Thinking is not conscious awareness

In an old Laurel and Hardy comedy movie Stan is supposed to keep guard while his friend Ollie sleeps. After a while Ollie wakes up and finds Stan asleep on the job. Stan’s response to this is, “I’m sorry Ollie, I was dreaming that I awake but then suddenly I woke up and found myself asleep.” This describes the current situation we are in. Asleep.

The Self We Take for Granted

The way that we currently define ourselves is a definition that is taken for granted.  Most of us take it for granted that we feel ourselves in our thoughts, and therefore seek to define consciousness as thinking.  This is why in our western culture we are very concerned with intellectual knowledge. It is then also taken for granted that as we define consciousness as thinking so, we also define the soul as thinking, provided of course that you believe in one.

In reality, our individual understanding of consciousness is very superficial and is based upon erroneous ideas.  I assert to you, that consciousness has a very specific definition, which can only be verified by the study of how one is asleep. Unless you actively seek, on a daily basis to see and understand how you live in a state of automatic mechanicity, you will never understand that which I am referring to as consciousness.

Consciousness, in fact is totally independent of thoughts and feelings and the body. It is in fact, our authentic self.  Few of us experience this authentic self, because we have fallen asleep in life, become hypnotized by the incessant chatter of the mind and the constant craving for pleasure and relief from pain.  We also then set about creating lives that reinforce our personal dramas which simultaneously reinforces our attachment to the body and our so called identity. This is seen by the example of the girl with an eating disorder. Her suffering and the suffering of her family is based completely upon her image of her body. She is attempting to have control over her family’s love and attention through her self destruction. In other words through her illness she is saying to others, “If you don’t accept me for who I am instead of what I do they I guess I must be wrong therefore I’ll die.” This thinking as a strategy for getting love and attention is a common and dangerous one.

How Much of Life Runs on Autopilot?

In our modern psychology there lies a tremendous amount of evidence to support the fact that we are largely unconscious.  This is however very soft-pedaled in pop psychology, as it is very uncomfortable for us to deal with.  The studies of behavioral psychologists such as B.F Skinner, Stanley Milgram and others have already verified that we are in fact very deeply psychologically asleep and merely stimulus response machines. According to behavioral psychology, what we would call consciousness is merely a response to deep social and cultural conditioning. Our state of consciousness is symbolized in the Gnostic myth Pinocchio. A puppet who thinks he’s a boy and does not listen to his conscious.

In our own lives we fail to see so many ways in which we are always acting unconsciously.  We come home hypnotized by our thinking. We get a glass of water hypnotized by our thinking, and then we talk on the phone while hypnotized by our thinking. We hang up the phone and keep dreaming. We make plans and feed the cat while dreaming, and then all of a sudden its time to go and we can’t find our keys. We look everywhere but we just can’t find them. We can’t find them because when we set them down we were dreaming/ hypnotized by our thinking. So now we become frantic and impatient and alter our good mood because we spend an hour tearing the house apart to find something that a simple act of being aware within moment would have helped.

Consider how many relationship problems we have seen in our own lives. People repeatedly get into the same kind of relationships over and over and make the same mistakes. We choose people who are often entirely incompatible for us. How many times I have worked with couples who spend so much of the time criticizing the other completely forgetting that they were the one who choose this partner. “If you saw these things in them in the beginning,” I say, “why did you choose them?” They chose them because they were responding to completely unconscious needs to seek out the same relationship they saw there parents have or to fix it or both.

Let’s assume then that our consciousness can be defined by thinking.  This would imply then that there is some choice to consciousness, or choice in thinking.  This is however, the crux of the illusion.  We are under the illusion that there is a choice in thinking. Nothing could be further from the truth.  If we inquire into exactly what is a thought? A thought is characterized by images, words or symbols.  Thought as an image is a way to recall defined experiences and is often deposited in the subconscious or unconscious.  Thought as words or symbols is a way to define and communicate experience and action.  Whether or not thought defines us as who we are is the fundamental difference between eastern, South American and Euro-western views of the self.

“The mind which is a slave of the senses makes the soul disabled, just as the boat that the wind misleads upon the waters”.  – Krishna, the Bhagavad-Gita

Self-Observation: Dividing Your Attention

If we were to begin to rigorously observe ourselves, not through thinking but by dividing our attention. Through looking for where our attention is coming from moment by moment. Within this concentrated state we would begin to see our sleep.

We like we drive to work without awareness. We like to drive while we are hypnotized by our thinking, we get into car accidents in this state of sleep, and pedestrians are killed in this state of sleep. They die sleeping with their minds entirely on something else other than the moment. The way we perceive thinking as consciousness can lead to this kind of unawareness, or checking out because we feel that once we have knowledge about something, like the route to work, then we already know and there’s no need to continue being aware.

Try It: Can You Stop Your Thoughts?

Now, if you believe that you have control over your thoughts than simply try this exercise.  Assuming that we make all of our choices from our brain or our thoughts then it would be logical to assume that we could choose to think or not to think and that we do in fact choose what to think about and what not to think about.  So starting from this basic assumption simply go home sit quietly on your bed and choose not to think of anything for 30 minutes.

Since you have the power of choice over your consciousness, prove it.  If you really have the power of choice, this should be a simple activity for you.  I believe you will experience, as most people do when they do this exercise, a startling realization. Thoughts are an automatic activity that happens without choice at all.  They are not choices.  This incessant neurotic chatter is the basis for most of the problems in our lives and the root of the psychological hypnosis we all live under.

This could be an astounding realization for you, for if you really consider then what is happening, you are then compelled to do something about it. Otherwise you will be forced to live as a machine that automatically responds to inner programming but believes it has free will.

You must begin to see that which observes, that which is awareness is your consciousness.  Thought is not observing, it is only memory of that which has been observed.

You may have noticed that it takes some effort to BE AWARE in this way.  It takes some effort, some concentration to notice our thoughts and feelings.  To separate from them, to distinguish between what we think and feel and our awareness of these things.  It may seem too subtle to us, or ridiculous, but this distinction means everything.  This distinction between thoughts, feelings and sensations, and consciousness, is the very foundation of any real self knowledge.

Ken Wilber “Much of today’s research into consciousness focuses on those aspects that have some sort of obvious anchoring in the physical brain, including the fields of neurophysiology, biological psychiatry, and neuroscience. While there seems to be an uneasy consensus that consciousness (or the mind) cannot be fully reduced to physical systems (or the brain), there is as yet no widespread agreement as to their exact relation (“the hard problem”)”.

What Consciousness Actually Is

So to distinguish, we must understand what each of these things are.

Consciousness, then, is pure attention, pure awareness.  It is simple, pure, uncomplicated.  A child is a wonderful example of consciousness: innocent, and absolutely in the moment.   Present

This consciousness is pure energy.  It is an energy, an active, vital force, it has a feeling, a presence, and naturally where that energy is present it has an effect. I assert that we must learn about this energy, the Consciousness, we must experience it in ourselves, for ourselves; in order to understand why we are in the situation we are in. Not just individually but globally. It must be understood.  It seems like we are all in different situations, different circumstances, and have different names and different stories, and of course we love to tell these stories and believe so much in them, but the truth is that we are all really in the exact same situation, only the effects of that situation look different.  Society is the extension of the individual and the global self destructive attitude is a reflection of our own individual self destruction.

“Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.”
—Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, 6th Century B.C.