Changes

[[Image:lighterstill.jpg]]

[[Image:lighterstill.jpg]][[Image:Treadingsoftly.jpg|right|frame]]

 

Consciousness is the great enigma. We experience it in the present moment. Yet when one tries objectively to understand it within oneself, it becomes amorphous and changing. Sometimes changes from one state of consciousness to another are not recognized until the change has occurred, as if these states were separated by a zone of forgetfulness. When one observes changes in consciousness in someone else, the description always seems colored with one's own biases and preconceptions, in spite of attempts to be objective. A physiologist sees only a range from stupor through sleep and from the normal everyday waking state to hyperexcitability. A psychiatrist who subscribes to depth psychology sees waking consciousness as the mere tip of the iceberg, the rest being composed of a vast domain of the unconscious lying below the surface of awareness, all of which is considered more primitive than rational consciousness. The religious adept wants to acknowledge the reality of hellish as well as transcendent states, the former considered lower and darker and more painful, and the latter higher and deeper or more subtle and more highly refined, than that of the normal waking condition. Hence one's model of consciousness depends largely on the scope of one's personal experience and the context of one's worldview.

Consciousness is the great enigma. We experience it in the present moment. Yet when one tries objectively to understand it within oneself, it becomes amorphous and changing. Sometimes changes from one state of consciousness to another are not recognized until the change has occurred, as if these states were separated by a zone of forgetfulness. When one observes changes in consciousness in someone else, the description always seems colored with one's own biases and preconceptions, in spite of attempts to be objective. A physiologist sees only a range from stupor through sleep and from the normal everyday waking state to hyperexcitability. A psychiatrist who subscribes to depth psychology sees waking consciousness as the mere tip of the iceberg, the rest being composed of a vast domain of the unconscious lying below the surface of awareness, all of which is considered more primitive than rational consciousness. The religious adept wants to acknowledge the reality of hellish as well as transcendent states, the former considered lower and darker and more painful, and the latter higher and deeper or more subtle and more highly refined, than that of the normal waking condition. Hence one's model of consciousness depends largely on the scope of one's personal experience and the context of one's worldview.

==Early Scientific Views==

==Early Scientific Views==