Consciousness

Consciousness is the individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environments. Essentially, your consciousness is your awareness of yourself and the world around you.

This awareness is subjective and unique to you. If you can describe something you are experiencing in words, then it is part of your consciousness.

Your conscious experiences are constantly shifting and changing. For example, in one moment, you may be focused on reading this article. Your consciousness may then shift to the memory of a conversation you had earlier with a co-worker. Next, you might notice how uncomfortable your chair is, or maybe you are mentally planning dinner.

This ever-shifting stream of thoughts can change dramatically from one moment to the next, but your experience of it seems smooth and effortless.

States of Consciousness

The various states of consciousness include:

Dreams

Hallucinations

Hypnosis

Meditation

Sleep

States induced by psychoactive drugs

The two normal states of awareness are consciousness and unconsciousness. Higher states of consciousness are often associated with spiritual or mystical experiences. It involves an elevated state of awareness where people are able to gain a greater sense of themselves, their role, and the world. Examples of this include transcendence, meditation, mindfulness, a "runner's high," lucid dreaming, and flow states. 

Altered levels of consciousness also can occur, which may be caused by medical or mental conditions that impair or change awareness. Altered types of consciousness include:

Coma

Confusion

Delirium

Disorientation

Lethargy

Stupor

Doctors and healthcare professionals use various assessments to measure and assess levels of consciousness. They use scores on these assessments to guide diagnosis and treatment decisions.

What Are the 5 Levels of Consciousness?

●Conscious: Everything you are aware of

●Preconscious: Information you are not currently aware of that you can pull into awareness if needed

●Unconscious: Memories that are outside of awareness and inaccessible

●Non-conscious: Automatically bodily functions that occur without awareness and sensation

●Subconscious: Information that is out of consciousness and not immediately available to consciousness

Functions of Consciousness

Consciousness has several biological and social purposes. For example, it allows us to process information, choose our actions, set priorities, learn and adapt to new information, make decisions, and more.

Consciousness is an essential state in philosophy, spirituality, and religion. All of these require self-awareness, which is impossible without consciousness.

Changes in Consciousness

Understanding different levels of consciousness can help healthcare professionals spot signs that someone might be experiencing a problem. Some of these changes occur naturally; others are the result of factors such as drugs or brain damage. Changes to consciousness also can cause changes to perception, thinking, understanding, and interpretations of the world.

Changes in consciousness can sometimes be a sign of medical conditions or they may even be a sign of an immediate medical emergency.

For example, sudden changes in consciousness might be a sign of:

Aneurysm

Brain infections

Brain tumor or injury

Dementia or Alzheimer's disease

Drug use

Epilepsy

Heart disease

Heatstroke

Lack of oxygen to the brain

Low blood sugar

Poisoning

Shock

Stroke

When to Seek Help

If you thinking you are experiencing changes in consciousness, talk to your doctor. Sudden changes may be a sign of a medical emergency that requires immediate attention, such as a stroke or hemorrhage. 

Talking to your doctor right away can ensure that you get immediate treatment before problems get worse.

History of Consciousness

For thousands of years, the study of human consciousness was largely the work of philosophers. The French philosopher Rene Descartes introduced the concept of mind-body dualism or the idea that while the mind and body are separate, they do interact.

Once psychology was established as a discipline separate from philosophy and biology, the study of the conscious experience became one of the first topics studied by early psychologists.

Structuralists used a process known as introspection to analyze and report conscious sensations, thoughts, and experiences. Trained observers would carefully inspect the contents of their own minds. Obviously, this was a very subjective process, but it helped inspire further research on the scientific study of consciousness.

The American psychologist William James compared consciousness to a stream—unbroken and continuous despite constant shifts and changes. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud focused on understanding the importance of the unconscious and conscious mind.

While the focus of much of the research in psychology shifted to purely observable behaviors during the first half of the 20th century, research on human consciousness has grown tremendously since the 1950s.

Theories of Consciousness

One of the problems with the study of consciousness is the lack of a universally accepted operational definition. Descartes proposed the idea of cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), which suggested that the very act of thinking demonstrates the reality of one’s existence and consciousness.

Today, consciousness is generally defined as an awareness of yourself and the world. However, there are still debates about the different aspects of this awareness.

Research on consciousness has focused on understanding the neuroscience behind our conscious experiences. Scientists have even utilized brain-scanning technology to seek out specific neurons that might be linked to different conscious events. Modern researchers have proposed two major theories of consciousness: integrated information theory and global workspace theory.

Integrated Information Theory

This approach looks at consciousness by learning more about the physical processes that underlie our conscious experiences.3 The theory attempts to create a measure of the integrated information that forms consciousness. The quality of an organism’s consciousness is represented by the level of integration.

This theory tends to focus on whether something is conscious and to what degree it is conscious.

Global Workspace Theory

This theory suggests that we have a memory bank from which the brain draws information to form the experience of conscious awareness.

 While integrated information theory focuses more on identifying whether an organism is conscious, the global workspace theory offers a much broader approach to understanding how consciousness works.

Summary

While consciousness has intrigued philosophers and scientists for thousands of years, experts clearly have a long way to go in our understanding of the concept. Researchers continue to explore the different bases of consciousness including the physical, social, cultural, and psychological influences that contribute to our conscious awareness.

Christhood Consciousness 

Christhood is a higher state of consciousness, a state that is fundamentally different from what is called “normal” human awareness.

It is very difficult to describe Christhood for people who have not experienced it. Imagine having to describe what a sunset looks like to a person who was born blind. The person has no frame of reference, no comparison.The deeper reality on this planet is that most of us have been brought up without ever encountering any expressions of the consciousness of Christhood. All we have seen have been expressions of the lower state of consciousness, which we might call human consciousness or the consciousness of anti-christ.The deeper reality is that Christhood is NOT a further development or evolution of the human consciousness. It is a fundamentally different state of consciousness. How different? As different as life and death. When Jesus walked the earth 2,000 years ago, he described Christhood as a state of spiritual life and he described normal human awareness as a state of spiritual death. That is why he said that only those who are willing to lose their human lives would be reborn into the eternal life of the Christ consciousness. 

Let the dead bury the death. You have Christ consciousness follow Jesus  Christ.