Many living things are sensate without being conscious – eg plants and single celled animals. Think of a sunflower that tracks the sun as it moves through the sky. There is stimulus and response but it is mechanical and inflexible. There is no one home.
In more advanced living things stimuli excite sense organs which encode the interactions and pass electrical signals along sensory nerves to specialist modules of the brain. These modules decode the signals and integrate them with signals from other modules. This makes it possible to generate the information that is needed to react and respond more or less flexibly to the changes in the environment that caused the stimuli in the first place.
Once upon a time there were sensate beings but none of them were conscious of the fact. They were not aware of or awake to what was going on in their mindbrain. They were zombies and robots. But things changed as brains evolved and became more self reflective.
Some human beings began to notice what they were noticing and to think about what they were thinking. They were aware of and awake to a particular mental construct in their mindbrain. This can be thought of as a subjective feeling or a perception. It is commonly known as consciousness.
In conscious beings new inputs from the outside world are deliberately matched against memories of similar situations in the past and there is judgment – good, neutral or bad. This leads to an appropriate reaction or response.
There is a lot going on in a human mindbrain and its associated nervous system. Most of it does not enter consciousness. There is therefore the concept of the subconscious or the unconscious. This includes reflexes (innate and conditioned), instincts (hard wired), and a range of culture specific intuitions and biases.
A useful metaphor is of a calm witness inside everyone’s head. This witness can note the thoughts and feelings that were fed into the attention centre from the unconscious. In many people the witness is asleep most of the time and the person lives on automatic pilot ie driven by the unconscious rather than self consciously. This gives rise to the feeling that ‘my mind has a mind of its own’; or, more poetically ‘the heart has its reasons that reason know nothing about’.
This might have been why the concept of self-consciousness came into being. There were at least two sets of intention and motivation - and ultimately at least two world views (Weltanschaaung). There is the unknown and unknowable unconscious, and the known rational self. So what and from where am ‘I’?
Human beings have evolved to be social animals. We are hard wired with the innate tendency to behave and believe, in general terms, this way rather than that. The process of enculturation causes us to learn how to believe and behave in more detailed socio-culturally acceptable ways.
The conditioning process moved up a gear with the evolution of language. In the beginning there was a small vocabulary and simple sentence structures. Advances were made through metaphor and analogy. The unknown is like the known because …
So what was known? Patterns and agents woven into stories. These evolved to suit the needs of groups of hunters and gatherers in the African savanna. There was focus on status, hierarchy and power amongst families, friends, enemies and the forces of nature. And, by analogy, these simple social constructs became the knowns upon which social and metaphysical unknowns were comprehended eg there is the image of God the Heavenly Father linked to the divine right of kings.
- A father is responsible for decision making in the family – appease him
- A tribal chief is responsible for decision making in and between groups – appease him.
- A God is responsible for decision making about droughts and floods – appease him.
Once language evolved the rate of cultural evolution developed exponentially and newer and ever more sophisticated metaphors and analogies appeared and competed for prominence. Myth and magic abounded and people believed in all manner of patterns and agents.
For most of human history most people have believed that the objects of myth and magic were real. But there has always been a crazy few who, by adopting a higher form of thinking, have realized that thoughts and feelings were mind-made and had no abiding reality.
The Tao te Ching is a classic Chinese document from about 600BC. The author Lao Tzu was one of the crazy few. He left us some striking quotes:
- The reality that can be described is not the real reality.
- He who knows does not speak.
- He who speaks does not know.
There have been other members of the crazy few who have warned about the limitations of language when trying to describe those forms of consciousness that are above the ordinary. Those who sit quietly doing nothing can have a subjective and non-egoic appreciation of the Oneness which is everything. It is a state of mind that can be experienced but is ineffable and unspeakable. Language cannot do it justice but the words ‘enlightenment’ and ‘liberation’ are often used.
There are three Enlightenment projects:
- a Western one based on rational thought,
- an Eastern one based on seeing through the illusion of the Self, and
- a Postmodern one based on the concept of socially constructed reality.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau made the famous revolutionary pronouncement that: "Men are born free, and everywhere are in chains." A couple of centuries later that still holds truth for us, but now we see that the strongest chains are symbolic ones, mind forged manacles. (ref Truett Anderson)
But most of that is now ancient history. The crazy few is fast becoming the crazy many. The internet is encouraging tipping points in the promotion of (a) mindfulness based thinking and feeling amongst ordinary folk, and (b) holistic, multidisciplinary consilience amongst scientists and academics.
Do I see a planetary progression from sensate through self conscious to enlightened?
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