareness of intense stillness behind all sounds, and spaciousness behind air and light. A total stillness entered my awareness and being...a feeling of being connected to a source of light, love and endlessness.
I felt totally empty, not in a negative way, but in a receptive way. It was an emptiness full of life, full of ecstasy, without any mind– activity, far beyond the "I" with which I identify myself in the normal daily states.
This state lasted for an eternity. Time did not exist; there was only this expanding and unfolding awareness. Slowly my body-awareness changed and I could feel the sweat all over my body, and the tingling and the throbbing of my heart, as if I was watching myself from a great distance. I noticed tears on my face, although I did not feel any sadness.
The feeling at that time was so utterly different from normal feelings that words do not exist to describe it. It all felt like an enormous shower of light and love, and as if all channels in my body/soul were cleaned of old debris and filled with purity. It was extremely inspiring. Hesselink, J.K. 2003, No Thoughts, Only Pure Awareness[online][URL] http://www.meditationresearch.com/Perspectives/Personal/NoThoughts.html
There is a quality of awareness in the foregoing anecdote of “expanding” and becoming more than what we normally think we are.
Metta Zetty (2000), who describes herself as an “ordinary woman whose understanding of the nature of Reality has been profoundly transformed by an extraordinary experience of spontaneous awakening”, explains awareness in this way:
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Awareness is the backdrop against which all individual consciousness and experience arises. As such, it is the unmoved, ever present Essence of All That Is. We may become actively involved with, or even distracted by, that which appears within the field of individualized consciousness or human experience, but even in the midst of all this mental and physical activity, our inherent, Natural Awareness remains the undisturbed constant. Zetty, M. 1997-2000, Natural Awareness [online][URL] http://awakening.net/RMNatural.html
Zetty describes awareness as a vital part of us that is all-knowing and all-seeing, perhaps a detached observer – who we really are:
At our most essential and fundamental level, we are not separate from this pure, unconditioned Awareness. It is our root identity, manifesting within the present moment. It is who and what we are, and it is from within this level of Natural Awareness that a recognition of the completeness and perfection of our fundamental and Essential nature can arise. Zetty, M. 1997-2000, Natural Awareness [online][URL] http://awakening.net/RMNatural.html
Zetty’s definition of awareness must be seen in the context of her personal experience. Like Hesselink, she, too, had an emergent spiritual experience. She calls this experience her epiphany. An epiphany is defined as a sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something; an intuitive grasp of reality through something usually simple and striking.
The epiphany arrived suddenly, and without warning. In fact, I was asleep when the experience began. The night before, my partner and I had driven from where we live in San Antonio, Texas, to Austin, where we rented an overnight room at a Rodeway Inn. As professional meeting facilitators and management consultants, we were scheduled to facilitate a planning meeting for one of our Austin clients, in preparation for one of their upcoming construction projects.
This was a routine work assignment, and we spent the evening as we usually did, reviewing our agenda for the next day, and confirming a new work opportunity with another of our clients. Little did I realize when I lay down to sleep that night, I would awaken in the morning seeing and experiencing the world through new eyes. Sometime during the early morning hours of February 5th, I began to dream. During the dream, I found myself standing before a man, apparently a healer, who used acupressure points to release and encourage the flow of chi (essential energy) throughout the body.
As I stood before this man, energy was moving and surging within the upper part of my body; he was kneeling behind me. Then, he touched my body in two places: first, on the mid-point of the back of my left arm, and then on the back of my right leg, just below the knee. Suddenly, an invisible, but significant, shift occurred internally: it felt as if any residual or latent energy blockages within my body had been instantly and completely released.
Before I knew or could understand what was happening, the top of my head opened up, and a flood of brilliant white light poured over me, flowing into and through my entire body. Overwhelmed by the intensity of this flooding energy and light, my knees buckled beneath me, and I awakened abruptly. Now wide awake and in utter amazement, I felt the surging energy continuing to flow through my entire body! As it moved through me, flooding through the very essence of my being, the energy rapidly began changing -- transforming into a wave of complete and absolute euphoria, an indescribable contentment that extended far beyond the bounds of human expression.
Within this timeless, euphoric space, I suddenly realized and knew with unmistakable clarity that the universe, exactly as it is within the present moment, is absolutely complete and perfect. The present moment was whole and integrated. Any sense of fundamental separateness was gone. "I" was still there, but any anxiety I had ever felt was completely eliminated. All I knew/felt/experienced was the complete and absolute perfection of the present moment.
