Should Bernardo rename his book; "The Idea of the World" to "DID of the World? (Or maybe this was his easter egg all along?)
Ok, I have a question regarding thoughts. Can thoughts be out of meta-consciousness? The breath as an example; as we point our attention to the breath we start to notice it and it becomes meta-conscious.
Does the same process happen with thoughts? It really feels like i'm meta-conscious of every single thought that I have while I'm certain i haven't been meta-conscious of every breath i've been taking.
DID of the World
Re: DID of the World
Yes, these are inner domains of experience. We're conscious of the thoughts because they are the most immediate expression of our spiritual activity. After all, you won't even be able to know that you breath if you're unable to connect the thought of breathing with the inner perception of it. In other words, you can think away your body, breathing, feelings and so on but you can't think away your cognitive core (not speaking necessarily for rigid intellectual thoughts). If you think it away you fall into unconsciousness.
Breathing, just as the life of feeling, is more 'distant' from our immediate thinking experience. If we compare thinking to waking life, feeling is more akin to dream life - much more elusive. Through feeling we come in contact with something greater than the intellectual self.
If in our feeling life we are dreaming then in our life of will we are completely asleep. This may sound contradictory - we're quite aware that we can command our body. That's true but we don't control it in some direct manner. Recently I gave an example in another post - it's enough to imagine a paralyzed limb in order to differentiate between the spiritual intent for movement and the actual movement and its perception (kinesthetic, visual, etc.). Most of the time these go together quite synchronously so we just assume that we are in full control. In fact, in the actual unfoldment of the movement of the limbs we are just as unconscious as we are for our metabolism. In breathing we are still partly capable to interfere - we can take over and adjust our breathing rhythm. In metabolism - like in bowel movement - we're quite asleep.
So we have:
* the upper man - head and nervous system - thinking and perception - waking consciousness
* the middle man - rhythmical system, heart and lungs - breathing, circulation - feeling - dream consciousness (the connection between feeling life and circulation is easily seen in phenomena as blushing or rising blood pressure when angry)
* the lower man - metabolic system, muscle and skeletal system - willing - sleep consciousness
Clearly the designation upper-middle-lower is only indicative. It's obvious that we have nerves all over the body and bones in the head. Yet there's also justification to point to the parts of the body where these systems are most pronounced.
The waking-dreaming-sleeping life of our thinking-feeling-willing is not demarcated by some hard boundaries. Through inner work we can elucidate these worlds. The fact that we're normally unconscious of metabolism doesn't mean that we're isolated from it. Quite the contrary. For example, most of the digestive problems are caused by patterns of our soul life that are very deeply ingrained and quite unconscious. Few people pay attention to the things they feel and think while eating. Yet these are exactly the things we need to master if we are to move towards the higher forms of cognition. There's symmetry here - the more unconscious we are of our own psychic life, the more unaware we are of how these deeper soul and spirit layers play out in the bodily sheaths. And vice versa - as we strive to become more and more awake for the depths of our being, gradually through Imaginative, Inspirative and Intuitive cognition we begin to recognize how the spiritual shapes the physical.