Levels of Consciousness

Things that make sense “out there” make no sense at all “down here.”

I’m including a link to a video from Hoe Math below describing one way of conceptualizing different levels of consciousness. Listening to it may help what I’m about to say make sense.

Start watching about 8 minutes in for the short and sweet version.

Yes, there are levels of consciousness. That may sound woo, but it’s really not. It’s just a matter of perspective.

When we are hyper focused on our personal day-to-day lives, the world appears one way. When we zoom out, such as by going up in a very tall building for the first time, we see that the world isn’t really how we imagined it while on the ground. Things that were “true” on the ground aren’t true at all from this height. Things that were big seem relatively small. And things that were small, like ants, disappear from view completely. Our whole perspective of reality shifts in an instant.

When we get in a plane or hot air balloon and go even higher, our perspective shifts even more. We can see from this higher perspective that the terrain isn’t shaped the way we thought it was. Mountains line up in rows and look like waves on the ocean. Clouds look different when viewed from the top.

And then one day humans actually went to the moon and looked back. The earth looked so very different than what many imagined, a blue orb in a near perfectly black infinity. From there humans experienced “earth rise” (rather than sunrise) for the very first time. For many, their whole view of themselves and of their planet was transformed in an instant.

And then on another day Voyager 1 turned its camera back towards earth from 3.7 BILLION miles away, and we saw the “pale blue dot” made famous by Carl Sagan. Sagan so articulately described the impact that single picture had on his consciousness:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

***

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

It’s so very difficult for a person speaking from a “higher” (more zoomed out) perspective to communicate with someone hearing from a “lower” (more zoomed in one). Things that make sense “out there” make no sense at all “down here”.

If a time traveler could read zoomed out Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot to an average zoomed in person living in 5th century Bulgaria, it would be nonsense. Such a person wouldn’t likely even grok that the world is round, much less that it’s a pale blue dot in an ocean of never ending blackness circling a modest star on one of the outer spirals of one of billions and billions and billions of galaxies of inconceivable size in the visible universe. The idea simply would not compute for them.

The Buddhists have a symbol for this change in perspective that happens as we “zoom out”, the “gateless gate”. On the “zoomed in” side of enlightenment there appears to be a gate between us and enlightenment. But from the “zoomed out” enlightened perspective, there is no gate at all. It’s true that there is a gate. And it’s true that there is no gate. It’s all a matter of perspective, or levels of consciousness.

This explains much miscommunication today. For example, I’ll often make statements like “women are the reason that men do everything”, which from a zoomed out evolutionary perspective is undeniably true. Viewing the system as a whole and over sufficient lengths of time, women are the reason men do everything they do. And yet from a zoomed in perspective, it’s not true at all. From the zoomed in perspective any given man at any given moment may be motivated to do any given thing without the idea of a woman in his mind at all (or so he thinks).

As noted in the Hoe Math video linked to this post, most humans reach Level 3. And a few reach the very highest levels (8 and 9). It’s really hard for those at lower levels to relate at all to those at higher ones, but those at higher ones can sometimes remember what it was like to be at lower ones and manage to communicate in the latter’s terms.