I became keenly aware of the river of energy flowing through each of us -- an energy arising from within and intuitively guided by this exquisite and innate perfection. I realized that everything appearing before us is simply a manifestation and expression of this energy, and that this energy is always moving through each of us, guiding us throughout our lives. Zetty, M. 1997-2000, Natural Awareness [online][URL] http://www.awakening.net/ Epiphany.html
Deepak Chopra (1993), medical doctor, synthetic thinker and cutting edge theorist on mind-body medicine describes awareness as a
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“field of energy and information . . . the mind’s faculty for having thought before thought is actually present” (Chopra, 1993, p. 51).
He suggests that awareness is a part of a unified, quantum field of intelligence which not only patterns, organizes and “holds together” each human body and psyche but patterns, organizes and “holds together” the universe as well (p. 51):
Intelligence holds together the blueprint of each cell in its DNA, and many scientists now believe the same holds true of the entire universe…Physicist Paul Davies summons many theoretical findings to support the new view that the universe organizes itself and reacts to its own internal events much as our cells do (p. 115).
Chopra adroitly uses quantum physics to explain Zetty’s “ backdrop against which all individual consciousness and experience arises.”
…Quantum physics tells us that every atom is more than 99.9999 percent empty space and the subatomic particles moving at lightning speed through this space are actually bundles of vibrating energy (p. 14).
He asserts that the empty space in which these “bundles of vibrating energy” move is
imprinted with information even before any information is expressed. Just as thousands of words exist silently in your memory without being spoken, the quantum field holds the entire universe in unexpressed form . . .
The essential stuff of the universe . . . is non-stuff, but it isn’t ordinary non-stuff. It is thinking non-stuff (p. 14).
http://fusionanomaly.net/quantummechanics.html
Chopra’s reference to quantum mechanics (physics) and unified, quantum field theory underscores his western training as a scientist and medical doctor. His ability, however, to synthesize the same (as well as the bulk of his medical/scientific experience) with the spiritual concepts (cultural thought) of his native India in coherent, almost self-evident fashion underscores his multicultural awareness/consciousness . . . and his genius. Let us examine how he accomplishes this synthesis.
AWARENESS AND QUANTUM THEORY
An expression that has proliferated in popular American culture of late is “ . . . you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that . . . ” The suggestion, here, is that the rocket scientist is brilliant, capable of understanding the most complex of things. The rocket scientist is more often than not a physicist or has a strong background in physics.
Western culture, meaning more precisely those cultures wherein European-American mores and norms predominate, elevates physics and the physicist to the highest echelons of characteristic cultural thought.
adapted by author from http://www.htmltricks.com/manytrees.jpg
Quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are a part of the body of knowledge known as physics. For many, what is “meaningful” in physics is either lost or obscured by a “forest” of mathematical equations. When confronted with that forest, some of us would be unable to see the trees even if our very lives depended on it. Many people believe that even the simplest concepts of physical science are too difficult to understand.
Let us attempt to step through this “belief based in fear” and derive for our purposes a clear and (to the extent possible) simple understanding of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Such an understanding is essential if we are to understand Chopra’s synthesis and get closer to a more complete understanding of awareness.
For centuries in the western world, the atom was commonly regarded as the most fundamental constituent of matter and energy.
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At the turn of the century (1897) with the discovery of the electron and later in the second decade of the new century (1911) with the discovery of the atomic nucleus, it became clear that the venerable atom was itself made up of even smaller particles e.g., electrons.
It was discovered that the atom was a “system” of sorts with particles (electrons) orbiting around a heavy core. It was determined in the 1930s that the atom’s core or nucleus consisted of particles we know now to be protons and neutrons.
By the 1970s, an even smaller particle, the quark, was discovered and was thought to be the basic building block of matter.
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To date, more than 200 subatomic particles with such unlikely names as leptons, mesons, and bosons, etc., have been detected by modern science and each has a corresponding antiparticle, an “antimatter” counterpart with the same mass but with the opposite electrical charge. (When a particle and its antiparticle come together, they cancel each other out, usually with an explosion!)
