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Consciousness and Awareness

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Brief Introduction

The term ‘consciousness’ is used in very varied ways: in its most restricted and literal usage, often thought only to apply to human beings and animals closely related to us, it implies an awareness not only of environment as ‘surroundings’ but of ‘self’ as an ‘exception from’ those surroundings. Correspondingly Albert Einstein is said to have defined ‘the environment’ as ‘everything that isn’t me’, i.e. as something ‘outside my consciousness’.

This ‘exceptional awareness of being aware’ arises from the perception of a ‘gap’ or ‘severance’ between ‘self’ as ‘individual subject’ and ‘other’ as ‘object’. The bodily boundary is perceived as an ‘exclusion zone’ or ‘limit’ that dislocates inner world from outer world, sealing the ‘self’ within as a ‘ghost in the machine’ that makes abstract executive decisions about what is and is not in its best interests. These decisions use projections and back-projections (extrapolations) from previous and current observations of outer world ‘events’ to analyse the ‘past’ and forecast ‘the future’ so as to enable us to act in a way that brings about what we deem to be ‘desirable’. They involve ‘making plans and designs’ and bringing these to fruition by inventing suitable tools and contrivances.

This executive consciousness is widely regarded as a huge ‘advance’, which marks the coming to evolutionary and developmental adulthood, beyond the basal ‘here and now’ awareness of ‘infants and other animals’, of the creature that calls itself Homo sapiens. Useful as it may be, however, it can also be a source of enormous loss, as well as the egotistical pride and definitive logic that leads to the ‘addiction to conflict’ epitomised by Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy. The ‘self’ comes to be viewed as a stand-alone ‘I’, struggling for its existence and angrily asserting its independent sovereign ‘rights’ to freedom of choice and possession of property in competition with others.

As the focus shifts abstractly from implicit spatial receptivity to purely explicit informational definition, Nature is diminished from infinite ‘Mother Nurturer’ in whom One belongs, to three-dimensional ‘Other Existence’ upon whom one makes demands and against whom one is opposed. What is purely implicit becomes taken for granted, even reviled and hidden from explicit view within the enormous realm that rationalistic observers describe as ‘unconscious’, a turbulent cauldron of emotional toil and trouble, filled with Shadow.

Executive consciousness alone may hence be regarded as a very partial (i.e. superficial, self-referential and prejudicial) form of awareness. It may limit and distort our sense of reality to the point where we make unreasonable assumptions and inapt decisions that ironically deny our natural neighbourhood and feelings in the very name of Reason!

Inclusional awareness correspondingly entails expanding and deepening this narrowly defined and definitive consciousness so as to include the receptive influence that pools us together in common space whilst recognising the uniqueness of our local situation where our distinct self-identity dynamically resides. We come to view our complex, inner-outer selves arising as local spheres of non-local influence, distinct but not discrete.

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