Edward’s Diary Entry 110: Self-Awareness Diagrams - 1

Let’s remember that we have classified Self-Awareness into 5 states on this blog, from 0 to 5:

“S-A 0” – Deep sleep, where our normal “awareness” is zero.

“S-A 1” – REM sleep, where our “awareness” is of dreams and dreaming.

“S-A 2” – Normal “waking state” of conditioned man and woman, where “awareness” is at a minimum and often only comes when provoked from outside, when we are told something and become a little more “aware” or cognizant at that moment.

“S-A 3” – The “Observed waking state” in which we have already distinguished and ordered the components of mind into their appropriate places: we are often “aware” of our body’s productions, the appearance of sensations, the appearance of feelings, and the occurrence of thoughts in our minds, but there is an Observer or Watcher of these who stands slightly apart from them and evaluates them before reacting according to conditioning.

“S-A 4” – Flashes of a conjectured (unknown as yet) incipient “Cosmic awareness state” in which individual consciousness expands to embrace all life and all creation, and the individual “bubble of Self” dissolves, meaning that the higher faculties or regions are accessed by what we might call the “soul” and there is direct perception of Truth… This may be enlightenment, liberation, mukti, etc.

“S-A 5” – This is when S-A 4 or Enlightenment becomes permanent.

We don’t need diagrams of S-A 0 and S-A 1 because we are all familiar with these lower states of consciousness.

We do need a diagram for S-A 2, however, because this is the “normal waking state” called going with the flow, or the societal junk-heap, or the philosopher’s “unexamined life”, because everything in the mind is all higgledy-piggledy, a result of dubious upbringing, education, injunctions, belief systems and falsely “thinking that one knows”:

In this state, there is no coherence in the mind, as sensations, urges, impulses, thoughts and emotions simply pop up at any time when elicited from outside or within, and are automatically accepted as “I”. We have had our personalities formed by society, with a touch here and there of our own concoction, but this is Socrates' "unexamined life that is not worth living..."

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