Consensus consciousness

To keep the acquired, semi-arbitrary, conditioned nature of our ordinary consciousness before us in the rest of our discussions, I shall no longer use the phrase ordinary consciousness, with its connotations of naturalness and normality. I shall substitute a technical term I introduced some years ago, consensus consciousness, as a reminder of how much our everyday consciousness has been shaped by the consensus of belief in our particular culture. ... 

A fifth quality of the available-state dimension of enlightenment involves a realistic assessment of your capacities, including the fact that some may only be potentials at present, requiring development. A mode of thinking, feeling, or acting experienced in a particular state may need considerable work to become robust and usable in that state, or for you to learn to transfer any or all aspects of that ability into some other state, such as consensus consciousness. 

An experience of great compassion in a meditative state, for example, may seem to carry over into consensus consciousness, making you feel like a very enlightened being, until someone insults you. The feeling of compassion is immediately replaced by anger. This kind of discrimination between developed reality and potential is particularly important when there is excessive attachment to an altered-state experience, such... 

By understanding the nature of altered states, we can relieve suffering in those states the remedy for suffering in some particular state is often specific to that state. Our attempts to apply a remedy suitable to some other state lead to frustration and more suffering. For example, fear may trigger an altered state and consequent maladaptive behavior in a person. He spends many hours with a psychotherapist trying to get at the root of this fear. But the hours with the therapist are in consensus consciousness, while the heart of the fear is in experiences only fully accessible in the altered state of fearfiilness, so the therapy proves only partially effective. 

The alternative perspectives on our selves offered by altered states can allow work on both negative and positive aspects of our ordinary selves that might not otherwise be possible to us. Perhaps most important, the direct experiences of values and modes of knowing not available in consensus consciousness may be able to transform us in ways that consensus consciousness knowledge about can never do. The unitive... 

Each of us is in a profound trance, consensus consciousness, a state of partly suspended animation, of stupor, of inability to function at our maximum level. Automatized and conditioned patterns of perception, thinking, feeling, and behaving dominate our lives. For too much of life, we are like the evolved crane/sorter we appear to be intelligent and conscious, but it is all automatized programs. Many of these automatized and conditioned patterns may have been adaptive once upon a time, but they don t work well anymore indeed, they may destroy us. We live in and contribute to mass insanity. 

When people first try sensing, looking, and listening, they frequently experience a certain kind of subtle clarity, a feeling of being more alive and more present to the reality of the moment. It is a kind of clarity that cannot be appreciated in consensus consciousness and, indeed, cannot... 

One of the most common procedures for inducing ordinary hypnosis is to have the subject fix his eyes on some specific spot and keep them there. Since consensus consciousness involves a fair amount of... 

We commonly speak about our ordinary state of consciousness as if it were one. Given our discussions of identity states, we now can see that ordinary consciousness is a collection of identity states. Since most identity states function within the allowable limits of consensus consciousness, they are not recognized as altered states in the way some obviously... 

The ordinary, level-two knowledge we have about objective consciousness comes from the little we know about altered states of consciousness and the unusual moments we vaguely call mystical experiences that can occur in them. People have insights into their own nature and into the universe that are experienced as the most important things in the world, understandings that can totally alter the directions of their lives. But to describe them to others, and even to themselves once they are back in ordinary consensus consciousness, they must use ordinary thoughts and languages. All life is one, for example, or God is love, or All reality is both void and full. ... 

From the point of view of my ordinary consensus consciousness it is perfecdy obvious that everything depends on my own efforts. Realistically I also recognize that the effects of my efforts are modified by the desires of others, by the limits imposed by physical laws, and by chance. I can pray for a million dollars to materialize in the middle of the floor so I can finance my next research project. It s a worthy project, I m sure But nothing happens. I d be better off reading books on how to raise funds through normal channels. Funny things sometimes happen, but I can write them off as luck (whatever that means) or chance. If I seriously consider the possibility that higher levels intervene, they do so rarely and in ways that are often contradictory to what I want. Ordinary consciousness... 

Ordinarily we are surrounded by sleeping people, people who neither know nor care about the idea of awakening. TTius we are automatically rewarded for continuing to sleep, for maintaining consensus consciousness. Simply by being in a different social grouping than we ordinarily function in, Ae work group can lessen the automated power of ordinary social... 

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