Levels of Consciousness

Many Levels of Consciousness
Your mental states exist at many levels. A person lives, but remains in coma below the lowest level ofconsciousness. As you rise from barely aware states, at the middle animal levels, your world view may shift suddenly to despair, or shame. At the highest RI level, you will be calm. Your moods change with each level.

Shifting Controls
Why are there such drastic changes in your views between the different levels of consciousness? Because, your triune brain contains competing feeling and emotional controls, including reptilian and mammalian subsystems, which evolved over millions of years. Each control entity envelops you into the views of its level of consciousness. An intuitive decision making process shifts controls instantly between the conflicting views of varied levels of consciousness. You remain helpless, while your world view swings erratically between joy and despair.

Evolution is responsible
Elementary pangs, like hunger, or anger provided controls for the brains of reptiles, snakes and birds. Advanced social feelings like shame and guilt added more controls to the mammalian brains of dogs and cats. These operate at lower levels of consciousness. The final addition was the Real “I,” (RI) the rational subsystem, the highest level intelligence, in the recently expanded prefrontal cortex. When you don't know the existence of these levels, you will be unwittingly dominated by unpredictable moods. When you become familiar with the symptoms of different levels of consciousness, RI will take control and free you from such turmoil.

RI Has A Detached View
While the lower operating levels whip you through a slew of painful emotions, RI manages the system with a detached unemotional view. The Buddhists have seen the view of the highest levels of cosciousness. “You will not see something is good or bad, whether it is a beautiful picture or a very ugly picture, a sweet sound or an ugly sound. When you act like this, your mind will stay calm.”

Instant Processing
Your mind chooses your options with lightning rapidity. It remembers millions of evolutionary experiences and can recall anything you have seen, or heard. Intuition enables instant processing. In the blink of an eye, it receives a sensory perception, recognizes it, interprets it and then responds with motor activity. It sees a word on this page, recognizes it as a unique entity, gathers its meaning and then moves on to the next word, within the time it takes spilled coffee to hit the saucer.

RI Can Act Only When In Control
Your system decides your level. The famous experiments of Benjamin Libet showed that the emotion which controls a particular level of consciousness acts before you know it. Libet studied subjects who voluntarily pressed a button, while noting the position of a dot on a computer screen, which shifted its position every 43 milliseconds. Each time, he had also timed the beginning of motor neuron activity in the brains of his subjects. The noted moment of depressing the button was the moment of conscious awareness.

Libet discovered that awareness occurred 350 milliseconds AFTER the beginning of motor activity. Each level of consciousness takes charge and then informs you. If you are angry, you will act in anger. If you are calm, you actions will be just right. So, to control your mind, you have to put RI in charge before you act!

Your System Has An Immense Wisdom
Shifting control systems manage your brain. Billions of nerve cells within those circuits have amassed an ancient wisdom, on a galactic scale. To get an idea, in a grown human body, with the DNA in each cell containing a sequence of over 3 billion chemical nucleotide bases, the total of those codes in the body would FILL THE GRAND CANYON FIFTY TIMES OVER WITH 500 PAGE BOOKS!  Your changing levels of consciousness are also supported by massive inherited and acquired knowledge.

The Partisan Wisdom of Emotions
Early in history, the evaluation of smells enabled the olfactory bulb to detect safety, danger, or opportunity and make survival choices. Just like the olfactory bulb, several organs in the limbic system initiate different levels of consciousness, adding more choices. Those organs trigger anger, fear or guilt. Your nervous system permits only a single control system to take charge. Nature also limits the information available to lower levels of consciousness. Anger, fear, or guilt will focus the organism on a specific strategy, inhibiting awareness of other viewpoints. Consequences worry you less, when you are angry.  Each emotion limits knowledge and envelops the system in its innate level of consciousness.  Dominated by the current perception, you are enveloped in anger, gloom, or joy.

The Wisdom of RI
Peace of mind requires your ability to induce the RI level of consciousness. Your prefrontal regions contain a powerful analytical intelligence.  Those regions have access to all your sensory perceptions, recognition messages and emotional patterns, which enable your mind to make your subtle decisions - to support democracy, or to invest in a home. Uninhibited by emotions, at the highest level of consciousness, RI has the wisdom of the ages and the ability to make sense of a complex modern world.

The Buddhists Know
The Buddhists have advocated an effective mind control method to reach the highest levels of consciousness. Observe the shifting streams of thought within you. Matthieu Ricard, the eminent Buddhist Monk said: "One may wonder what people do in retreats, sitting for eight hours a day. They familiarize themselves with a new way of dealing with the arising of thoughts.

When you start getting used to recognizing thoughts as they arise, it is like rapidly spotting someone you know in a crowd. When a powerful thought or anger arises, you recognize it. That helps you to avoid being overwhelmed by this thought."  The Buddhists know that self knowledge will induce your highest level of consciousness to take charge.