It’s interesting how we talk of accessing higher levels of consciousness as a consequence of meditation or other therapeutic or esoteric practices.
Anthropologists and sociologists have long explored human propensity for labelling and categorising just about everything. While this habit may, on the surface, appear innocuous enough there is an underlying difficulty. Along with these categories and labels we tend to apportion positive and negative feelings. The difficulty of this is the sense then that lower levels of consciousness are ‘bad’ and to seek a higher level of consciousness is ‘good’. This categorisation leads to what many would term ‘dualism’ a term often linked to the work of philosopher Descartes who famously separated the mind from the body for reasons many don’t fully appreciate and led to centuries of division and non-holistic thinking.
The term consciousness really refers to our sentience, fundamentally our awareness. Most animals are conscious while plants for example are generally considered not to be conscious. Self consciousness and self awareness is another division of consciousness – in other words the ability to refer to the ‘I’ in consciousness. This area of consciousness hotly debated as to whether or not we share this ‘I’ consciousness with other animals – and if so, which species.
Putting other species to one side for a minute, it is safe to assume that all humans have consciousness and are self aware in so far as they can refer to ‘I’ knowing they are separate from others.
The great difficulty comes then when talk turns to higher and lower levels of consciousness. What does this really mean? Is there a firm division between operating on the lower and the higher level?
The first great difficulty with this is that merely thinking about higher or lower consciousness means accessing the cerebral cortex – the ‘thinking’ part of the brain. That is the very part that is engaged with the idea of categories and labels.
So the brain is now reviewing consciousness. The brain is a physical mass, part of your physiological body while consciousness is not – it is intangible a free flowing, natural, ethereal presence in us all. The brains’ only way of engaging with this is to construct what the brain understands – physical constructs or socially taught labels and categories.
So to allow consciousness to be described in terms of being higher or lower is fundamentally to allow our brain – our thinking process – to again override and prioritise itself, the physical aspect of self, as more significant than the non-physical aspect of self (consciousness).
Consciousness is about feeling, intuition, non-physical sensory awareness and presence.
When we refer to higher levels of consciousness within the esoteric and therapeutic sense we really mean the realisation that consciousness is not physical, along with recognition of our ego thinking. The ego thinking again, being part of our cultural and physical world, not our truest deepest self.
Rather than being a higher level of consciousness perhaps it is safer, and more accurate to think of it as a heightened self of self awareness – one where the consciousness has become aware of the consciousness!
