As you are aware consciousness is just being aware or being in a state of understanding or grasping what is happening around us. The sense organs help the brain to decipher the environment. But the brain is also a temple of emotion and it is these emotions that sometimes mislead the brain and hallucinate. Our beliefs drive emotion, our faith drives ideas and our awareness drive excellence. It is these episodes that we have taken for granted but it is time to pause and appreciate life. When you truly understand consciousness you will appreciate life.
Concept 1: Belief
If you are reading this post now you are surely alive because I don’t believe in ghosts. Why do I not believe in ghosts? It could be because I have not had a paranormal encounter. I am just not conscious about some things, hence my belief is restricted. I wouldn’t even believe if someone or something leaves a comment below saying “Mindpluckd is awesome. – Ghost”. Even it was for real, I wouldn’t believe.
However, if you told me that Bulgaria exists, I would believe it. This belief is based on facts and acceptance by people who know geography. Experience may not be all it takes to believe something. How is believing in Ghosts and Bulgaria different? Ghosts are nothing but creations of movie makers to describe a soul gone rogue. If you didn’t believe that body and soul are different you would even want consider believing in ghosts. But believing in Bulgaria is driven by an urge to learn. You learn or educate yourself or get yourself aware of the world to cope with what the world needs you to know.
Concept 2: Education & Training
We are constantly flooded with so much information that our brain finds it really difficult to process it all that at once. Brain is capable however, but we have not trained it so well. As we educate ourselves we become aware but once we train we learn. Education and training are two different things. The difference is that we want our children to get sex education, not likely training. Understand?
Concept 3: Purpose & Happiness
If you Google ‘Purpose of life’ you will get about 8 million videos, 3 million books and applications. We are often so lost in finding the purpose that we forget to live. I guess the purpose of life for me is to be happy. Happiness is easy to attain but difficult to maintain. Sadness is difficult to attain but really easy to maintain.
The problem is, happinesses is different for different people. Yes I made up the word ‘Happinesses’ just now. Cos we don’t really get happiness from one thing.
So why would a saint be happy without anything? Why would they let go of everything that makes everyone else in the world happy? They somehow learn to merge all those happinesses into one prime happiness. They believe in it cos they believe in a bigger plan. Their pursuit of happiness ends the moment they learn to collate it all. Do we not consider the saints to be one of the most conscious of all? Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk motivate us to dare and be brave in following our hearts. His consciousness of the impact he could have on this world has made him so successful.
Concept 4: Intelligence
The dictionary says ‘Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills’. Can’t disagree with that. Application of mind is the key to attaining higher intelligence levels. So why is one person more intelligent than the other even if biologically we are the same? It is dependent on the ability to acquire knowledge and create a database which is easily accessible. That is a skill one develops over time.
Now that you know the different concepts you need to know to understand consciousness, let me make a drastic statement: “your soul is older than your body”.
Every animals, every insect just like us have souls. The energy that drives their bodies are the same that drives us. Our bodies just enable us to do more. To learn how to drive a Fighter Jet, you need to first know how to fly a starter’s airplane. Similarly our souls have aged though time and assumed different bodies of animals and insects before they were given a luxury of a human body. Why doesn’t a cat have the ability to brew beer? It is just not conscious enough to do it. Consciousness grows as the soul ages.
In the above picture, the ant’s consciousness is shown as least among the others as its body is limiting the soul to acquire more knowledge and become more intelligent. The ant’s mind does not even have the capacity to challenge the things that could increase its consciousness.
To be a man’s best friend a dog needs to keep up with the tasks that the man throws at it. The dogs have the ability to learn quickly and have increased levels of Vitamin L. L for Loyalty. The consciousness of a dog has grown with that of the man. The dog knows how to console, it can feel, and it can understand. But dogs too don’t have enough intelligence to question its consciousness.
Chimps are our nearest cousins. They have feelings, they understand how it feels to be a mother, they know that they have to protect. But most importantly they know how to manipulate and use the tools to accomplish community tasks.
Humans are considered the most intelligent beings on earth. Is it because we have lived over 6 million years out of the 4.5 billion years that our earth has aged? Modern human forms have only evolved about 200,000 years ago. Crocs have lived more but why are they not as intelligent as us? It is the consciousness being limited by the body.
Hence the consciousness keeps growing and assumes different bodies to expand. Swami Vivekananda, Jesus Christ and many such great men said to have died at a very young age. Does this mean that their consciousness grew so much that the human body could not handle it? It is believed that Swami Vivekananda himself confided to his disciple Swami Abhedananda that he would live only 5 or 6 years more. As intelligent beings I think we can accept that the Humans are not the ultimate conscious species in the world. It makes us want to think if this energy or soul as we know would make its way to life in anywhere in the universe or is it just limited to earth.
On a simplistic level, I think being alive is one kind of consciousness, living in the moment is another. So in this moment if we believe that our intelligence can help us apply the education and training we have got to attain happiness I think we have attained a good level of consciousness. Let us believe that we can do more, be more and help people be happy. We are gifted with an ability to make animals happy, the ability to create life and enjoy the process. The purpose of life is no more a question if you just do what you do with a highest level of consciousness. It is simply what you love to do.
The whole exercise of understanding consciousness helps us find what we love do to, our capabilities provide a sense of confidence that we are blessed with such powers that others species in the world are not even aware of. We as humans need special attention. And the creation gave us just that. If we are more appreciative of what we know and what we have we can achieve more. In the end the only achievements we will remember are the little happinesses.
Cartoon credits: Subham Kumar (Instagram – subham.mr.bonzo)