Einstein Bohr Heisenberg Tomonaga
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Quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are the collaborative intellectual products of several seminal thinkers in western physical sciences, including Max Planck (1900), Albert Einstein (1905), Neils Bohr (1913), Werner Heisenberg (1925), Louis V. De Broglie (1925), Erwin Schrödinger (1925), P.A.M. Dirac (1926), Pascual Jordan (1926), Richard P. Feynman, Julian S. Schwinger and Shin’ichiro Tomonaga (c. 1940s).
According to quantum theory, both matter and energy have particle-like and wave-like properties. Matter, at the subatomic level [smaller than atoms], is made up of submicroscopic [smaller than what can be seen by the microscope] particles. At the subatomic level, matter exhibits its wave-like properties.
Energy, which is usually experienced as “waves,” also consists of submicroscopic particles at the subatomic level. Matter and energy never cease to exist, they merely change forms. "Matter and energy never cease to exist, they merely change forms. Matter (theoretically) under certain conditions (E=MC2) can be changed to energy, and energy (theoretically) under the reverse of those conditions can be changed to matter. Matter (theoretically) under certain conditions (E=MC2) can be changed to energy, and energy (theoretically) under the reverse of those conditions can be changed to matter. All forms of matter and energy consist (below the subatomic level) of discrete “bundles” or “particle-like packets” called quanta.
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To get an idea of where quanta exist, let us visualize the several physical levels as “worlds” and take sequential steps down first to the cellular level or the world of cells,
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Now to the molecular level or the world of molecules.
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Next, let us proceed down to the atomic level, the world of atoms, and
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Then the subatomic level where we experience leptons [electrons, neutrinos, muons and other electron-like particles] in their cloud orbiting the nucleus of the atom, the protons and neutrons in the nucleus and the quarks which make up the protons and neutrons.
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QUANTA DEFINED
What then are quanta? Quanta are measured, individually distinct amounts of energy, charge, angular momentum or other physical properties which exist in a field below or more interior to the subatomic level (like an electromagnetic field) that extends throughout the cosmos.
Within this field, quanta are connected i.e., their energy fields touch and in touching, energy and information are passed from quanta to quanta in a continuous process of transformation. Nothing can happen to any individual quanta that does not have a rippling effect throughout the field. This field is the “cosmic soup” out of which comes all of creation. It never stops transforming itself; it is forever becoming new.
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According to Chopra, Einstein and his colleagues:
…reassembled time and space into a new geometry that had no beginning or end. Every particle in the universe turned out to be a ghostly bundle of energy vibrating in an immense void . . . The old space-time model was smashed, replaced by a timeless, flowing field of constant transformation.
The quantum field isn’t separate from us—it is us! …Where nature goes to create stars, galaxies, quarks and leptons, you and I go to create ourselves (p. 8).
This process of transformation and renewal is an important theme in Chopra’s mind-body vision. It is not only quanta that are in a continuous “dance” of transformation, but at the atomic level, even atoms:
Day old bread goes stale because it sits there, prey to humidity, fungus, oxidation, and various destructive chemical processes. A chalk cliff crumbles over time because wind and rain beat it down, and it has no power to rebuild itself.
Our bodies also undergo the process of oxidation and are attacked by fungi and various germs; they are exposed to the same wind and rain. But unlike a loaf of bread or a chalk cliff does—they circulate it. Fresh atoms of calcium enter our bones and leave them again to become part of blood, skin, or other cells as the body’s needs demand it.
At this moment, you are inhaling atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen that just an instant before were locked up in solid matter . . . Your stomach, liver, heart, lungs, and brain are vanishing into thin air, being replaced as quickly and endlessly as they are broken down.
The skin replaces itself once a month, the stomach lining every five days, the liver every six weeks and the skeleton every three months. To the naked eye, these organs look the same from moment to moment, but they are always in flux. By the end of this year, 98 percent of the atoms in your body will have been exchanged for new ones (p. 9).
Chopra’s vision sees the human being as an “outcropping” in this vast quantum field. Linked at the quantum level to every other human being and, indeed, every “thing,” one is in a state of unity or “connectedness” (p. 9):
You and your environment are one. Looking at yourself, you perceive that your body stops at a certain point; it is separated from the wall of your room or a tree outdoors by empty space. In quantum terms, the distinction between “solid” and “empty” is insignificant.
