The 'facts' of our lives structure our conscious
existence. We think of fantasies as unreal, 'lies', but they are often fictions that
consist of fragmented 'truth' set against a background of make-believe events.
They communicate our deepest fears and desires and identify the realities
that support or stand in their way.
What constitutes a 'fact'? In essence, a fact must be
able to be validated to the extent it cannot be reasonably denied. If it cannot be shown in
concrete sensory terms to be consistently valid in our interactive
environment, it is a hypothesis, conjecture, speculation, guesswork, a
fantasy or a belief, but not a fact.
Facts can be hard to come by. 'The ground is solid
beneath our feet' stands as fact, until we remember the reality of
earthquakes.
'Facts' employed by the imagination pose a special
problem. A metal screw upon a desk cannot be altered. An imaginary screw
in our imagination can be any size, shape, and can be employed in endless,
unlikely scenarios. We imagine wish-fulfillment, but when applied to real,
everyday problems, the imagination tends to conjure
worse-case scenarios wherein we become our own enemy pitted against foes
and mindless forces of nature that know our every move and vulnerability,
evade our defenses effortlessly, and cannot be harmed. We react
emotionally to such scenarios because of the difficulty the limbic system
has in discerning reality from the imagined, fact from fiction, enabling
us to take our upset all the way to the so-called nervous breakdown,
complete nervous exhaustion, or even suicide.
Regardless of whether we settle for an 'interactive'
reality as a resolution to the mind-body problem, or insist upon a totally objective physical reality, no aspect of
reality has meaning or significance until it is processed in a quite
automatic fashion and presented to conscious awareness with an
interpretation and evaluation already set in place. We
obtain most of such evaluations from personal experience. Bees stings are
bad, unless we are bee keepers and know the essential role bees play in
our lives. Sugar is sweet and provides energy, but our nemesis if we are
diabetic.
Social values are those that cause us the most
confusion and disconcertion, because we are expected to adhere to the
interpretations and evaluations of 'authorities' within the society within
which we live. We tend to toe the line as best we can within our native
culture, but in a part of the world strange to us, it's
not hard for our behavior to unintentionally offend. We
shouldn't try eating in public with our left hand in a Saudi Arabia, as an
example.
Science strives to define the facts of ‘objective
physical reality’, but religious, political and philosophical authorities
are quick to point out exactly what emotional connotations should be
assigned the various elements of that 'objective' reality, what should be
believed and the fate we shall reap should we fail to conform to social
norms. They are our self-styled wannabe 'alphas’, if we allow them the
honor. For those who fall back on old biological foundations and look to
‘alphas’ for guidance, conscious presence never develops the skill to
reason for itself. Our minds become the manufactured product of other
people, and we’re hardly inhabitants of realities anyone would recognize
as ‘objective’.
Regardless, facts are vital. We need sensory
measurements, inches, and meters, and seconds and years that share a few
common frameworks between cultures. It is left to the individual to
discriminate between the reality of an 'inch' and that of a superstition.
Facts become the
foundation to our lives either way.
Based upon the 'facts' we accept, conscious presence forms the structure of reactive
processes during the course of life, most of it set in place long before we reach
adulthood. The reactive mind is built upon our beliefs about reality,
ideas, expectations, and anticipations. Our reactive mind is our own
personal creation, or at least our own personal responsibility. We all
have one. Some are works of art. Others are living nightmares.
These reactive processes are entirely transparent
when we do not oppose them. We think we are initiating most of what we do
on a moment by moment basis.
Because conscious presence gave these reactive processes birth by
systematically accepting each premise upon which they function, even if
only as an abdication, we strongly identify with our habits of thought and
behavior and feel our psyche to be a smoothly functioning unit. We become
aware of the power of reactive behavior only when we try to stand in its
way.
Parents, guardians and others close to us early in life
played a large hand in providing us with the beliefs upon which we have
programmed our reactive minds. We learned to see the world through their
eyes when we had no experience of our own with which to work. Regardless,
what we accept and what we reject was fully volitional then, even as it is
today, and no belief is etched so deeply that it cannot be identified and
reconsidered.
