THREE TYPES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Sir,

Consciousness is something simple but deep. Consciousness in simple terms is awareness and there are three types of consciousness; simple consciousness, self-consciousness and cosmic consciousness. Self-consciousness is higher than simple consciousness but lower than cosmic consciousness, which is the highest form of consciousness. Simple consciousness is found mainly in the animal kingdom.

Faculty

By virtue of this faculty, man is not only conscious of trees, rocks, waters, his own limbs and body, but he also becomes conscious of himself as a distinct entity apart from all the rest of the universe. This is the faculty by which he is said to be self-aware.  In self-consciousness there are intellectual faculties that give man the ability to change his life as when he would say: “Mmm, that’s not a good thought or attitude; I have to change!” or “What am I doing, this is insane of me.” With this we say man is aware of his subjective world and animals do not have these qualities but are actuated by instinct, not reason.

Before, we deal with cosmic consciousness, let’s analyse self-consciousness (man’s consciousness) relative to competence. We will outline three forms of competence, namely: nconscious competence, conscious competence, unconscious incompetence. By unconscious competence we mean when a person is able to do something and or has achieved something but cannot tell us how they did it. A successful businessperson may fail to teach you how he got to the apex; he can’t give you a step by step tutorial to success.

Accomplish

Many a times we accomplish something by fluke. Maybe that’s what makes a person become rich for some years, and the next thing we know he is in abject poverty and is unable to regain his richness paradigm. This happens a lot right under our eyes. Those are the dynamics of unconscious competence. But the case is different with conscious competence. In this scenario, the man does not only become successful but knows how he got the success; he may experience some misfortune and have his business go south, but he will climb right back to the top because he knows the laws of the universe and understands the operations thereof.

That is a man who can mentor you and I; because he knows how to achieve that one thing or the other. However, those who know that they know may be ravaged by pride and we are told ‘pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before the fall’, hence many a man with great abilities fall from grace. But there’s this other category we may refer to as unconscious incompetent. These are those who pretend to know it all, but are in dire and alarming ignorance. Among these are those who are really bold and confident to an extent that you may even give way to them thinking they are bringing some value to the table only to find that they are void of substance – a total waste of everyone’s time. These often do not see that they are unconsciously incompetent.

Well, what is cosmic consciousness? This is the ‘higher level that theology would refer to as divine consciousness, Christ consciousness…depending on your religious persuasion. Science might refer to this level of consciousness as cosmic consciousnesses. Maybe this is the consciousness that the master said we should pursue when He said: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect,” Matthew 5:48. This is the ultimate of human potential.

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