Consciousness

By J. Boerman

A lot is happening in the world around us, we interpret all this through our consciousness and make an interpretation of it. How we use this consciousness determines our interpretation of the world, there are different ways of perceiving our surroundings. According to the psychologist Velmans:

‘The contents of consciousness encompass all that we are conscious of, aware of, or experience. These include not only experiences that we commonly associate with ourselves, such as thoughts, feelings, images, dreams, body experiences and so on, but also the experienced three-dimensional world (the phenomenal world) beyond the body surface’.

The most well known state of perceiving is the rational everyday waking reality, the rational state modern society is focused on and sees as the only legitimate way of perceiving. There are also transrational states like meditation, trance, dreams, imagination and divination; sometimes they are also labelled altered states of consciousness. Approximately 90 percent of human cultures have institutionalized forms of altered states of consciousness, which means they are statistically normal. Anthropologist Laughlin argues that perceptual differences allow people to obtain information in many different ways and not every society perceives in the same way. Industrialized societies for example have specialized in the rational perception and have become monophasic cultures. One could say therefore that western ideational input is more specialized.

An understanding of the full consciousness to which we have potential is relevant. Because when we are monophasic (focus just on one) our interaction with our surroundings is fragmented and in misbalance. It also means that we analyse and diagnose in a fragmented manner and therefore do not notice the holistic picture, we get fragmented knowledge. It is therefore vital to study all sorts of perception and their relation to find the truth. Source: JPAB

Consciousness and the Environment