Nobody but us makes the choices upon which our reactive
processes are programmed. Nobody can monitor what we think, nor can they
control what we choose to think. Only through our behavior can our beliefs
be seen by others and then manipulated, but we succumb to their
machinations only if we have confused their beliefs for our reality and
believe that we have no right to our own choices.
Conscious presence is our reality in its entirety. What
we call our reactive mind and other autonomic functions of the nervous
system are conscious models of what we can perceive about ourselves, which
may not be nearly as much as we may imagine. It is the role of conscious presence to
monitor and evaluate the performance of the reactive mind and autonomic
functions and to
compensate for ever increasing levels of education and emotional maturity,
to tweak its programming, so to speak, as we grow. We reactively throw
temper tantrums as four-year-olds. Hopefully, we do not do so at
twenty-four.
This still does not mean that conscious presence is
imbued with some mysterious wisdom and intelligence. Conscious presence
unifies independent, but interrelated processes into a unified, 'quantum'
whole. Conscious presence structures the psyche by
virtue of its focus. Unwanted elements drop from view, vanish entirely, or
wait in the wings for another opportunity at manifestation. We build on
that which we acknowledge.
If conscious presence abdicates its responsibility to
keep the programming of the reactive mind up-to-date, either out of simple
laziness or deference to the beliefs of others, conscious presence becomes
a prisoner of an isolated, self-contained waking dream. Because the
reactive mind is largely a defense mechanism and actively seeks out hidden
danger lurking in the environment, imagined or otherwise, our waking dream
soon degenerates to a living nightmare. Many of us are caught up in such a
nightmare, and have been for as long as we can remember.
The nightmare is not unrelenting. Occasionally, we are
startled into moments of internal silence by unexpected events that do not
associate with past experience, often moments of unexpected beauty, first
sight of a newborn child, the unanticipated beauty of a panoramic dawn at
daybreak, or maybe the confused silence following a car crash.
We cannot sustain this clear focus for long, but when
conscious presence ‘wakes up’ momentarily, the sudden clarity and
stillness serves as a contrast to the mass confusion of our usual mental
state. If only we could hold that inner peace and silence for a little
while longer. We intuitively sense that we need longer moments of this
utter calm to effectively rethink the value of fast and furious cycle of
daydreams, thoughts, and emotions churning inside our heads.
We can actually test the integrity of our link to that
unfettered world by sitting quietly, emptying our mind of all thought, and
counting slow, natural breaths to one hundred and twenty. A clear
conscious presence all the way through the test indicates relative freedom
from reactive domination.
Many of us will lose our train of thought along the
way, and
subsequent efforts become increasingly frustrating and annoying. We can
become alarmed by our defenselessness against our own uncontrolled
imagination. What was once seen as a tool has now become a tyrant. The
power we thought ruled the human mind, our conscious will, is, in fact,
the victim of our obsessive daydreaming.
Those of us who enjoy independence from the reactive
process live in the immanent Now. The immanent Now is our current moment
of consciousness. It is the only moment of time we ever experience,
because it is a state that changes by virtue of the ability of consciousness
to bridge the changes of the moment in a sequential, space-time manner
and thereby to be
aware of the illusion of continuity.
But we do not live in a realm of
continuity. Consciousness does not reside in time at all. It orchestrates
associations between quantum states of information. We see
information as qualia. We confuse qualia for 'objective physical
reality' something outside of ourselves. If we have believed that the
coherency of 'objective physical reality' is due to quantum entanglement,
we can apply the same rules to information. We are not conscious of
information. The information and is processing is a conscious reality in
and of itself. The notion of an 'objective physical reality' is an
intermediary than was never needed.
