Consciousness

We often tend to think only of the conscious mind and the subconscious mind and ignore all the glorious variations between and outside of those two points; the dreamy, the psychedelic, the mystic, the bidden, the unbidden, the channelled.

Meditation is interesting because whilst I am focussing on my breathing various thoughts will come to me. Some of these thoughts will pertain to things that are currently happening in my life, others are seemingly much more random. Some of these thoughts stealthily enter my mind and others come in like Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball. Oh bugger, I can be pretty sure that image itself will greet me the next time I close my eyes to meditate. I have no idea how I’ll erase it. Focus on the breath, focus on the breath.

Sometimes I think of the different types of consciousness as being like the various features of a banknote. Some features are embossed or gilded, others raised like braille, some holographic, and others need to be held up to the light in order to be seen.

As I meditate different thoughts come and go, each with their own behaviours. They overlap and intertwine. Some loop round and round, some sit quietly meditating in the corner of my mind as I too meditate, and kind of look at me as if to say, ‘oh you’re meditating too’.

I consider consciousness to exist on a spectrum. At the more subconscious end of the range we have chemical, genetic, familial and ancestral consciousness. Spirituality might also reside there.

At the other end we have abstraction, self-reference, postmodernism, irony, and consciousness of consciousness.

We then have peripheral consciousness and quasi consciousness which itself exists on a spectrum of quasiness, with slightly quasi at one end and completely and utterly quasi at the other. It’s quasi!

Some thoughts we carry as physical weight, whilst others evaporate under the slightest glare, others are dreamy, almost unreachable and exist almost as a taste on the tongue.

We have consciousness of death, the consciousness of being dead, and the unconsciousness of death. We have gestational consciousness, pre-gestational consciousness, the story of how your mum met your dad, how the sperm and the ovum met, a kind of parental consciousness that can be either present or absent and the impact that has on the consciousness of the child.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. It’s just a thought.