Every cubic centimeter of quantum space is filled with a nearly infinite amount of energy, and the tiniest vibration is part of vast fields of vibration spanning whole galaxies. In a very real sense, your environment is your extended body.
With every breath, you inhale hundreds of millions of atoms of air exhaled yesterday by someone in China. All the oxygen, water and sunlight around you are only faintly distinguishable from that which is inside of you (pp. 26–27).
What links us together with our environment and with each other is not merely the exchange of atoms, etc., but an organizing intelligence, Hesselink’s source of light, love and endlessness, Zetty’s complete and absolute perfection of the present moment.
It is important to make a distinction between awareness and consciousness, two terms often used interchangeably. Ornstein suggests that consciousness is only one of many levels of awareness:
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There is quite an important difference between awareness and consciousness, although in most discussions they are confused. When something is in awareness it means that we are keeping track of it. We are aware of a great deal, much more than we know.
For instance, to walk, we must be aware of our own movements, the touch of feet on the pavement, whether there is a crack, a curb or a stone. But we are not conscious of these things as we walk, nor are we conscious of our breathing, our arm movements, the background noises or traffic (Ornstein, 1986 p. 65).
The phrase “ keeping track of ” is significant in the foregoing passage as it characterizes awareness as a general monitoring process. We can be aware of something and yet not be conscious of it. Ornstein suggests that the difference between awareness and consciousness is the perception, the apprehension or the noticing of what one is aware of with a degree of controlled thought or observation. He continues:
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Sleep provides a striking example of the difference between awareness and consciousness. During sleep, when our consciousness is shut down, we are nevertheless aware of sounds. If the sound has a particular significance, our consciousness can be aroused.
Sleepers will awaken to their own names or to a word like fire, although they will not awaken to random words spoken. A mother sleeps through the noise of sirens in the streets, but awakens at the far softer sound of her baby crying.
For that to occur, we must have been aware of many of the words and sounds of the environment and have selected only the important ones to enter consciousness. Therefore, when we know we are aware of something, we are conscious of it (p. 67).
Osho
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Osho (1931-1990), a modern day guru and creator of Dynamic Meditation, makes this distinction between awareness and consciousness:
Consciousness is a quality of your mind, but it is not your total mind. Your mind can be both conscious and unconscious; but when you transcend your mind, there is no unconsciousness and no corresponding consciousness. There is awareness.
Awareness means that the total mind has become aware. Now the old mind is not there but there is the quality of being conscious. Awareness has become the totality; the mind itself is now part of the awareness. We cannot say that the mind is aware; we can only meaningfully say that the mind is conscious.
Awareness means transcendence of the mind, so it is not the mind that is aware. It is only through transcendence of the mind, through going beyond mind, that awareness becomes possible. Osho: Meditation: The Art of Ecstasy,
2002, Osho International Foundation [online][URL] http://www.meditationresearch.com/ActiveMeditations/ Aspects/Consciousness.html
Awareness is much more than the mind; it is not mental. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a quality of mind; it is mental. We can be aware of something without being conscious of it. To know that we are aware of something is to experience consciousness of some kind -- but what kind of consciousness?
David Rosenthal (2003) makes three distinctions between kinds of consciousness. These are creature consciousness, transitive consciousness and state consciousness:
The oldest and most widespread use of the term is to describe people, and other sentient creatures, as being awake and receptive to sensory input. This is also the least problematic mental phenomenon we refer to as consciousness. The term is used in this case simply to mark the distinction between a person or other creature's being in an ordinary waking state and its being asleep, knocked out, anaesthetized, or failing for some other reason to interact mentally with its environment in ordinary ways. The distinction between these conditions is doubtless to be explained in large measure in biological terms. Because this first notion of consciousness applies to people and other sentient creatures, we may refer to it as creature consciousness. Rosenthal, D., 2003, Consciousness and Sensation [online][URL] http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/enc-soc.htm
Being “awake and receptive to sensory input” is for Rosenthal a baseline measure of consciousness. He continues:
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A second notion of consciousness has to do with a person or other animal's being conscious … of something, or its being conscious … that something is the case. A person is conscious of something when that person sees or hears it or perceives it in some other way. And, following on that perceptual model, we also count a person as being conscious of something when that person has a thought about that thing … Finally, a person is conscious that something is the case when that person has a thought that it is the case. This second notion of consciousness again applies to people and other creatures, but we describe this kind of consciousness in terms of some object of which a person or other creature is conscious. For that reason it is convenient to refer to this second kind of consciousness as transitive consciousness. Rosenthal, D., 2003, Consciousness and Sensation [online][URL] http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/enc-soc.htm
When we, for example, put our attention on a tree, we are, according to Rosenthal, conscious of that tree. When we later think about that same tree, we are also conscious of that tree.
