CONSCIOUSNESS & AWARENESS ● I. Consiousnes & evolution ● II. What is Awareness ● III. What is Consciousness ● IV.Super Consciousness - the Holy Grail ● V. The Super Awake Flow ● VI. Shared Fields of Consciousness THE INNER AND THE OUTER PERSON ● The inner and the outer Person ● The Sacred Wound of the Inner Warrior   THE BUTTERFLY OF THE SOUL ● The operative system of thought ● Asynchronus control systems ● The liberation from or of the Self ● Meditative spatialization ● Meditative pixellation ● The liberation of the greater Self ● The Butterfly of the Soul

HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY & SCIENCE ● Religion, Science and Philosophy ● Meditation and secterianism ● The 'I' and its developmental history ● Meditation and Meta-Consciouness ● Meditation & Symbols ● Jesus in the footsteps of the Buddha   QUESTIONS TO MEDITATION ● Is meditation a miracle cure? ● Is meditating narcissistic?   MEDITATIVE VISIONS ● The Miraculous Fractal Consciousness ● God wants to become Man ● Singularity, Meditation and Entheogens ● Meditation and Love ● Meditation and Truth ● About the author

 
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WHAT IS AWARENESS / ATTENTION

We do not live alone, but chained to an animal from another kingdom: our body.
Marcel Proust

God is simple presence, a stay-at-home in himself.
Meister Eckhart

Meditation.dk's exploration and understanding of the concept of 'awareness' builds upon the almost overly simple, banally familiar Western thoughts about humans as instinct-based animals. By revisiting what we believe we have already seen and understood with fresh eyes, we can rediscover the unknown aspects that we overlooked in the known. At least, that is my goal.

We habitually reside in the dark body world behind the skin, but we don't really know it. Discovering and exploring this total unknown as a young person, and continuing throughout my life, transformed my existence. I realized how shockingly little I was aware of and how little control I actually had over my own life.

Although this inner bodily life is almost unknown to most of us, it is anything but foreign. The unknown remains unknown because we think we know it. In constant self-remembrance, this truth will be repeated as a mantra on Meditation.dk.

The Potato Sack
We block information when we receive information. Let me give an example. I was a tour guide for 30 tourists in Northern India. We were driving in a ramshackle bus by Western standards at breakneck speed through cows, goats, endless crowds of people, and vehicles that mostly resembled props from the movie, Planet of the Apes. Bus travel in Northern India is like being trapped in a fractal, where the same decayed roadside-bombed village with the same dark-skinned people with dark hair and dark eyes in a spiraling eternal chain dance keeps reappearing hour after hour, no matter how much the driver accelerates to escape this karmic cycle of dusty roads that will never end. The goal is Nirvana, in the form of our hotel's clean and orderly freedom from all things Indian. (Even this five-star order turns out to be Maya, an illusion that reveals itself in the sound of the first cockroach crushed underfoot on the bathroom floor.)

During such a trip, a tourist struggled up through the winding bus with a question: About half an hour ago, we drove through a town where a woman on the roadside was carrying a large sack. What was in that sack? Without hesitation, I replied: There were potatoes in the sack.

The guest was satisfied with the answer and returned to his seat. Time and time again, during my 10 years as a tour guide in the East, I experienced how the Western mind is conditioned to receive 'explanations' that, in reality, explain nothing or are insignificant, such as when a tour guide piles up irrelevant details about how many bricks there are in a particular building. When delving deeper, questions are asked that directly relate to the familiar home life but are infinitely irrelevant in an Indian's world. Especially in India, I received many foolish questions that led to even more improvised foolish answers.

Explanations Explain Nothing
I realized that it was actually India's insane unpredictability that gave rise to this need for explanations. Through 'explanations', the content of which no one was interested in or at best had forgotten half an hour later, India's anxiety-inducing incomprehensibility was dispelled. This country's chaotic mathematical metabolism exposed to me the fact that logical explanations can be just as effective as religion in keeping the unfathomably incomprehensible incomprehensibility we find ourselves in at bay.

