Foreconsciousness

“ To feel, to [Pg 5] experience a sensation, or to perceive, implies consciousness; it is that which is transmitted by the nerves to the sensorium, either by the organs of sense, or by the internal nerves; as pain, or feelings of which we are conscious. Consciousness is the test, the evidence, the proof of sensation or perception. ”

“ The mind must sink itself into the deepest conscious state, NOT UNCONSCIOUSNESS, or absent-mindedness, or sleep, but such a focused concentrated state of absolute consciousness that all thoughts are sunk and merged into the one state, like particles drawn to an irresistible magnet. ”

“ It is simply this: that when a brain, or other organ of consciousness, has once acquired an habitual movement, consciousness disappears from that act, and it enters the unconscious and generally automatic stage. ”

“ Is it not obvious that the patient must have been conscious at the time, though the consciousness vanished like that in a dream? The persistent consciousness is the continuous linking on of one state with previous states—the apperception of the past. ”

“ But the experience leaves its 'unimaginable touch' on the matter of the convolutions, and the next impression which a sense-organ transmits produces a cerebral reaction in which the awakened vestige of the last impression plays its part. Another sort of feeling and a higher grade of cognition are the consequence. 'Ideas' about the object mingle with the awareness of its mere sensible presence, we name it, class it, compare it, utter propositions concerning it, and the complication of the possible consciousness which an incoming current may arouse, goes on increasing to the end of life. ”

“ I go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, or sensation, or thought, or any special mode at all. What I find when I look at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings. ”

“ Now, if it be true that the consciousness aroused by objects around us, through sensation, is an accompaniment of certain physiological changes in the brain, it is clear that the localization of their points of origin in special parts of the skin, and the outward projection of the objects exciting vision, is an act of the mind quite distinct from [311] the mere passive response in consciousness which we call an impression, and more complex than that mental activity which, through discrimination and recognition, converts the bare impression into a sensation. ”

“ So where consciousness is, we know there is mind; but where consciousness is not, we must find whether it has been, and is only temporarily withdrawn, before we say “Mind is not here.” And consciousness we might call awareness, or our personal recognition of being—awareness of me, and thee, and it. So we recognize mind by its evidences of awareness, i. e., by the body’s reaction to stimuli; and we find mind at the very dawn of animal life.
Consciousness is evidenced in the protozoön, the simplest form in which animal life is known to exist, by what we call its response to stimuli. ”

“ We may easily dispense with the phrase "substance of the mind," if we wish to avoid a term of matter; but if mind is constituted by the perception of feelings excited in the nervous system, what is it that perceives? Is there a something that is reached by the feelings which constitute sensations in the great nerve-center, which takes cognizance of them, which combines them into portions of consciousness, or is consciousness nothing but a succession of sensations, and if so, what is "thought"? ”

“ The great lapse of time during which the action of subconsciousness may remain unrevealed until, through unconscious cerebration, it reaches self-consciousness, through the medium of recognition of a particular event as of actual occurrence, and how, finally, this recognition, as true, of a particular event, may be restricted for a while to the condition of sleep, and after a long period of incubation at last rise to waking knowledge, is so admirably exemplified by an experience of my own that I here put it on record. ”

“ The mind often manifests, through the cranial nerves, states of mind of which the person is unconscious. While consciousness is the power by which one knows his own states of mind, there is no proof that consciousness takes note of all one’s states of mind. ”

“ The element that is common to them all, and which I have called ‘consciousness,’ really is consciousness. A sensation is, in reality, a case of ‘knowing’ or ‘being aware of’ or ‘experiencing’ something. When we know that the sensation of blue exists, the fact we know is that there exists an awareness of blue. ”

“ The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. ”

“ These impatient messages that are constantly coming up from every nerve and tissue in his body are registered in the brain, but they do not enter consciousness in their original form. Consciousness receives only an interpretation of them. ”

“ But what we fail to know, yet what we must know, is the nature of the pristine consciousness which lies integral and progressive within every functioning organism. The brain is the seat of the ideal consciousness. And ideal consciousness is only the dead end of consciousness, the spun silk. The vast bulk of consciousness is non-cerebral. It is the sap of our life, of all life. ”

“ All human sensations, as sight and hearing, are readily perceived by one awakening to spiritual states to be but manifestations of consciousness through the physical limitations to which the spirit in its mental states of earth becomes accustomed. ”

“ Such processes, taken as a whole, show that man possesses a twofold consciousness, the ordinary consciousness and the subconsciousness. And we have every reason to believe that subconscious activities go on continually, in waking and in sleeping. ”

