Abstract
We are considered to be
highly evolved conscious beings, but if we look at ourselves, do we actually
feel that we are there; wise men or Homo sapiens as we call ourselves? In
today’s world, reward based conditioning forms our contemporary culture that deeply
defines how we look at life and how we intuitively perceive our consciousness.
Presently, acquisitions are our priority and we behave as narcissistic conditioned
puppets and let governments and corporations rule our lives. We are hypocrites
that can see, but behave blind; blinded within the realms of our short-termed thrills,
joys and beliefs. Augmenting logical questioning and logical conditioning is
the only way we can come out of this state that cannot be done individually, it
has to be a collective effort. This paper is an attempt to understand our very
own evolved consciousness and its relation to the current world with the true
meaning of our existence, where we seek to understand it from a logical sense.
Keywords: Contentment, Consciousness, Logic, Reward,
Conditioning
The ubiquitous and
fundamental nature of consciousness makes it subtle and of central importance
where the manifestation takes place within the sea of its existence to shapes
and forms that brings out the beauty of our consciousness (Pereira and Reddy
2017). Scientists have shown that from birth we continue to grow throughout our
lives shaping and reshaping our consciousness, building our ability to achieve
by means of rationality and focused approach to understand what we are.
Unfortunately, we have ended up pursuing interests ranging from material
possessions to impressing our social circles, seeking momentary thrills and
growing our greed exponentially. The world that we live in today depends on
how we are judged by our social circle and by society at large seeking to be
like the other (Baumeister and Leary 1995). Our opinions and our identity today
depends on our reward driven obsessive system wherein our natural tendency to
logical questioning gets discouraged and we are rewarded for actions that we
often don’t see the meaning of and become dedicated to seeking approval of
others (Edwards 2017). Our whole purpose
of life is the life of others, which comes with reward based conditioning at an
early age. Kindergarteners and first-graders demonstrate a high level of
enthusiasm with their logical questioning and thinking, as they question
everything around them, but as adults this curiosity fades away where the focus
is on acquiring to be content of materialistic desires and beliefs (Peterson
1979).
Lack of contentment leads
to greed wherein the scope of logical thinking is diminished (Chan 2009). Politicians
scare us with inaccurate claims, while corporations lure us into happily
consuming toxic substances advertised along with an imagery of laughter and joy
preferably from known individuals who are idolized to be perfect in society
(Zaller 1999; Cawley et al 2013). To understand how we have changed, we need to
go back a few years when cell phones were considered inappropriate for
teenagers or for use on public transport and we could barely imagine why anyone
would want to put random thoughts along with personal pictures on the internet
for everyone to see. But this has changed, now about everyone is sensitized
into having an active social media account and in only a few years taking
selfies went from a strange and narcissistic habit to a cultural norm leading
to mental health issues and suicidal cases (Alloway et al 2014; Ling and Haddon
2008); as if we opened the door way to hell. In a world with a continuous
stream of tragic events we can easily be influenced by the chaos, but we no
longer risk our lives in order to make a difference; our inaction kills on a
daily basis while we mentally recite to ourselves the mantras we have been
taught and join in the hypocrisy. We are conscious beings and we had to go
through a long way to reach here; a journey which began in the stars.
Why have we
become what we are? It is an existential question and the answer lies in our
evolution and our manifested consciousness. We often question our consciousness
with respect to all our trivial problems unknowingly seeking answers from the
thoughts that reside in our subconscious. We are practically nothing and we
came from nothing and there is nothing there to see when we seek consciousness.
As a fundamental constant, energy exists and we see it manifested as work
force, consciousness is also a fundamental constant that exists, and we observe
it as an experience. In our quest for finding some sort of core of what we are,
we can look even deeper and zoom in on the basic building blocks of what we are
made of, but if we peer into the individual molecules that make up our cells, our
findings become mysterious, not only will we not find any mysterious trace of a
soul, we will also not bump into any kind of structures that science claims as
tiny particles that everything else is made of. We are waves that behave similarly to
vibrations of sound or ripples in water, built in the oscillations of matter,
the peaks and valleys of these quantum waves are not made of anything tangible,
they are waves of probabilities. Our universe is inherently probabilistic and
all the things in it cannot be 100% predicted with certainty (Villenkin 1989)
but does exist as patterns or fractals (Schmitz 2002; Reddy and Pereira 2016) manifested
out of nothingness.
