Difference between revisions of "Category:Consciousness"

"Consciousness" derives from Latin conscientia which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridic texts by writers such as Cicero. Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else. In Christian theology, conscience stands for the moral conscience in which our actions and intentions are registered and which is only fully known to God. Medieval writers such as Thomas Aquinas describe the conscientia as the act by which we apply practical and moral knowledge to our own actions. René Descartes has been said to be the first philosopher to use "conscientia" in a way that does not seem to fit this traditional meaning, and, as a consequence, the translators of his writings in other languages like French and English coined new words in order to denote merely psychological consciousness. These are, for instance, conscience, and Bewusstsein. However, it has also been argued that John Locke was in fact the first one to use the modern meaning of consciousness in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, although it remains closely intertwined with moral conscience (I may be held morally responsible only for the act of which I am conscious of having achieved; and my personal identity - my self - goes as far as my consciousness extends itself). The modern sense of "consciousness" was therefore first found not in Descartes' work - who sometimes used the word in a modern sense, but did not distinguish it as much as Locke would do -, but in Locke's text. The contemporary sense of the word (consciousness associated to the idea of personal identity, which is assured by the repeated consciousness of oneself) was therefore introduced by Locke; but the word "conscience" itself was coined by Pierre Costes, French translator of Locke. Henceforth, the modern sense first appeared in Locke's works, but the word itself first appeared in the French language.

Higher consciousness, also called super consciousness (Yoga), Buddhic consciousness (Theosophy), cosmic consciousness and God-consciousness (Sufism and Hinduism)--to name but a few--are expressions used in various spiritual traditions to denote the consciousness of a human being who has reached a higher level of evolutionary development and who has come to know reality as it is. Evolution in this sense is not that which occurs by natural selection over generations of human reproduction but evolution brought about by the application of spiritual knowledge to the conduct of human life. Through the application of such knowledge (traditionally the preserve of the world's great religions) to practical self-management, the awakening and development of faculties dormant in the ordinary human being is achieved. These faculties are aroused by and developed in conjunction with certain dispositions of character such as patience, kindness, truthfulness, humility and forgiveness towards one's fellow man – qualities without which higher consciousness is not possible.