No one wants to waver in their faith in the cosmos by worrying about what Atlas stands on, let alone what the Indian turtle, supporting the elephants, stands on itself.

India is a great place for self-discovery. For the country's wonderfully bustling life can be seen by the fortunate as a mirror reflecting the chaos that exists within ourselves.

Now, after many years of staying in India, I will attempt to describe the troll that holds up the turtle, without dismissing it by calling it a potato. The astonishing thing is that this troll hides within ourselves, beneath our skin, in our own bodies. It can only be found and exposed when, with eyes tightly shut, one gropes blindly for the hidden within the obvious.

This exploration takes place as a dissection of our internal bodily life - a life so close that we usually don't give it a second thought. Here, the passionate meditator will encounter themselves as pure awareness in a bodily ocean of nameless sensory waves.

Oh Friend! Understand
The body is like the ocean
Rich with hidden treasures.
Open its innermost chamber
and light its lamp
Mirabai

THE TWO FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
On Meditation.dk, a distinction is made between two forms of consciousness:

AWARENESS & CONSCIOUSNESS

This definitional distinction between consciousness and awareness can, to some extent, be compared to the Indian mystic Nisargadatta Maharaj's distinction between awareness and consciousness:

Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep. Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content; consciousness is always of something. Consciousness is partial and changeful, awareness is total, changeless, calm and silent.
And it is the common matrix of every experience.
Nisargadatta Maharaj - I AM THAT

A tree is a good illustration of these two operating systems:

Your deepest roots are in nature.
No matter what you are, where you live,
or what kind of life you lead,
you remain irrevocably linked
with the rest of creation.
Charles Cook

The consciousness crown of the human tree is visible, but a large part of the tree's life is lived in darkness underground.

In short, the difference looks like this:

● Consciousness knows - in luminous, remotely sensed cognitive wakefulness.
● Awareness senses - in sleeping, bodily close-sensed darkness.

CONSCIOUSNESS
I define consciousness as a term for the brain's most recently evolved and, thus, genuinely awake operating systems. It is likely that the development of consciousness accelerated when humans began to use language.

AWARENESS
I see awareness, in line with Nisargadatta, as 'primordial'. From an evolutionary perspective, life developed awareness before waking consciousness. In the bodily and dark-growing sensory root system of awareness, our ancient biological world mass lives. Awareness is used on Meditation.dk as a collective term for all the archaic, rudimentarily sleeping, and semi-waking forms of consciousness that preceded our current and most recently evolved waking consciousness. Consciousness may be 50,000 years old. Awareness ruled in all the ages of life that came before. Awareness is my collective reductionist term for the various bio-operating systems associated with our older and oldest biological life - yes, all the way back to the single-celled life forms in the Precambrian primal ocean.

The attentive, sleeping body-animal
We sense attentively. We feel our sensations. We experience in awareness. We become aware of ourselves and the world through sensations. Fundamentally, humans are remarkable sensing animals in their attentive awareness. A dog is just as aware as a human. Awareness-based survival responses rule in the twilight landscapes, almost unknown to consciousness, between sleep and waking. In the gray zones between sleep and waking, countless archaic operating systems of awareness live, recycling outdated genetic bio-software, making us the living landfill we are, seen in loving misanthropy at our core.

A sleepwalker is fully aware but not conscious. Human awareness systems can be compared to computer algorithm-controlled high technology that can effectively navigate a Tesla car in traffic without consciousness.

Primeval attentive close-sensing versus modern conscious remote-sensing
Close-sensing, such as touch, taste, and smell, is primarily managed by the older control systems of awareness. The most recently evolved waking consciousness is more 'hardwired' with remote senses. In particular, the sense of sight is connected with waking consciousness, where we can clearly perceive things while awake. The sense of sight is, therefore, humanity's most conscious sense. We are usually much more aware of what we see and realize than what we feel. That's why we only become aware of our feelings once we've realized them. Even the sense of hearing is subject to the obvious dominance of sight. As a music teacher, I've often heard the thought-provoking phrase: Have you seen that concert?
To put it bluntly, the difference between consciousness and awareness is the difference between perceiving remotely and sensing closely.

