people often think of consciousness, if they think about it at all,
is that consciousness is unchanging, permanent...
and yet, even in our limited lifetimes, we see that isn't true...
consciousness is really consciousness about something.. I am
conscious/aware of her feeling toward me..
to be unconscious is to be unaware of..... that is why I am a big
fan of being ''WOKE" because it means being aware of, being conscious of
something... those who are ''anti-WOKE" want to remain unaware of,
unconscious of something/all things... to be ignorant of, is another
way of thinking about ''anti-WOKE" is to be ignorant of...
and recall the primary Socratic Maxims... to know thyself..
to be aware of thyself and the unexamined life isn't worth living..
to examine, to become aware of... thus the Socratic Maxims are
really nothing more than calls to become aware of, to become conscious of...
anyway, back at the ranch... the question of changing consciousness
is obvious when thinking about our very growth as human beings...
we are born, and we are not aware of much.. it takes months for
a newborn to even grasp the notion of oneself vs someone else...
one of the primary consciousness issues of newborns is to be able to become
aware of others.. this growth of consciousness, of becoming aware of others,
means that we slowly become aware of others beyond our own family,
of becoming aware of other human beings beyond family...
the growth of consciousness is the growth of going from one,
thyself, to a few, family, to many, children in a class, to all...
I may not know billions of people, but I am aware of them...
I am just one person out of 8 billion people...and the number of
people I actually ''know'' is a fraction of a fraction of the number
of people on planet earth...
Our consciousness expands to include more and more people,
even if that means theoretical to know people... I can't image or
count 8 billion people, but I know that there are 8 billion people...
I am aware of....and this is how consciousness works.. it
becomes aware of more and more of existence....from the one
to the few to the many to all... my consciousness has grown
in its awareness of others...my consciousness, it has changed, it is changing and it
will continue to change....
one possible way to think of consciousness is to think about perspective...
my perspective about people has changed as a result of my conscious
awareness of others... I have a changing consciousness/perspective
about people... I have gone from the one, me, to the few, my family,
to some, my schoolmates and my friends, to a lot/many.. other
Americans and others who practice my own politics or beliefs about
what a human being is.. this is tribal.. and we must always be aware
of this tribal understanding.... of being aware of those who share something
with me.. be it religion, or politics or beliefs or philosophy... they are my
fellow tribe members... but that is a limited and frankly, a perspective that
has its day... it was useful to have, this tribal belief in others... but
we have grown beyond the tribe... I am aware of my tribe, but I
also have perspective about others outside of my tribe... right now,
the battle is to overcome this tribal aspect of being American...
am I a member of my tribe, perhaps, but I am a member with other people
outside of my tribe... I am an human being... and I am a global person...
a person who is conscious of, aware of others who don't belong to my own tribe...
or as one Greek philosopher said, I am a member of the Cosmos...and the
changing consciousness must become a change in our overcoming
our own inclination to tribal thinking....
and as it is clear to me, that the government is preparing us for
this new understanding of being aware.. of becoming aware of,
having a perspective of beings, not being human.... given the fact
that knowledge of alien beings is coming, isn't tribal thinking rather
short sided and pretty useless.. given the fact that we are not alone...
we will have an expansion of understanding of the universe.. we will have
a new perspective, a new awareness of what life is...
I cannot overstate the revolution that is coming....
we will move, because we have to, from having awareness of,
perspective of life as being greater than just human beings...
it will rock our world, are you ready?
anyway back at the ranch... my own awareness, my own
perspective has changed as I have grown older...my own coming death,
at some future point, has given me a new, changing consciousness about
my own life...(again, consciousness is about perspective/awareness)
my own perspective has changed since I have become aware of, conscious of
my own coming death... and that is the nature of our changing conscious nature...
new events, new environment, creates changes in our awareness of, perspective
of who we are and what it takes for us to succeed or survive this time...
my own perspective or consciousness changed as I have changed...
from being a bachelor to being married with children to being an empty
nester to my own knowledge, awareness of my own coming death....
with each new physical change in my environment, comes a change
in my awareness of, knowledge of, perspective of who I am
and what it means to be human....
now a change in perspective, awareness is not just an individual
matter, we also change socially, collectively... take the question of
sacrifice... at one time, all societies and states practiced public sacrifice,
but the very nature of sacrifice changed.. from the sacrificed of human beings
to animals is a significant one...and a profound change in our awareness of
life itself... today, at least in the industrial west, we no longer practice
sacrifice.. as it was practiced for thousands of years...
this is a social, collective change in our perspective, our awareness of
being human...the mindset of those who practice sacrifice, either of human
beings or animals, is very different than the perspective of those today
who no longer practice sacrifice...
we can changed our collective consciousness as has been shown
by our understanding of the practice of sacrifice...and we can show
how our collective consciousness has changed in terms of history
as we know it today...
as I have tried to show in another thread, the fact is that
in the beginning of human history, we didn't practice theological
thinking, as hunter/gatherers, we practiced magical thinking...
which is different than theological thinking... the difference
lies in cause and effect... for in magical thinking, we don't
practice cause and effect.. a child practices magical thinking..
they don't ask how did something happen, why did that
toy suddenly appear next to them... it just did and they
move on from there... whereas in the next phase of human society,
pastoral life, which is the movement of the tribe with the food sources,
as part of the tribe.. which is different from the hunter/gatherers
who followed the animals but were not herding the animals as
the pastoral human beings did...and yet, the thinking, the consciousness
of the pastoral people was also magical thinking... not about cause and effect...
but the pastoral people, due to their way of life, began to think about
the cause and effect of existence... The path of human consciousness/
awareness is from hunters/gatherer and magical thinking to the pastoral
existence... of moving with the herd, as part of the herd...again,
with the magical thinking... and there began the collective consciousness
of moving from magical thinking into the religious/theological thinking..
which is moving from not knowing/caring about cause and effect into
theological thinking which is about cause and effect...
which is to suggest that the early man/human beings didn't
practice sacrifice, either human or animal... because of their
magical thinking... it was only when human beings shifted from
magical thinking to theological thinking that the practice of
sacrifice began...cause and effect.. if we sacrificed some living thing,
be it human or animal, we can create, cause an action beneficial to us..
that is cause and effect thinking...our collective thinking went from
not having a concern about cause and effect to being all about cause
and effect.. that is going from magical thinking to theological thinking...
and so with this in mind, I would suggest that the next step in
human consciousness, human awareness is in the coming awareness
of alien life... the awareness, perspective of alien life will cause
a major shift in our own consciousness/awareness...
hopefully, this short sided and shallow thinking of tribes will go
away... as that time, the perspective of being part of a tribe,
needs to go away as we have shifted from tribal life into
human life... we are no longer just tribes, but we are human beings,
part of something much larger than just a tribe....
awareness of alien life will shift that understanding into ways and means I can't
even guess at right now....
believing in tribal life, as many do today, is holding onto the past,
no different than trying to believing in Jove OR RA or the Nordic gods...
or in human/animal sacrifice... those days are gone, long, long time ago...
time to move on...into knowing, having the perspective that we are
a class of human beings, and not tribes....
to move into the future, we must shift our perspective from tribal to
a collective human family... and that overcoming our tribal nature...
is an important step into the next step of humanity...
Kropotkin