spirituality 07.pdf

7/29/2019 spirituality 07.pdf

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spirituality - lesson 7: states of conscience

some people talk in their sleep. lecturers talk while other people sleep.albert camus

the concept of consciousness is familiar to us all, but it may be the mostmysterious feature of our existence. what exactly is consciousness? what givesus this self-awareness? these questions have occupied philosophers and artistsranging from the writings of kant and hegel to movies like paul verhoeven's totalrecall (based on the novel 'we can remember it for you wholesale' by philip k.dick).

recently we assisted a scientific lecturer who said in his introduction right nowyou might be conscious of my arnold schwarzenegger accent, but you're notconscious of other things in the room. most of the activity in your brain you haveno conscious access to. you have no idea how you talk. I don't know how I putthe words together. I don't have access to the way I see color, I hear, I analyzelanguage.

he showed how specific neurons in the brain respond to recognized images andthe memories of images. for example, certain neurons in one monkey familiarwith o.j. simpson's image fired when the monkey saw a picture of simpson butnot of elvis, or others. one neuron in a person's brain fired specifically when hesaw an animal. another fired when a person saw an image or cartoon of afamous person. another fired at the image of a baseball. only some of theneurons fired when the people were asked to remember certain images. bylooking at these patterns of neuron activity and their overlap, the lecturer hopesto gain insight into visual consciousness and recognition.

states of consciousnesswe may think of sleeping, waking, dreaming as phases of a normal state. if wemean something else by consciousness, perhaps, as different states inthemselves, along with a wide range of other conditions of consciousness, wecan include intense mental concentration, directed acute visual or aural


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observation, sudden recognition, various modes of puzzlement, generalizeddoubts, or even awe in the mode of the aesthetic sublime. and perhaps also thekinds of moment of voluntary memory. and likewise, the condition of wonder inwhich socrates had it that philosophizing begins.

there are three distinct and recognized states of consciousness awareness of waking the world of dreams, in which pictures appear only in the mind unaccompanied

by mental pleasures and body pains deep sleep, or unconsciousness during which one remembers nothing andemerges fresh.

while dream experience is short, the waking one is comparatively long. but thereis no difference in the constitution, the make-up, or the construction of these twotates. though there is difference between waking and dreaming, there is littledifference between the consciousness of waking and the consciousness ofdreaming. while the waking state is due to actual perception through senses,dream is brought about by the memory of waking state on account of theimpressions of the latter imbedded in the mind, which manifest themselves on

suitable occasions. even if to us it seems that there is no consciousness orknowing in deep sleep, there is a persistent memory of one's having slept andexperienced relaxation therein. there is a total absence of experience from thepoint of view of consciousness, but the effect in the form of memory of havingslept is enough evidence that there was some sort of experience even in deepsleep.

scientific investigationlevels of consciousness change with levels of activation in the brain. differentregions of the brain have also been linked to different states of consciousness by


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comparing positron emission tomography brain images of sleeping and wakingpeople. different sets of chemicals are associated with the sleeping and wakingstates as well. the kind of consciousness we feel, is actively controlled by thebrain stem, the lower stalk of the brain that connects it to the spinal cord. indifferent sleep states, the sensory inputs are blocked; at other times the abstractthinking inputs are blocked. different waking states such as daydreaming, beingvigilant, relaxed, or drowsy, are also governed by the brain stem in this way.

we're beginning to get a rather more complete picture of how consciousnesschanges with changes in the brain state. consciousness is the forebrain'srepresentation of the world, our bodies and ourselves, and of course this is thegreat mystery... we still haven't said how this happens. what we can say is - it isalways a construction whose level, focus and form depend on the brain stem.

stages or phases?the nineteenth- and mid-twentieth-century locution states of matter -solid, liquid,gaseous-now are more generally called phases, as opposed, in later-twentieth-centuryscientific language, to one of two conditions in a binary system, still called

states.

artistscreate objects and events that alter and enrich human consciousness. teachersshould help art students discover their own, most profound sources of creativityand life. artists use creativity and passion to help the world discovering andexpressing the sacred withinourselves.

the creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creativefeverishness. it is not like a drug; it is a particularstate when everything happensvery quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear andpleasure; its a little like making love, the physical act of love.francis bacon

art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the braincan conceive beyond any canon. when we love a woman we dont startmeasuring her limbs.pablo picasso

the scholar seeks truth, the artist findsandre gide

I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.vincent van gogh


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discussnobody knows for certain why we dream. there are many theories andpsychologists are divided about why we dream. so what do you think? why dowe dream? is it just a load of nonsense rattling around the brain? are dreamsperhaps just the mind's way of cooling the emotions.

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