The First Conscious Shock

The First Conscious Shock

From our friend, David Tuttle

“Can you elaborate on the first conscious shock, which is self-remembering? I seem to have difficulty understanding self-remembering.”

The first conscious shock means bringing special attention to incoming impressions. It is simplest to start with the sense of sight. The idea is that instead of just seeing the computer screen in front of me, I see two things and thus double the energy of the impression. So, I first see the screen and keyboard in front of me, and then I see myself looking at them. Seeing myself looking at them has an implicit sense of “I am here, now.” As soon as we lose the awareness that “I am here, now”, we have become identified with the act of looking or have become identified internally with some “I” and have fallen into imagination.

Sometimes this practice is called divided attention, which is depicted as an arrow with one head at each end. There is an “arrow” of attention going outward and an “arrow” of attention towards oneself, towards the awareness of being here in the present moment.

All this is kind of an abstract game at the beginning, but later it becomes more natural. It is actually an imitation of what happens in those moments when we are in the third state of consciousness, self-consciousness. In those moments, we are strongly aware that we are in the here and now. When we fall back into the second state, our everyday state of consciousness, this strong sense of the present disappears.

If we keep trying to reproduce this kind of awareness, our ability to do it increases. At some point, the emotional center becomes involved and it becomes easier. Now behind the effort to remember ourselves is an emotional desire to be present and to not waste one’s time and life in imagination. Later, after many efforts along this line, the tendency to be present enters our essence and acquires much more force. It becomes a way of life.

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Image: Study For Phidias In The "apotheosis Of Homer", by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres