Levels of Consciousness

Effective mind control can carry you to the highest levels of consciousness. The secret is to become familiar with those levels by developing your skills in sensing them. Lower emotionallevels include fear, shame, guilt, apathy, despair, greed, anger and pride.

Remember how you immediately recognize and interact with your friends? Familiarity with these emotional responses leads you to a similar state. They become as familiar to you as your friends. When you become swiftly aware of these pitfalls, you will reach your highest RI levels. That state grants you reason, neutrality, acceptance and peace.

The RI level will continue and open your mind to love and joy. Evolutionary history, the logic of ascending control systems and age old Buddhist experiences point jointly to the concrete existence of these states of mind.

A level of consciousness is a state, where an individual emotion permeates all awareness.
RI is the state where the prefrontal regions, with a common sense view dominates consciousness.
Evolution created reptilian, mammalian and RI level control systems in the brain.
People lack an awareness that shifts in moods are caused by shifts in levels.
Libet's experiments show that awareness follows actions by the control systems.
Nerve cells hold memory codes measured in CUBIC MILES of 500 page books.
Each emotion has limited access to the knowledge of the mind.
RI has access to global knowledge. The RI level has been reached by Buddhists.
The focus of RI on lower levels inhibits them. This was discovered by Buddhists.

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 emotionlimits 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.

Reach The RI Level!
These Mind Control Tips offer you a practical path to reach your RI level of consciousness. With its immense wisdom, RI can give you many an answer. It is the seat of your conscience. It reflects your truest wishes. It requires effort to retain your highest level of consciousness, with RI in ongoing control. That requires self awarenes, which identifies and inhibits the competing emotions, which disturb you. When RI clearly identifies an emotion, it becomes stilled. With persisting practice, RI will take over ongoing control and you will become calm. At the highest levels of consciousness, you will view the ups and downs of life without emotions, “like watching a bird in the sky.” It is worth the effort. Begin today!

This page was last updated on 31-Dec-2013

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Once, Decades Ago, I Tripped Over The Divine

For me, the flash of insight into the sublime happened way back in 1989. The vision stunned me with the grandeur of its simplicity. The startling prospect emerged from, of all things, an algorithm! Its potential flickered into my view by accident, while transferring a Prolog AI disease recognition procedure to a Lotus spreadsheet.  I had inadvertently reversed the logic of the Expert System, instructing it to eliminate improbabilities, instead of selecting probabilities. Such algorithms are just repetitive procedures. Cold and logical lines of code. But, they yield dependable results. Algorithms are just mechanical tools. But, this algorithmic code was unique.

The capability of the algorithm was that it could sift a Google sized database of connected facts to instantly recognize patterns. This was 10 years before Google started building its vast data warehouses. But, I knew the mind identified complex patterns when you just opened your eyes!  For the next few months, glimpses of probable neural accomplishments through instant pattern recognition kept waking me up at 3 a.m. I kept adding to the list on paper. The dots just kept connecting. Decades later, more possible links keep opening up new horizons - say, the seat of consciousness or the persistence of working memory. This algorithm could distinguish between good and evil. It could make us weep in anguish or gasp in wonder.  Could it be the fabled divine gift to life?

It worked in the mind. Gray's Anatomy was an exhaustive source and a starting point for me. Its 1500 pages listed the functions of virtually every mental organ. The algorithm could link them all into a single mind that could suture an artery, while recalling a tennis match. Starting at the input level, it focused your senses. The light from the heavens. The songs of the birds. The touch of a loved one. The fragrance of a rose. The taste of chocolate. We were blessed with millions of receptors, which flashed this magnificent perception of the world to the sensory regions of our cortex. There were association regions there, which could use the algorithm on this data to identify a pencil, or a word. We could separate the idea of a gun from the idea of a war in the abundance of incoming sensory patterns.

Object and event recognition. Algorithmic pattern recognition could act at every stage of mental processing. Things were happening all around us. There was a limbic system, where the algorithm could identify between good and bad happenings. It generated emotions. This mammalian region could drive us to attack in anger, or flee in terror. It was the limbic system, which held us in thrall. It filled us with despair, or tortured us in grief. It made us question the very meaning of life. Life was so unfair. Why did we have to suffer so?

Sadly, we lacked the capacity to naturally see our emotions and feelings. The limbic system was invisible to us. It was the algorithm, which caused the motor system to transform those emotions and feelings into actions. Hunger made us raid the frig. We went to work every day to avoid the pain of guilt. Love reminded us to pick up children from school. Hatred built the death camps. In the end, urges from the limbic system drove us out of Eden.

As a precious compensation, algorithmic pattern recognition ascended to higher levels. Our prefrontal regions gifted us with science and logic. Those skills enabled us to understand the vast structures of the cosmos. We built leviathans, which could sail the oceans and fly the skies. We explored the heavens. Our powerful civilizations conquered the continents and explored the cosmos. Even more, the algorithm also pointed us to the divine, which defied logic and definition. We sensed the order and beauty, which, like the laws of nature, existed from the beginning of time.

Pattern recognition dealt with subtleties. Reason and logic could not create great symphonies, or works of art. Why do we stand in awe of the sunset? Or find joy in a lilting song, or in the laugh of a baby?  Nerve cells recognized such patterns without our awareness and fired to initiate the skin tingling thrill. Who, but the Designer, could possibly want to hard wire us to thrill to the astonishing splendor of the design?

Over three decades have passed since my first glimpse of the truth. Like an ancient city hidden by forest cover, the vast and invisible city of the mind has many avenues linking its great palaces and temples. I also realized that those divine pattern recognition paths led to still spaces, untrammelled by the ravages of emotions and feelings.... Life was worth living! Even the great sages of the past advised us to still passions to empower the sublime within us. The divine stillness lives at the core. You too can find your home there.

The information provided in this website is useful for the modification of normal behavioral patterns. Please do get professional help, before applying the advice for the treatment of any abnormal behaviors. Copyright ©2008 by Ebbi Thomas. All rights reserved. This material may be freely published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.