Being conscious that something “is the case” is another way of saying that we are conscious that something is “so” or true. When we were conscious of that tree, we were also conscious of the condition we believed the tree was in. If we believed the tree was unhealthy due to poor care and maintenance, then that “was the case” of the tree. Whether we are paying attention to the tree or thinking about the tree, we are conscious of the tree and what we believe to be true about the tree.
Rosenthal concludes:
A third notion of consciousness applies not to people or other creatures at all, but to their mental states, states such as perceiving, sensing, thinking, desiring, and feeling… Because this third use of the term 'consciousness' applies to mental states, rather than people or other creatures, it is useful to refer to it as state consciousness. Rosenthal, D., 2003, Consciousness and Sensation [online][URL] http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/enc-soc.htm
The Brain
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Western science places consciousness in the mind, somewhere in the cerebral cortex of the human brain. Bharati Sarkar (2003), in his article, “Consciousness – Our third Eye”, describes the workings of consciousness in this context:
Human consciousness is a cerebral ability with inputs from the approximately 50,000 million cells that constitute an adult body. There is a growing understanding of the intelligence in individual cells in living matter. The human body is incredibly complex and each of its cells is in constant communication not only with cells that perform similar functions but also with every other cell in the body. Our consciousness probably results from assimilating all this data and arriving at choices or solutions. Our present state of consciousness may be likened to the tip of the iceberg of potential human awareness, of itself and of the universe.
To arrive at consciousness, we have to enter the areas of the brain that contain memory, information and emotion. Human memories go back, to the primal soup and perhaps beyond, to the void before material creation. Scientists of various disciplines are involved in a worldwide research project that is trying to map all of the genes in the human DNA sequence. Another project, not so widely publicized, known as the Human Consciousness Project is already well under way to map the gamut of human consciousness including the unconscious. The latter project is also multidisciplinary and researchers around the world are piecing together what they call a spectrum of human consciousness. This includes: instinct, ego and spirit; pre-personal, personal and transpersonal; subconscious, self-conscious and super-conscious; thus, no state of consciousness is dismissed from its embrace. Undisputed evidence is already in hand that such a spectrum does exist. Sarkar,B. 2003, Consciousness—Our Third Eye, [online][URL] http://www.lifepositive.com/ Mind/consciousness/human-consciousness.asp
British writer Colin Wilson suggests that there are at least eight levels of consciousness, but describes only seven. (The following are Wilson’s levels [in italics] with explanatory notes by the author) These are:
During REM sleep the eyes move rapidly but the muscles of the body are paralyzed. Dreaming occurs during REM sleep. REM sleep lasts about 20-30 minutes in an adult and is followed by an hour or so of non-REM sleep.
The hypnagogic state, that period between being awake and falling asleep, is complex because it cannot be accurately categorized as either waking or sleeping. Because the transition is gradual, it is very difficult to determine when we actually fall asleep. During alert wakefulness, eye movements are fairly rapid. When we relax or become drowsy, our eye movements become slower and less frequent. In fact, the presence of slow eye movements (SEMs) is considered to be an extremely accurate indicator of the hypnagogic state.
Adapted from Sherwood, S. 2003, Relationship between the hypnagogic/hypnopompic states and reports of anomalous experiences, [online][URL] http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/3549/pa_sp3.html
The waking state refers to the period of relaxed wakefulness, because this is the stage in which our bodies prepare to go to sleep or to wake up. We all fall asleep with tense muscles, our eyes moving erratically. Then, normally, as a person becomes sleepier, the body begins to slow down. Muscles begin to relax, and eye movement slows to a roll. The process is reversed when we awake.