Consciousness and nothingness
are constants which we can never seek; made up of nothing but a sea of
probabilities via the route of evolution over a period of 4 billion years. Our
consciousness is an event of capacity for learning and course correction,
making us sentient or self-aware, capable of interpreting our own evolutionary
drives and our purpose in ways that can even go against our survival. Despite
knowing that we have come such a long way by nurturing our own consciousness;
we seem to be less content with everything that we have gained. The mere
thought of our existence in actuality should make us leap in joy, but we frown
over thoughts and things, which are short-lived and trap ourselves into the
deep depths of needs and greeds. Somehow our cognitive evaluations seem to
dominate in the overall evaluation of life and we infer happiness on the basis
of our content (Rojas and Veenhoven 2011). We evolved for a reason wherein all
the mechanisms that we learnt were to overcome the obstacles in our path where
life fundamentally aligns itself with reality, genetically and biologically,
instinctively and intellectually. But as we grew we aligned ourselves to
imitating others, parents, friends, teachers and with various cultural and
religious influences which over powered our true inner selves. This is not
something that we are born with, but get forced into, because our reward system
only values their approval more than logical deduction, trying to live up to
the expectations of society and family (Combes 1998).
In the
present we can much better comprehend the cold heartedness of a career fixated
individual if success or social validation is what he or she craves more than
anything else in comparison to an individual who spends all resources helping
siblings or parents wherein family is this person’s core drive (Wood 2000).
Lack of contentment in adults is usually a result of a childish attachment that
lurks in our subconscious; where the sub conscious overcomes our inner consciousness
making us dependent on a thought that is created by the world around us and not
by the logical thought provoking process that is suppressed within us. We often
see logic as the opposite of emotion but instead it is the engine of our
emotions and it provides reliable answers when we are frustrated or confused
(Ciompi 2003). Logic is what creates rhythm or structure; is fundamental in the
melody of music and the colors and symmetry of flowers, it creates biological
machinery so intricate and rich that they can become self-aware, capable of
love and selflessness being able to observe the majestic logical patterns that
created them. Logic is innocence, the prime directive of our consciousness,
which we must value as such if we want to break free from the clutches of
hollow reward mechanisms.
Satisfaction can be achieved when one can feel the
flow of consciousness; can experience the outcome of consciousness; can
understand the subjective state of consciousness and most importantly,
understanding the nature of acknowledging the relevance of consciousness and
its beauty (Pereira 2015). Consciousness plays an active role in processing
information and making decisions (Koch and Crick 1991), it has a say in what our
most deeply rooted core motivations are; concepts and ideas only have power
over us when we emotionally invest and hold on to them. If logic is not applied
the role of consciousness is diverted from its task positive network of making
us selfless, clear-headed and focused to actually being a selfish, confused and
unsatisfied individual. Logic pushes the limits of our consciousness to explore
the vastness of its emptiness; it creates an awareness that is often described
as being in the present or being in a state of flow wherein rather than
identifying with our thoughts we become an observer of them and are much more
inclined to follow reason over impulse (Brown and Ryan 2003). The best example
to understand the importance of logic is when we apply it to superstition,
which has reduced considerably over the years because of our logical thinking,
wiping away our sub conscious values, which we had gathered in the past. Logic
makes us selfish in the other sense, where we become selfish for love,
compassion and kindness, which are derivatives of a mind that uses our inner consciousness.
Reward based conditioning is what
drives the lack of satisfaction that urges us to survive on greed and envy. We
need to realize that we live in a probabilistic universe which emerged from a
probabilistic occurrence not known till date, in such a probabilistic universe
with our ability to reason we can come up with pretty good approximations of what
the best action is at every point in our lives and if done in the sense of
logic can supersede our subconscious values of social validation and greed for
reward and recognition. Everything takes place in our consciousness and there
are no limits or borders of what is a part of our existence, nothing is
external (Pereira
and Reddy 2017). Each second the consciousness that emerges from our
perception is different, sometimes unrecognizably so from what it was a second
before. The truth is that every moment we are a new entity that existed only
for that one single moment and will never manifest itself again; no experience
can truly be replicated; no identity can ever reflect an ever changing synergy
in the endless stream of experience. The only place where this memory resides
is within the infinite space of nothingness that we are all made up of.
For their
benefit, philosophical or religious beliefs tend to provide an explanation to
our existence conditioning us with the concepts of sin and fear in relation to the
existence of an external granting source. Seeking the path of logic and science
in the infinite realms of our consciousness provides an expression of the
emptiness that exists within all of us and its importance and falsifies such
kind of beliefs. The void is what decides and manifests for us; the nothingness
is where all physical and non-physical emerge. Consciousness emerges from the
vast interplay of star dust becoming aware; countless genetic mutations for
thousands of years led to the evolution of culture and necessity to form
complex thought and finally our current society’s condition, education, social
influences and parental guidance all elements combine to eventually creating
these experiences; all of it is interconnected. Despite knowing all of this our
individualistic ideology programs us to only care when there lies a benefit to themselves
making them inherently selfish wherein our ideology is a façade; a collection
of excuses that we let ourselves and each other get away with. An attempt to be
logically selfless can seem scary as it threatens all the conditional
attachment that emerge in a culture where enjoyable feelings are considered the
ultimate goal but it leads to far more fulfillment than chasing our positive
emotions as our ideology demands.