In the following, I will blindly grope for the invisible 'God' of awareness that lies buried in the 'sensual' darkness of our own bodies.

I am certain as I live that nothing is so close to me as God.
God is nearer to me than I am to my own self;
my life depends upon God's being near me, present in me.
Meister Eckhart
 

An infant develops best in unlimited attentive close-sensing contact with the mother. Sensing awareness develops before consciousness in a person. An infant is undifferentiatedly attentive. Consciousness only begins to develop along with language at the age of two or three. The dog and child in the above illustration are not truly consciously awake, but fully aware.

The attentive skin

A human being has so many skins inside,
covering the depths of the heart.
We know so many things,
but we don't know ourselves!
 
Why, thirty or forty skins or hides,
as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's,
cover the soul.
Go into your own ground
and learn to know yourself there.
Meister Eckhart

Our existence as linguistic individuals in waking consciousness has not lasted longer than a snap of the fingers one second before midnight. 'The Word' was certainly not in the beginning. It came much later. We have covered the vast majority of our evolutionary journey sleeping as mute stones and dreaming plants.

The 'foretold' language
Despite the young age of words, they are often wiser than us who speak them.
For sometimes language hides the slumbering truths concealed in the simple that we ourselves cannot tell, but can only 'foretell'.
Let's try to get under the skin of the following everyday and all too familiar formulation:
'Do you feel comfortable?'
Our fundamental existence is primarily tied to feeling. To be is, first and foremost, a feeling: a sensed sensation that reigns from the borders of the skin to the inner bodily spaces.
The possible answer to the first question is just as interesting in its simplicity:
'Yes, thank you... I feel in a good mood!'
The 'I' tells of a 'me' who feels comfortable. The basic task of the 'I' is to protect and tell about its hidden little brother within: the feeling 'me'. Me has feelings. I tell about them - to ourselves and to others.

We all have a Mini-me. He is hidden inside behind the skin.

Me and I
Her er mini-mig sluppet ud

Feeling and sensing are fundamental to our existence. What was the first thing that 'felt' in us?

Skin sensing and cell membranes
What is the oldest operating system in the human organism? Which sense first emerged from the ancient cellular organisms' evolutionary tree? My guess is that attentive skin sensing is, from an evolutionary biology standpoint, our oldest sense. Skin sensing is the most fundamental aspect of humans' interaction with the outside world. Cells in the primordial ocean did not see, hear, or smell anything, even after they formed the first types of symbiotic life. These cells did not see the light, but they noticed the heat from it in the form of close-sensed information from their cell walls. They sensed the world, and through responses to this sensing, they survived. The older a biological survival system is, the more it will be anchored in unmediated bodily close sensing.

If a cell could understand and speak words, it would recognize the description of skin's sense of touch and might say: that's precisely how it feels out by my cell walls' protective ramparts! These single cells were small fortresses with protective walls around them, protecting even older forms of life, such as mitochondria. When these cells joined together in symbiotic alliances through an outer ring of sensory defense, they developed the beginnings of the extended hard skin that, through aeonic time in struggle, enabled them to survive as 'me'.

This type of close sensing is most closely related to the Precambrian primal cells' defense against annihilation: the fortified cell wall. Later, when cells discovered how to join together in symbiotic alliances, they carried this earliest genetic memory with them and, based on it, created a common 'cosmotic' defense against chaos in the form of skin. In this sense, cells' osmotic membranes are the recycled ramparts of attention from our original primordial home. From their biological palisades, skin sensing systems have defended pre-human and later human cell federations against attacks for billions of years.