This level of consciousness is aptly described by Sarkar:
It is interesting to note that most of our purposeful behavior happens without the aid of consciousness. We even solve most of our routine problems unconsciously… In other words, at the routine level of existence, we do not employ consciousness except when we are altering our actions or thoughts from the routine, for a purpose. Sarkar, B. 2003, Consciousness—Our Third Eye, [online] [URL]http://www.lifepositive.com/ Mind/consciousness/ human-consciousness.asp
This level of consciousness is descriptive of those situations where we have been caught off-guard or unawares. We are distracted, not focused on what we are doing. This is the consciousness of the person “off his or her game.”
Characteristic of this level of consciousness is focused attention, anticipation of responses and outcomes, having spontaneous answers for challenges that present themselves in the moment, and acting with total involvement. This is the “flow” experience. This is the athlete in the “zone.” This is the orator whose words come fluently, poetically, and powerfully persuasive –who moves the crowd. This is the housewife and mother who has solved all of the domestic crises of the day so adroitly that no one but her knew that anything was amiss. This is the musician who moves effortlessly from one musical idea to the next with ease and without pause.
This level of consciousness is best described as a state wherein we have begun to transcend the limits of our every day reality and connect with a higher level of awareness. Imagine a state where you experience a clear perception of the coming and going of each successive mind moment, where you experience such phenomena as brilliant light, rapturous feelings, tranquility, devotion, energy, happiness—where time seems to cease to exist.
Adapted from Colin Wilson in Sarkar, B. 2003, Consciousness—Our Third Eye,[online] [URL] http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/consciousness/human-consciousness.asp
Wilson is silent on level 7, the eighth level of consciousness. Perhaps he was referring to what Richard M. Bucke called cosmic consciousness, and either could not find the words or chose not to find the words to describe it. Ian Williams Goddard is not so diffident. Cosmic consciousness, he says,
is an experience wherein the observer's identity exceeds normal limits. Normally the observer's experiential field is broken into self, a sense of identity limited to the observer's body, and not-self, which is outside the observer's body. During C[osmic] C[onsciousness] E[xperience] the division of self and not-self is seen as an unreal mental fabrication, the dissolution of which causes self to occupy both the inside, or the body, and the outside. Goddard I., 2003, Logical Structure of Cosmic Consciousness,[online][URL] http://users.erols.com/igoddard/CCE.htm
Does this mean that you have to experience cosmic consciousness to experience personal transformation? Hardly, transformation can occur any time we learn something new. Life altering transformations do not have to be transcendental, as in mystical or supernatural. They are, however, always transcendent, provoking states of consciousness in which the sense of self is expanded beyond the ordinary definitions and self-images of the personality; when we become more than the collection of self-concepts, self-images, and roles which have developed through our normal day-to-day interactions and relationships.
The transformation of the bigot, racist or homophobe into a tolerant and accepting human being requires a different kind of consciousness, an expanded sense of self and a direct experience of a fundamental connection, harmony, or unity with others and the world. The transformation of the alcoholic or drug addict into a sober and productive member of society requires a different kind of consciousness, an expanded self-sense and, to paraphrase Max Weber, the complete reversal of the central attitude toward the value and meaning of life and the world. Every progressive transformation requires achieving a higher state of consciousness and an expanded self-sense.
Multicultural awareness/consciousness [MA/C] is a kind of personal transformation. It requires a different kind of consciousness and an expanded sense of self. At a very basic level of operation, to be multiculturally aware is to (consciously or unconsciously) keep track of similarities and differences in human beings.
Similarities refer to those characteristics and behaviors common to genus Homo. Differences are born of the collective spirit of the cultural groups to which they belong, their distinctive cultural thought, truth processes and characteristic cultural behavior. To know that one is keeping track of these similarities and differences is to experience multicultural consciousness.
Several of the many levels of conscious and unconscious processes and activities that comprise awareness/consciousness and multicultural awareness/conscious fall under the two general processes known as sensation and perception, the topic of the next essay.
Go to Essay 5: Transformation: The Miracle of Sensation
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WEBSITES
Goddard I., 2003, Logical Structure of Cosmic Consciousness,[online][URL] http://users.erols.com/igoddard/CCE.htm
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Rosenthal, D., 2003, Consciousness and Sensation [online][URL]
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/enc-soc.htm
Sarkar, B. 2003, Consciousness—Our Third Eye,[online] [URL] http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/consciousness/human-consciousness.asp
Sherwood, S. 2003, Relationship between the hypnagogic/hypnopompic states and reports of anomalous experiences, [online][URL] http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/3549/pa_sp3.html
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