All of us are a plethora of emotions and feelings that represents a ‘smorgasbord’ of consciousness levels — akin to the onion with its several layers. Such levels correspond to a host of patterns that mirror our day-to-day life just as well — viz., alertness, or wakefulness, sleep and dreams, including our essential needs and also wants.
Research suggests that all of us are endowed with two levels of consciousness — viz., primary and secondary. The duo works and flourishes with a sense of transcendent synchronicity and also sonority that are unique to our conscious awareness. You name it, and there it is — a part and parcel of our everyday existence, viz., getting things organised, or planning, reasoning, and [re]solving issues, or problems, through active contemplation, introspection and reflective self-analysis. When the sprightly two entities achieve their elementary patterns, or reach optimal levels, we all uphold a complete sense of harmonious receptivity — not just in our thought processes, but also their initiation and execution. When there is, on the contrary, a certain delineation that reflects chaos, it leads to emotional dissonance, lack of balance, a wobbly glitch, or mental bankruptcy, to gaining the upper hand, or one-upmanship, in anything one wants to do, or does not want to, just like it occurs when baser elements prevail upon good sense and logic.
This brings us to the idea that our mindful brain is the seat of our conscious experience — a synchronous entity that synthesises every activity of our consciousness, including the expansive multiplicity and range of our thoughts and feelings at variable levels. Mind scientists call it the ‘conscious workspace’ — a frame of not just reference, but also our entire spectrum of thought. In other words, the symbol and substance of our overt and covert state of conscious alertness and attention that each of us would require to carrying out tasks, small and big. This includes the presence of every racy, spontaneous, simple, or intense cognitive process — viz., normal, routine, specialised, or planned behaviour, or impromptu responses, and also reactions.
Synchronicity is a fundamental signature concept and also raison d’etre of renowned psychologist Carl Gustav Jung’s vision of the world. Jung, the ‘plumber of the mind,’ defined it as the connecting principle, where internal psychological events are linked to external world events by meaningful coincidences rather than just causal chains. Synchronicity has a profound theoretical significance, what with anecdotal clinical evidence serving as primary descriptive elements in Jung’s analyses. Picture this — the celebrated case of a patient’s dream of being given a piece of gold jewellery in the shape of a scarab beetle and being told as a ‘knocking’ on Jung’s consulting room window. This drew Jung’s attention to a scarabaeid beetle [a rose-chafer] seeking entry. He caught the beetle and handed it to the patient. It had a positive, transformative impact on the case, as it broke through her defensive rationalism.
It’s a given that every process inherent to our mind, or conscious state, is regulated, or controlled, by neurons in the brain. Such processes are the consequence of natural and other activities attributed to ‘neural oscillators’ that reside in them. Neurones exemplify the sublime crux of our mind-body relationship. This is facilitated by signals that propel our conscious thoughts and enable us to function during our wakeful hours and also sleep. It portrays the physics of our consciousness — or, the fundamental web of life, its vibrant vision, focus and also fusion.
When neuroscientist Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sleep and Consciousness, put forward his ‘integrated information theory,’ some years ago, which is, perforce, the most persuasive explanation on what our consciousness is, it bid fair to the existence of consciousness and its cause and effect power on itself. It ratified philosopher Plato’s credo that for something to exist, it must be capable of having an effect. For Plato the idea of consciousness was ‘being.’ It was, in other words, ‘simply power.’ As Plato also articulated, in his own purple prose, traced to 360 BC, “My notion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and howsoever slight the effect, has real existence; and, I hold that the definition of being is simply power.”
What does this signify? That, like Plato’s remarkable aphorism, you and I should always be receptive to look at issues that are disturbing us and also aim at resolving them in the best manner possible.
— First published in India First