Quantum
theory strongly implies that the apparent continuity we experience is an illusion
similar to the twenty-odd frames per second projected upon a movie screen
that we perceive as a smooth flow rather than as a sequence of 'quantum'
states. Consciousness spans, by the process of interference, a short range
of associated changes in the immanent Now. This we struggle to define as a flow of
something mysterious, matter existing in time. We call it 'time' when we need only to acknowledge
change. The matter we need only acknowledge as conscious qualia.
Simple common sense alone tells us that this is indeed the nature of
our experience. The notion of objectivity and the intermediary of matter
and energy are only necessary as a stop-gap in our ignorance of the nature
of conscious information processing, quantum information
processing at that. We experience our conscious reality as limited and
'individual'. Given sufficient conscious awareness, we would perceive the
conscious multiverse, Platonia, and see ourselves as both the limited
'individual' within the whole picture as well as the 'oversoul' itself,
which is a matter of perspective and, in a manner of speaking, our
existence as an information processing subroutine in the larger equation
of our part of overall reality.
We have no access to the past as we sometimes imagine.
Memories are but simulations. Dreams are similar in nature. When we
'remember' an event, we change it by virtue of having accessed it, and it is
that recalled and rememorized memory we will access in the future, not the
original.
We seldom have any smooth continuity of memory at all.
Memories are more often static snapshots, or icons, of past experience.
They arise to consciousness by virtue of their emotional association with
thoughts and events in the immanent Now. Memories that do not associate
with events, thoughts, or feelings in the immediate moment may never be
replayed at all no matter how revealing or valuable they may be to us.
Let's try this experiment in our imagination: We place
before us a stack of clean paper, one for every day of our life,
seventy-three hundred sheets for a twenty year-old, almost fifteen reams
of paper. The top sheet of paper represents yesterday. Now, we proceed to
record key memories of each of the days of our lives. Some memories will
be vivid and could fill several sheets of paper, but once the repertoire
of memory used to maintain our emotional being in the here and now is
exhausted, the stack of blank paper that remains demonstrates the
unsettling void of forgotten yesterdays.
Our store of memory may be total despite the fact that
our conscious access to it is generally meager. Some have eidetic
memories, and chimps have far better short-term memories than ourselves.
Either way, memory is built upon association, a clue as to how our lives
are structured.
A church bell rings as we pass through a strange town,
and for the first time in decades, we remember an old corner church from
our childhood. Someone walking at our side won’t see the church or hear
the bell at all, instead concentrating on a green street lamp similar to
those surrounding a city park near their childhood home.
Memory used to sustain our sense of self and our
self-esteem is especially, even appallingly, meager and consists largely
of a vicious cycle of emotional ‘tapes’ etched too deeply in our reactive
processes to easily alter or disregard. Beliefs that result in low
self-esteem associate with memories of failure and humiliation. There are
enough small victories and successes in even the most unsuccessful life
upon which to build healthy self-esteem, but conviction of one’s
worthlessness will render them irrelevant and we will overlook their
existence.
The reactive mind makes no claim to objectivity. Our
only moment of personal power is in the immanent Now. We use memory to
form and then authenticate the acausal structure of our selves in the
immanent Now. Memories do not rise into consciousness unless evoked in
ways that may not always be apparent. They have no independence of their
own.
In other words, what we believe to be true in the here
and now largely triggers the associative process of memory. The past as we
remember it is entirely determined by our beliefs in the here and now.
Just as the past exists as associative memory, the
future as far as we can know it also exists as associative
extrapolation. It is certainly true that we must anticipate and plan
during the course of our lives, but if we react emotionally to purely
imagined future events, we are acting out dreams churning up an endless
succession of worst-case scenarios. And if we begin to act upon those, we
become like dreamers bereft of the safeguards of sleep paralysis who will
rear up in bed hysterically fending off hordes of unseen demons.
But we never for a moment doubt that what we feel and
how we behave is nevertheless founded upon an ‘objective physical reality’
within which we live and die. What we see of the world is what we get, and
what we get is what we have to deal with the best we can.
It will take a bit of explaining to show why this is
not even close to the truth.
