Consciousness – Integration – Sentience
by pre.
In the second lap around the spiral you studied sentience, the ability to feel, to have an emotional state, to be aware. You smashed yourself in the face with a book, hard, to know what the pain felt like. To grasp, on a gut level, exactly what the experience, what sentience, is all about.
Then we pondered what happens if you turn sentience on itself. If you become aware of the process of being aware. If you focus your attention not on your senses, but on the process of sensing. If you learn not only how the world works, but how your own sense of the world works. This, of course, is “Sapience”
Further even than this, we discussed raising consciousness even higher, learning to model and increase control of both sapience and sentience. To use your understanding of your own mind to improve and guide that mind.
These skills are the foundation of consciousness, of awareness, understanding and interacting with the world. Which means that improving them will improve your abilities at all the other skills in the spiral.
Sentience is, if not simply awareness, then at the very least awareness of your awareness, and being aware, as we have already mentioned this lap, is the foundation for learning to put things into a memory store. Burning them into the connections in your brain.
Cognition itself is built from sapience, by learning how your brain learns, observing the rules of logic and common sense in action and then applying those rules outside the normal domains of sense perception and reflex, you create thought itself. And that thought, along with the awareness that you can influence how your brain works by controlling it’s environment and processes, allows you to begin to learn the skill of bio-programming.
Your sapience also, when applied to other people rather than just yourself, provides the basis for empathy and so for social skills. Understanding how brains work in one case, your own case, allows you to apply that understanding to grasp the communications and intent of others.
That empathy is also the foundation for ethics, for understanding that we are all alive, thinking, worthwhile beings in our own right.
The Meditation
In our walking meditation presented at the end of this month, you’ll concentrate for a while on what it feels like to be sentient, and then on what it feels like to understand that sentience, to model yourself, to become sapient, then finally you’ll concentrate on trying to turn that modelling on itself, to raise your consciousness still further.