My Window on Consciousness

By Irving Stubbs

Quotes from the Book: 

Human consciousness is our experiential awareness, consisting of feelings, thoughts, intentions, and our personal sense of identity. 

We all know the difference between being conscious and not being conscious. 

Like a polarizing magnetic field that draws iron filings i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: May 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638374251

Irving Stubbs

Irving R. Stubbs has been a consultant to organizations and their leaders across the United States, in Canada, Mexico, the UK, across Europe, in Japan and in Hong Kong. He is a minister and served 4 pastorates before transitioning to his consultancy. In his practice of transformational dialogue, he discovered that a critical key to stretching potential was stretching consciousness.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1:

QUOTES

T

hese quotes, continuing from the back cover, offer clues to what will come later. They are from a wide range of sources. The context of most of these quotes will be found in the chapters that follow. There are conflicting views included in these quotes and their context. I think of these conflicting views as expressions of complementarity.¹ I have taken the liberty to juggle the structure of the quotes to fit my narrative. These quotes preview coming reflections.

We all know the difference between being conscious and not being conscious. Consciousness is the word that we use to circumscribe all the different kinds of experiences that we can have. Human consciousness is our experiential awareness, consisting of feelings, thoughts, intentions, and our personal sense of identity.

Awareness is knowing or consciousness in a state of close attention. That spark of awareness that experiences, and that remembers experience—that is consciousness.

Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself, such as thoughts, feelings, memories, or sensations. It has also been defined in the following ways: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive-control system of the mind.

These three-pound brains in our heads appear to contain billions of neurons with trillions of synaptic connections. These electrochemical connections flash across our brain networks and form patterns that lead to our consciousness.

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Like a polarizing magnetic field that draws iron filings into formations of multiple ellipses, consciousness aligns the processes of the mind into patterns with direction and purpose.

Thoughts, perception and memories could take place in a consciousness somewhere separate from the brain, but are then received and processed by the brain.

It has become a thing for theoretical physicists to weigh in on consciousness and, returning the favor, for neuroscientists to weigh in on physics. Consciousness is such a deep and pervasive problem that it makes an odd couple of neuroscience and physics. Even if the answer does not lie in the interconnectedness of networks, it surely demands the interconnectedness of disciplines.

Consciousness is contained and upheld not only by its biological host, but also by the culture in which it participates. Consciousness incorporates stimuli from the environment as well as internal stimuli.

As human culture develops and evolves, human consciousness evolves along with it. Attention is fundamentally the linkage between consciousness and any aspect of the world around us.

The Attention Schema Theory (AST) suggests that our brains evolved with mechanisms to overcome information overflow by processing select signals at the expense of others. According to the AST, our consciousness is the result of that evolution. The textum directs our senses to what is deemed important, and the cortex part of our brains shifts our covert attention to what is near via a thought or memory. According to the AST, the origin of consciousness is the covert attention from one item to another.

A further adaptation enabled us to model the attention states of others as consciousness itself evolved to our ability to attribute consciousness to others.

No human has ever seen a brain or anything else produce consciousness. The brain doesn’t produce consciousness any more than it produces sound waves when you hear music. We know lots about the mechanics of the brain, right down to the molecular level, but when it comes to consciousness, we simply haven’t got a clue.

There’s a lot of evidence from scientific research that the brain, under extraordinary circumstances, seems to come unlinked from consciousness, and consciousness can in fact, function better without the mediation of the physical brain.

A 24-year-old woman checked into a Chinese hospital complaining of dizziness and nausea. The doctors did a CAT scan and found a big hole in her brain where the cerebellum should have been. Though deprived of three-quarters of her neurons, she showed every sign of being as conscious as any of us are.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Consciousness is nonlocally infinite, immortal, and one with all other minds. Consciousness precedes Being. All dying patients exhibit a profound feeling of peace just before death. As the brain finally begins to die, consciousness is released from the grasp of the degenerating brain.