Conclusion
We are deeply
programmed with a set of requirements that must be fulfilled in order for us to
experience abundance; requirements that are often so elusive that we become
mostly entrapped in this scarcity mindset but as soon as we see through this
which can be achieved in many ways, we are able to distinguish truth from
indoctrination, to dispel our confusion and dissolve our apathy. Behind
everything there is a logical reason we can find when we choose to follow
curiosity rather than fear. We don’t have to feel regret or guilt when we know
our intentions are pure and we did the best we could at the time with the
knowledge that we had. The world can seem like a cold and dark place when this
knowledge leads us to recognize the selfish motives behinds people’s actions
and how it causes idealistic movements to scatter and fall apart but with these
insights those who choose to not make life about them and can seek out and
trust each other. Over billions of
years molecules configured themselves into complex units that we call human
beings; these units are like cells in the body of humanity wired to evolve and
move it forward. This is what brought about the evolution of manifested
consciousness wherein we became highly conscious beings with the ability to
create and destroy ourselves. Evolution has fundamentally programmed us so that
we want our beliefs to align with reality. Logic is innocence, the prime
directive of our consciousness, which we must value it as such if we want to
break free from the clutches of hollow reward mechanisms that exist in the
world today.
References
Alloway T, Runac
R, Qureshi M and Kemp G. 2014. Is Facebook Linked to Selfishness? Investigating
the Relationships among Social Media Use, Empathy, and Narcissism. Social
Networking 3: 150-158.
Baumeister RF and Leary MR. 1995. The need to
belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.
Psychological Bulletin 117 (3): 497 – 529.
Brown KW and Ryan RM. 2003. The Benefits of Being Present: Mindfulness and Its Role in Psychological
Well-Being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (4): 822–848
Cawley J, Avery R and Eisenberg
M. 2013. The Effect of Deceptive Advertising on Consumption of the Advertised
Good and its Substitutes: The Case of Over-the-Counter Weight Loss Products. NBER
Working Paper No. 18863 (http://www.nber.org/papers/w18863).
Chan
MLY. 2009. When More Is Still Less: Greed, Idolatry, and Contentment Church & Society in Asia Today 12(2): 97 – 106.
Ciompi
L. 2003. Reflections on the role of emotions in consciousness and subjectivity,
from the perspective of affect logic. Consciousness and Emotion 4:181-196
Edwards F. 2017. An Investigation of Attention-Seeking
Behavior through Social Media Post Framing. Athens
Journal of Mass Media and Communications 25 – 44.
Koch C and Crick F. 1991. Understanding awareness at the neuronal
level. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 14(4): 683–85.
Ling R and Haddon L. 2008. Children, youth and the mobile phone. In: Drotner, Kirsten and
Livingstone, Sonia, (eds.) The International Handbook of Children, Media and
Culture. SAGE Publications Ltd, London, UK, pp. 137-151. ISBN 9781412928328
Pereira C.
2015. An
unsatisfied body deteriorates the soul and so its experience. Journal of Metaphysics and Connected Consciousness 2
Pereira C & Reddy JSK. 2017. The Manifestation of Consciousness: Beyond
& Within from Fundamental to Ubiquity. Journal of
Consciousness Exploration & Research, 8 (1); 51 – 55.
Peterson
RW. 1979. Changes in curiosity behavior from childhood to adolescence. Journal
of Research in Science Teaching 16 (3): 185 – 192. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.3660160302
Reddy JSK
and Pereira C. 2016. An Essay on ‘Fracto-Resonant’ Nature
of Life. NeuroQuantology. 14 (4): 764 – 769.
Rojas M and Veenhoven R. 2011.
Contentment and affect in the estimation of happiness. Social Indicators Research, Springer Science
Business Media B.V. DOI 10.1007/s11205-011-9952-.
Schmitz HA. 2002. “On the Role of the
Fractal Cosmos in the Birth and Origin of Universes,” Journal of Theoretics, Extensive Papers
Vilenkin A. 1989. Interpretation
of the wave function of the Universe. Physical Review D 39: 1116
Wood W.
2000. Attitude change: Persuasion and Social Influence. Annual Reviews of
Psychology. 51: 539–570
Zaller
J. 1999. A Theory of Media Politics: How the Interests of Politicians, Journalists, and Citizens Shape the
News. University of Chicago Press, USA.
Dr. Contzen Pereira (Editorial Board Member/Contributor)
Independent Scholar, Mumbai, India
Corresponding Author. Address: Nandadeep, Chakala, Andheri (East), Mumbai 400 099, India. Email Address: contzen@rediffmail.com, contzen@gmail.com
Independent Scholar, Mumbai, India
Corresponding Author. Address: Nandadeep, Chakala, Andheri (East), Mumbai 400 099, India. Email Address: contzen@rediffmail.com, contzen@gmail.com
