Consciousness – Integration – Self Possession
by pre.
This month we will be looking at consciousness, and trying to understand how consciousness fits into the spiral. How it binds and improves all the other transcendence skills, links them together to form and transform a mind.
As usual this lap, at the end of the month we’ll present a guided walking meditation, this time designed to increase your sentience, sapience and raise your consciousness up towards another level while you walk.
In the first lap around the spiral when examining consciousness we talked about self possession, learning to control your mood and condition your reflexes.
You learned that you can use your memory to influence your mood, by replaying happy events in your mind. By doing this in as big, loud and colourful a visualisation as you can, you can push your mood closer towards the happiness which that event inspired. Likewise calmness, confidence or even terror and pain if you should desire.
You also learned how you could condition your reflexes. Once again this is done by rehearsing, imagining, visualising and remembering instances when you automatically took the cause of action you would wish to take in some quick-thinking situation. You learned how you can spend time considering the best way to behave and then train yourself to take that course of action when circumstances arrive.
Interactions
So how do these skills help to prop up the rest of the spiral? How do they interact with it and exaggerate all the other facilities?
The mood that you are in affects your awareness of the world. Depressed or sad people see colours less brightly, they notice details less easily. Meanwhile happy and excited people bounce through their world interested in and exploring every last detail. Clearly spending time in the moods which make you more aware will lead to greater awareness, so being in control of your mood is vital.
The better your memory is the more you’ll be able to use it to change your moods, and to condition your reflexes to behave in the most profitable manner. Further, being able to condition yourself to pay attention and remember things improves your memory in turn.
These techniques can be used to increase your body awareness by conditioning yourself to pay more attention to your body’s posture and position. By building a reflex to automatically eat and exercise as you’d want to.
We even discussed in that first lap how to condition yourself to stop and think when there was no urgent rush to action. Doing so, increasing the amount of thinking you do, will surely help you to improve your cognition skills, to think more clearly, more quickly.
You’ll have likely noticed that some times you’re in a mood to talk, and sometimes in a mood to listen, sometimes more in a mood to hide in a cave and avoid everybody. Now since people aren’t always in synch with your desires, you’ll sometimes have to do these things even when not really in the mood to do so. Being able to control your mood thus allows a disproportionate increase in your social skills. Helping you to make friends and alliances, to ethically gain trust and so influence, to give help and so get help.
The Meditation
Clearly, then, these skills are important to your mental development, and as such you will, in this month’s meditation, spend a few minutes walking around learning to better understand and control your mood and reflexes.