Styles of Consciousness
I was reading a guy called Walt Whitman earlier and found something that said: “He who walks a minute without love walks dampened to his own funeral.”
And this made me remember that I always carried my love everywhere, until I found you and gave it all to you.
— Juan Rulfo, Letters to Clara
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If there is an ending of suffering in one consciousness…then it affects the consciousness of the world.
— Krishnamurti
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Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact doing it.
— John Green
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A society that has no respect, no regard for its bards, its historians, its storytellers, is a society in steep decline, a society that has lost its very soul and may never find its way.
― Laurence Overmire, The Ghost of Rabbie Burns: An American Poet’s Journey Through Scotland
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Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you’re not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. The ego perceives itself as a separate fragment in a hostile universe, with no real connection to any other being, surrounded by other egos which it either sees as a potential threat or which it will attempt to use for its own ends.
— Eckhart Tolle
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I never wanted to be a mechanic or businessman because I wasn’t attracted to the kind of consciousness I would need to cultivate. I wanted something more contemplative, something more aesthetic and emotional, more expressive. I felt that there were insights waiting for me in the arts, and that I would grow as a person by practicing them.
When you practice the arts you become aware of something in you that needs to look more closely and feel more intensely in this world. When that drive connects to that thing you have discovered, that is what’s called ‘passion.’ You can build a life around that chemical reaction between those energies. It’s the excitement of expanding consciousness, and it’s unending.
Normal consciousness is not witnessing or watching, it’s the ‘unobserved mind’ that can function on autopilot. We live mostly in this realm and we have to do special things to get out of it. For me, that was the arts and to some extent the intersection between psychology and spirituality. This is no doubt a typical profile of any artist. You just want life to be more vivid.
Of all the styles of human consciousness in the world the one we need to develop the most is the consciousness of love as the basis for all existence. Anyone who is cultivating that kind of consciousness in themselves is helping create a more peaceful and thriving world. Following love is better than following success or any number of other things, in my opinion. It promotes a different kind of consciousness.
You can practice a lot of different jobs without love, but not art. Without some kind of love in it it’s nothing. If we could live and create like that all the time we’d be gods. I actually think that’s where we’re all going, that that’s our destiny. Right now we live in a twilight zone of the unobserved mind so that our norm is to suffer.
Unconsciousness is suffering; living on automatic is both suffering and numbness to life. We live in a stupor but we still suffer. At some point we’ll need to take a different tack. Instead of dulling our senses and lowering our awareness level in the hope of warding off pain, we might do the opposite, become artists of life.
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Volume four of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
Here’s one:
Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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It will look like this:
