A meditation on the fabric of the mind.

Mind is a complex web of inner biological senses. There are endless ways that these webs of inner sense affect your state of awareness. Our conditioning - dominated by the most basic drives of attachment and aversion - tends to restrict the possibilities.  

The evolution of life through DNA has led to complex forms of communication - which lead to internal verbalization - thought. Thought is an interplay between ego, imagination, intelligence, emotion, instinct and memory. DNA is the biological memory that makes mind, thought, language possible. Mind, thought and language also affect the memories stored in DNA.

Inner sense - sensing thought. Sensing ego. Sensing emotion. Sensing memory. The fabric of awareness. The stuff or medium of the mind.

Inner sense - a web of millions of processes that each sense different inner processes. It's not a single sensory organ - but a complex combination of many biological sensory mechanisms. There are infinite possibilities in the ways that these inner processes can come together to form new kinds of senses, awareness, consciousness.

Consciousness - the word we use to indicate the stuff that is aware of thought, sensory experiences, memories, emotions, environment, other. Thats the simplest use of the word. When we try to figure out what consciousness is, there are many basic ideas about the simplest aspects of it's nature. For example -

It is unlikely that any of the current ideas about consciousness comes anywhere near close to reflecting the real nature of consciousness. Consciousness is not a single "thing" - it is a collection of a vast number of things and processes - steered by the intelligence, wisdom and energy of nature that is stored and channeled through  DNA -  turning living creatures towards the exploration and creation of new states of consciousness,

From our deep meditations, here are our discoveries about consciousness.

Consciousness is a complex and dynamic collection of a multitude of biological sensory devices. They are constantly shaping and responding to the stirrings of emotion, memory, ego, body, spirit. The balances between all these biological inner senses changes constantly - and with it, the "tone" of consciousness also changes. When you become aware of something, it is because myriads of micro-sensory processes have come together to form that awareness.

What are these micro-sensory processes? We believe there are endless kinds of such processes. As an example, when a neuron fires in the brain, a branch of neurons may become activated. We actually sense that firing. We perceive it as a memory, or a thought. However, at near-atomic levels, the brain is sensitive to the cellular mechanisms that give rise to the thought, and it is possible for consciousness to become aware of these fundamental cellular processes.

Within your mind you have the sense of a thought. The sense of an emotion. There are many types of neural mechanisms that actually sense these activities taking place within the nervous system - collectively they form a kind of self-sensing. If you watch your thoughts, it is possible to sense the moment that the thought arrives. If you steer that sense towards earlier modes of the thought, it is possible to sense the energies of the memories and impulses that gave rise to the thought.

The brain can sense the flow of energy within itself. This flow that carries thought, emotion, etc. This brain-self-sense comes from multiple sources - some in the synapse, some hormonal, many of unknown origin. They are biological, electrical, neural, other types of processes yet to be discovered. They come together in coherent, integrated life forms, with the help of DNA and other yet-to-be-discovered processes.

This dynamic collection of biological sensory devices is held together by subtle fields of energy. The biological cell is known to set up very weak fields and emissions of photons. When you have a huge collection of these cells, they tend to build a coherent field that tends to coordinate the whole system - provided there are enough healthy cells that are capable of setting up and responding to these self-generating fields. The fields are incredibly weak. But the cells are capable of sensing them thanks to a variety of mechanisms - maybe due to the antenna-like properties of DNA, and maybe as yet undiscovered signal processing mechanisms within DNA or the cell, that can extract useful information from incredibly weak signals buried in the electromagnetic noise of our environment.

This bio-sense-field also facilitates healing.  These fields can sense damaged cells and direct healing processes to focus on them. These fields carry the imagination, wisdom, intuition, powers of mental integration, creativity, numerous senses of connection, spiritual channels of communication.

There are many aspects of our mental activity that don't need consciousness. We can unconsciously use logical reasoning, memory, etc. Consciousness is not the sum-total of these basic processes - but it is the sum total of a variety of biological processes that sense these processes. This is a complex system - so for example these sensory mechanisms are conditioned by the underlying processes, and by the responses that they invoke, and by the integrated bio-sense-field. At the center of our conditioning resides this "ego". The ego directs attention, builds connections, develops some degree of control over this bio-sense-field. The direction that ego follows is somehow related to our biological conditioning. It is from this relationship between the demands of the ego and the biolgical matrix of our inner life, that the barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness emerges.

