Wisdom: #2 What is consciousness?
Now let's begin a topic that for many years of my life seemed to be a secret with no answer. Each of us intuitively knows what consciousness is. We all think we have it, but it's hard to logically explain it. I'll try. Are we sure that we have consciousness as our own? What if we are the consciousness having the human body instead?
Everything that exists in the Universe comes from and arises from a sea of information. Evolution (personal development, spiritual development) is about obtaining information that we do not yet have from experiences. Evolution is the development of consciousness through the assimilation of truths that have been experienced, verified, understood, and accepted.
Example:
A person repeats a pattern - attracts similar people. He doesn't understand why he keeps running into people who use his resources, overuse him, and he feels tired. He starts blaming these people until he takes responsibility for himself. When this happens, he begins to look for a real cause of the situation. He makes various theses and tests them in practice. He assumes that perhaps it is the fault of his childhood, zodiac sign, destiny, and many other factors. However, none of these answers is correct - the person still does not feel peace and completion, something is still missing. This are all symptoms of ignorance (missing information). Time passes and finally a person comes across information that maybe he is not talking about his needs, that maybe he allows himself to be used and thus attracts more and more people who subconsciously feel it. The moment he fully realizes that and takes action - eureka - that was it. Now he understands, has verified the correct thesis, and thanks to the results, accepted that this was what life was trying to teach him. In this way, he has expanded his consciousness and will not make the same mistakes anymore.
The key thing in expanding consciousness is wisdom. Wisdom is each lesson we have learned. Wisdom is information assimilated by consciousness. We gain wisdom with destiny - it is a cluster of situations and life events that constitute 20-30% of our life and cannot be avoided. These situations involve various levels of difficulty and are opportunities to learn and assimilate the wisdom that is hidden in them. At the stages leading up to wisdom, the most common appearances are beliefs, knowledge, theories, tests and trials, decisions and mistakes. Contrary to wisdom - knowledge - requires only memory and is stored by personality. Knowledge does not expand consciousness, but true understanding and testing it in practice makes it possible. Knowledge can be an inspiration, a signpost, or a hint, but it will not pass the life lesson for us. I emphasize once again - no matter how many books you read; you will not expand your consciousness that way! At most, you will make a lot of theses, beliefs, and conclusions and only a part of them will be correct.
Consciousness is an information archive that stores universal, tested, verified, understood, and accepted truths. It does not accept beliefs (beliefs do not expand consciousness) or theories (knowledge). Instead, it requires experiences and tangible conclusions to free you from a given life process. If someone says that he or she has become aware of a topic and yet that person's life circumstances have not changed, then there is further ignorance - some information is still missing, and wisdom is still hidden in this lesson.
The entire process of evolution occurs through consciousness. It evolves and exchanges information with itself, the environment, and other sources of consciousness. The entire process of expanding consciousness takes place in contact with matter and is possible only with the participation of conscious being and matter. Sometimes it seems that the external world (matter) is undergoing intense changes, but in fact our consciousness evolves internally and, as a result, changes the external world. I will write more about this in the article on spiritual development.
Finally, it should be mentioned that consciousness evolves through the cycle of life and death. The first part of the cycle - life - is an active process in which consciousness comes to gain wisdom. It always starts at the level of lack of information (innocence - "I don't know"), turns into residual or erroneous information (ignorance - "I think I know"), and finally grows to the level of wisdom (complete information that expands consciousness - "I am fully aware, I understand and accept this wisdom”). For wisdom to be gained from experience, consciousness must accept it - confirm that it is universal truth. You can't do it with your free will - acceptance is a feeling of completeness, peace of mind, and release of the lesson. I will also write about it one day!
The next stage in the consciousness development cycle is death (passive part of the cycle). Since we are the essence of consciousness and not the essence of matter, and therefore we only assimilate wisdom, when we die, we do not take with us all beliefs and knowledge, but only all wisdom. Death is the passive part of the cycle where it comes to ordering, assimilating, and revising assimilated wisdom. Very often, NDErs report about watching a "movie of their life", "browsing through various memories", etc. You can find tons of such stories. It is a very important element of the death process, when energy for another life is restored and the wisdom is absorbed by the soul - it occurs beyond time and space.