A random mutation in the genome happens that gives a creature an advantage to survive. Because of that, it survives and reproduces. That’s it. Nothing within evolution accounts for the quality of life of that creature. Consciousness was a mutation that helped us realize we can make fire and use words. That made us great at not dying. That’s why we have it.

Consciousness has granted humans the awareness to solve problems, think abstractly, and to even realize our place in the universe. However, it’s also given us a stunningly inflated sense of entitlement that we use to justify our destroying the planet and slaughtering of everything living in the name of our own comfort and pleasure.

The Ancient Mayans were among the first to propose an organized sense of each level of consciousness, its purpose, and its temporal connection to humankind. The Mayans believed it to be the most basic form of existence, capable of evolution. The Incas considered consciousness a progression not only of awareness but of concern for others as well.

Teilhard de Chardin theorized that the progressive growth of consciousness itself is ultimately the purpose of our existence. Teilhard advanced his law of complexity-consciousness which holds that consciousness develops in direct proportion to an organism’s organizational complexity.

As consciousness becomes successful at addressing the problems of one level of evolution, those very solutions result in a new set of problems that can be addressed only by the next emerging stage of development. Each stage of consciousness arises in response to the essential problems of its time in history. Each new mutation in consciousness produced an expanded type of perspective.

In our consciousness, this Eros of evolution—this hunger for greater perfection—is stimulated by the eternal images of the beautiful, the true, and the good, which spur us onward and upward and inward into increasingly more evolved states.

Values serve to energize consciousness by providing input and throughput for its systemic metabolism. In order to raise our consciousness permanently and overall, in order to move our center of gravity into integral consciousness, we have to raise not only our thinking, but also our values, and our loyalties.

All growth in consciousness is a lessening of self-centeredness, a ‘death’ to the old self-centered way of looking at the world and a simultaneous ‘rebirth’ into a less self-centered way of seeing things.

We are created to grow to Kegan’s Fifth Level. When we shift to the 5th Order, we open our capacity to reconnect the previous Orders, build relationships among them, and launch a transformative level of consciousness. There are ways to raise our levels of consciousness.

Consciousness is a continuum in which at every stage we have the opportunity for learning and growth. Heightened consciousness is something that surpasses our ordinary, conscious mind. At the higher levels of consciousness, we no longer feel separate. We feel, know, and experience oneness with the universal energy field.

Postmodern consciousness is characterized by a high degree of sensitivity—sensitivity to those who have been previously marginalized or exploited, sensitivity to the needs and fragility of the environment, and sensitivity to the charms of the feminine way of knowing.

And if integral consciousness is indeed the next step in our culture’s evolution, then we can expect it to produce not only social and political evolution, we can also expect that it will bring about the evolution of our culture’s spirituality.

It appears that the enthusiastic pursuit of spiritual experience is usually a central feature in the lives of those who have achieved the complex worldview of integral consciousness. As it is practiced in the more developed stages of consciousness, faith in God yields composure, contentment, and supreme joy.

1 Zheng Wang and Jerome Busemeyer: The general concept of complementarity was developed by Niels Bohr in a series of debates with Einstein, but the main idea can be summarized as follow: Different measurement conditions for observing different phenomena are complementary when (a) they are mutually exclusive, and only one can be applied at any time; and (b) they are all necessary for a comprehensive account of these phenomena.

CHAPTER 2:

INTRODUCTION

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his book is about something we all have. OUR CONSCIOUSNESS. The thesis of this book is that most of us can make more of our consciousness than we do.

Plato’s Socrates seems to have understood the way that consciousness works. He said that the aim of life is not to choose the right, but to become the sort of person who cannot choose the wrong and who no longer has any choice in the matter. There are implications in this statement that find support in what follows. My window on consciousness has been opening to light and refreshing air, and it has helped me to be more than I was. What follows is my attempt to share this experience.

When our consciousness stretches to the higher levels for which we are equipped, we align with kindred spirits to change the world.