One of the key goals of the ego is to build models of the world in our minds. We explore our world-models in our imagination, art, science, study, culture, research, religion, play. The building blocks of our world models are memories, ideas, raw emotions, remembered emotions, associations, networks of thought, trained thought/learned thought, conditioning, bias, instinct, prejudice. Ideas range from detailed to generalized.

We judge the validity of our world model according to our emotional and instinctive biases, rarely according to critical analysis and we almost never accept the fact that our world model is innacurate, incomplete, full of uncertainty. We prefer to convince ourselves that our world model is a safe and absolutely certain representation of reality. Humans find that self-critical analysis is just too painful - which makes bias-free research of the human condition difficult. Some aspects of our world-model are stored in our DNA.

The mental powers that make it possible to develop a world model also make it possible to grow imagination, intelligence, wisdom.

Our world-model, no matter how simple or complex - is generally shared with others through a variety of mechanisms- with family, friends, community, tribe, race, nation, religion. Through these relationships our world-models take on unusual importance - they become our means of controlling the emotion of the group because they provide the general sense of safety, security, predictability for that group. We become attached to our world-model because we firmly believe that it gives us a sense of safety and certainty. We feel safe when our world is full of predictability. We avoid, fear or hate things that we feel are too difficult to incorporate into our world-model. We're often willing to destroy those who we believe are threatening this sense of safety and certainty. This gives rise to the widespread human desire for domination/control in the the name of an idea.

To build our world model, the brain is willing to make approximations. A generalization is one such approximation. Attachment to generalizations is the root of racism, intolerance, violence, and war. We see for example someone of foreign origin doing something that we would never do ourselves - this scares us because it is seen as far too unusual or unexpected or different from the norms of our world model. The brain's primitive instincts are affected by the higher brain's world model maker. The primitive brain quickly responds to the "strange behaviors of foreigners" and arouses defensive or agressive emotions. These emotions also affect our world-model-making processes - where we speculate that maybe something that seems so unusual should scare us, maybe it wants to destroy or dominate us. When you extrapolate these basic processes to the scales of the human race - with all those primitive alligences to tribe, nation, race, and so on - you find you have discovered the reason why humans keep resorting to violence, destruction, war.

Generalizations are flaky. Yet the brain has a tendency to give generalizations a place of great importance in it's world model. Technically generalizations have value in organizing our world model. Technically a generalization can be used to help identify common features of something - usually groups of people, culture, religions, technology, etc. It's technical value is lost when we don't accept it's limitations, innacuracies and incompleteness.

When primitive instincts are in the drivers seat and pushed to high arousal, our ability to sustain a coherent field of our inner biological senses is diminished. In this condition our world model-imagination-intelligence-emotions are entangled with fear, greed, hate, rage.

Grasping and aversion - deeply rooted in our lives - from the cells to the instincts to the mind - are what keep those primitive instincts in the drivers seat.

These entanglements interact both ways with the world-model-imagination-intelligence-emotions-instincts: grasping/aversion are pumped up when we are captured by these entanglements. Then grasping/eversion pump up the entanglements. Escalation occurs.

With the escalation of these entanglements, the mind becomes over-reactive. A generalization - technically useful in building our world model - becomes a source of emotional arousal. The activities of the imagination become stimulus for destructive emotions. Inner-sense is subdued, coming to the surface only when the raging storm quietens from exhaustion.

Interaction between generalization and the entanglements (fuelled by escalting grasping/aversion) is the root of all forms of discrimination, human conflict and violence.

Imagination is capable of creating a huge inner space. When there is a lack of inner space, the mind operates on autopilot - it is mostly reactive. When there is inner space, the reactive processes of the mind are dampened/still, while more of our biological energy is drawn to mental process that are explorative and creative. Within this inner space, we can explore consciousness - discover new kinds of inner sense (consciousness) and new ways of using and combining existing forms of consciousness - new ways of sensing thoughts and emotions - new ways of structuring our world model.

With the creation of new kinds of inner senses, we become more able to explore new forms of direct awareness of life's energies, of spiritual energies, of the web of interconnection that pervades all dimensions of reality. It may become possible to commune with the ancient biological knowledge stored in DNA, or spiritual energies from other universes.