Skin sensing is more closely tied to the eternal question of survival: death... or life? Even very primitive animals possess a sense of touch. Poke a worm with a sharp stick and observe it. Then poke a human and observe the reaction. Both reactions are about simple survival. Above all, we have been attentive to survive. Attention detects danger through the body's senses. If someone unexpectedly pokes us, our first reaction will be as old as the worms of the Cambrian period. The closer a threat comes to the body, the stronger the survival response will be.

Our Skin Tells Us What We Feel
From worms to humans, the sense of touch is our body's largest and most important sensory organ. Unlike other sensory organs, our skin covers our entire body surface. Through the skin's millions of tiny nerve endings, we receive information about our surroundings in the form of countless sensations, with the most important being warmth, cold, pain, pleasure, and various impressions of touch. Human skin senses the world in the same way as the world's first skin: the cell membrane.

The Outer and Inner Skin
We not only feel the world around us, but we also feel ourselves. Our inner emotions are intimately connected to our body's basic sensing of the world around us. We can feel love, but we can also simply feel an itch on our skin. Our attention is both introverted and extroverted. Our skin feels...and so do we. The inner world's near-sensations are so closely related to the skin's outer sensations that we even use words describing our skin's interaction with the outer world to express our inner experiences. My skin can be irritated, and so can I. The intimate connection between skin and emotions is also evident when we blush due to strong feelings.

The Skin's Narrated Emotions
In the following examples, we will see how words borrowed from the outer skin's sensory language transform into expressions for inner sensations through the thoughtful interpretation of our consciousness. The verbalization of our body's inner life reuses words from the skin's interaction with the outer world. We can be emotionally affected by situations, feeling touched, weighed down, squeezed, marked, or struck. Like our skin, we can feel irritated, pressured, or hurt. We describe people who are particularly emotionally sensitive as thin-skinned. We can be brutally honest or thick-skinned to the point where we don't listen to others. An experience or person can get under our skin, or we can wear our emotions on our sleeve. We can be soft or tough-skinned. We can also feel exposed to pressure. We talk about an atmosphere being tense or relaxed. The skin can also detect heaviness/lightness and warmth/cold, so we can feel heavy or light-hearted, and we can have warm or cold emotions. We can burn with love or anger, and we can be ice-cold towards someone we don't like. All these introverted, skin-narrated words are so closely sensed that we easily become touchy because we can't distance ourselves from them.

It should now be clear that attention in the context of Meditation.dk is primarily tied to the sensing skin. In the realm of awareness, humans are first and foremost skin-sensing, emotional beings. However, it seems that our waking consciousness does not fully acknowledge this, but instead allows the skin to narrate itself.
 

The Ancient, Incomprehensibly Fast, and Intimate Awareness

Would I have a God whom I could understand, I would no longer hold him for God.
Meister Eckhart

We are made of reincarnated bio-software. The most ancient coding in this recycling is our 'urge' for survival. It is the reason we are still here. All previously functional Darwinian biological experiences, from the primordial soup onward, are preserved as fundamental building blocks in our current biological architecture.
We are neck-deep in our body's sensed attention.
And we are not aware of it... It's simply mind-blowing!

The Indian mystic Kabir says he laughs when he hears that the fish in the sea are thirsty for water. The sensing body's overwhelming and vital presence is to consciousness like the air we breathe. We take it for granted until the moment it becomes inaccessible. Attention is incomprehensibly simple. It is the dark matter in our galactic microcosm.
 

Attention Beyond Words

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot be expressed in words.
Alfred North Whitehead
 

In unknowing knowing shall we know God."
Meister Eckhart

In a way, Wittgenstein was right when he said: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)
There is nothing beyond language. At least that's how it appears to the linguistic consciousness itself. The paradox is that even though the simply sensed existence of attention is overwhelmingly fundamental, our intellectual minds float around like disembodied consciousness balloons filled with word gas. Our Talking Heads are not aware of the extent to which they have grown out of the body's cellular sensory realm.