Developing Consciousness And Freedom

Here are some thoughts on our inner life that I have come across. They are of course not my own findings but the combination of outer influences, my own thinking and some intuitive illuminations. Here they are in short and following that a short explanation how I arrived at them as well as some thoughts on how we can help ourselves experience more wisdom, happiness and beauty in our everyday lives. So here goes:

1.  Consciousness is attention wanting to experience itself.

2.  Consciousness has many levels.

3.  Our consciousness is a legion.

4.  We need Telos to have Tulos.


If number four sounds wacky, read on. It'll all come clear in the end, I promise.

In a dream some time ago I entered a movie theater/courtroom. The film that was shown was Silence of the Lambs. It was shown as a sort of a punishment for the person on trial that evening.  As I sat down I noticed that the prosecuted was the serial killer Richard Ramirez who was sitting in the row in front of me. I shivered at the thought of having to sit so close to someone responsible for such horrible deeds. Sometimes I had to step outside the room but somehow I felt the need to come back inside, as if my mission wasn't completed. I sat down, this time next to Mr Ramirez and eventually met his glance. As it turned out I was even able to converse with him in semi-familiar tone. In the end it didn't really feel that awful. But still I had to make it step by step, first by sitting behind him, then right next to him and finally even having a small talk with him.

As I woke up I saw the immediate connection between my dream and our human condition. Inside of us in our private theaters there is a legion of us watching and judging the movies of our making. We choose to experience whatever attracts our attention and then face the consequences. Having evolved to a level of low consciousness we have wish for a similar level experience. Evolving to higher stages of our humanity we attract experiences that resonate with that level. It seems really simple, actually.

This "me" that evolves is not unified entity, though. Our inner movies are the results of dozens of different directors each trying their best to experience whatever their level of consciousness is. And consciousness is whatever attracts our attentions at the moment. So there might be, say, a person inside me whose consciousness is evolved at the material level in close personal relationships. That person may always want to have an experience of gross material-physical level and thus never seem to experience a steady relationship extending to mutual emotional of even spiritual exchange.

There are Directors of Experience who are highly evolved as well. One of those can be someone who wants to experience a common rationality between people. This person tries his best to direct his movie of noble vision but the market has lots of competition. There are levels of consciousness inside us that are crude, material and selfish. And there are levels that are rational, compassionate and caring - maybe even trans-rational and spiritually authentic.

Realizing our inner existance to be a battlefield of competing interests we need to make inner peace. What we have to do in order to function as truthful, compassionate and moderately happy persons is to -and I quote my dream here- sit in the same room with our different selves. Sure, there are killers and rapists and egoistical lunatics inside, but that's not the Whole Truth and Nothing But. But it is still true, a take on our inner reality that is multifaceted, complex and has many different levels of consciousness. We must at least see our different selves in order to know who we are as human beings. In the words of the poet Walt Whitman: "I am large, I contain multitudes".  It is these multitudes we need to acknowledge in order to grow beyond them. I wrote of this in my blog entry titled Before Transcendence, Inclusion. Coming to terms with our own multitudes both black and white we learn to accept our selves and other people as they are and not as we wish them to be. And that is in my opinion both the starting point and the goal of our inner work of personal development in consciousness and freedom. But that dichotomy is also a case for a major pre/trans fallacy so let's not, for the time being, get into the subtle differences between nondual wisdom and slacker ethics, or real compassion versus idiot compassion.

So what is freedom? Freedom is having more experiences to choose from. By working on our personal develoment we move from licentiousness towards freedom. Freedom is the availability of higher levels of consciousness, experience and unity than what was previously at hand. If our work is to be done efficiently it must take into account the different levels and lines of consciousness (or, experience; or, expertise) as well as states and types (such as masculine/feminine; or, personality types) of consciousness. Only in that way the chaos and confusion of our inner cinemas and courtroom battles may get past the inertia that keeps us in the "Whatever" state of mind. There are many useful tools for transformation and probably the best catalogue or map of those tools that I've come across is the body of work of the American philosopher and pundit Ken Wilber.

Having at least a conceptual clarity that our situation is not as hopeless or disorganized as it appears to be (it's worse, might Gurdjieff say) can give us hope that personal development is a real and worthwhile pursuit. Work can produce real results but we have to have a goal, a method for our work and we need to know where we are at the moment. But above all we need to have a wish. With an aim in sight we have a constant compass that guides us in our choices and experiences. You may want to check out Steve Pavlina's site on some insights on that.

One last note of clarification I promised in the beginning and then I'm outta here. In the Finnish language the word for "result" is tulos. It is kind of similar to the Greek word for purpose or aim, telos. Now figure that one out!