“ I ask the doubters of my vision to penetrate a little into the mystery of their own thoughts and dreams before they cry out against me, who for many years travelled far and came upon lovely and inhabited regions to which I would also lead them. I know that my brain is a court where many living creatures throng, and I am never alone in it. You, too, can know that if you heighten the imagination and intensify the will. ”

“ The tides of wakening consciousness roll in upon them daily as we unclose our eyelids, and keep up the gentle movement and murmur of ordinary mental respiration until we close them again in slumber. When we think we are thinking, we are for the most part only listening to sound of attrition between these inert elements of intelligence. ”

“ Certain normal and abnormal or morbid phenomena in man have proved the existence of this vehicle, which we will call the higher consciousness, for it is far greater than normal, waking consciousness, that of the brain. ”

“ There is, first, in the order of our consciousness and in the degree of its undeniableness, the element of our actual impressions, the flux of our consciousness as it apprehends particular sights and sounds, smells and tastes and touches; particular sensations of rest and movement, pleasure and pain, memory, judgment, and volition, a flux, “changeless in its ceaseless change.” We have so far found neither a true object for thought, nor a subject which can think. ”

“ But when we seem to have grasped his point of view, when we have catalogued the memory, fear, instinct, perception, choice and volition, the whole intelligent edifice crumbles; for we are told that “we are not in a position to determine whether these various acts are accompanied by consciousness, or whether they follow as simple physiological processes.” To most of us fear, memory, choice, volition, imply something more than simple physiological processes; they imply not only consciousness, but highly elaborated consciousness. ”

“ The first seat of our primal consciousnesses the solar plexus, the great nerve-center situated behind the stomach. From this center we are first dynamically conscious. For the primal consciousness is always dynamic, and never, like mental consciousness, static. Thought, let us say what we will about its magic powers, is instrumental only, the soul's finest instrument for the business of living. Thought is just a means to action and living. But life and action take rise actually at the great centers of dynamic consciousness. ”

“ If returning consciousness would only manifest itself first by some one indisputable proof of a still undisintegrated body, some crisp, reassuring method of outlining one's corporeal edges, some sensory roll-call, as it were of—head, hands, feet, sides! ”

“ In these one's real consciousness may be lost in sleep while the subliminal self, the alter-ego which never slumbers nor sleeps, rises to the surface and speaks in no uncertain tones. The mind sees with the startling clearness as if in a vision. ”

“ In a mind thus disassembled nearly every mental phenomenon, conscious and subconscious—conflicts, hallucinations, coconscious processes, defense reactions, etc.,—can be observed in an isolated form and systematically studied. ”

“ Thou hast a consciousness of thy seeing, feeling, &c., and thereby thou perceivest the object. Couldst thou not perceive it without this consciousness? Canst thou not recognise an object by sight or hearing, without knowing that thou seest or hearest? ”

“ Here again we have thought out the thing better: to us consciousness, or “the spirit,” appears as a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force unnecessarily—we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously. ”

“ It is contended that the senses correct the vagaries of the mind; that we are enabled to distinguish between the creations of the mind and the impressions brought to it from the external world solely by the consciousness we have, when we are awake, of the action of the senses and the knowledge we have that the impressions borne to us by the senses are objective—that is, made by something existing without ourselves. If, for instance, you close your eyes and give rein to the imagination, a stream of ideas—pictures of persons and places—flows before the mind’s eye. ”

“ We have recognized two distinct mental states—the conscious and the unconscious—and have found them constantly pressing each on the other’s domain. Our study of consciousness reveals the normal in the aspects of sleeping and waking, also various abnormal states. Consciousness may become excited, depressed, confused, delirious, or insane. We shall consider later some of the mental workings that account for these abnormal expressions. At present let us examine the mind’s activities in sleep and in delirium. ”

“ It is for the sake of the proof that it is not fundamental that we must now endeavour to decide what it is.
"Consciousness," by those who regard it as fundamental, is taken to be a character diffused throughout our mental life, distinct from sensations and images, memories, beliefs and desires, but present in all of them.* Dr. Henry Head, in an article which I quoted in Lecture III, distinguishing sensations from purely physiological occurrences, says: "Sensation, in the strict sense of the term, demands the existence of consciousness." ”

“ I cannot assume that that sudden consciousness of being in the air was absolutely the beginning of that episode any more than I can imagine a flower suddenly appearing without plant or root or prior growth; nor can I think that blind motions of the brain, in blank unconsciousness of what they tend to, suddenly flame into a consciousness instinct with wild beauty. ”

“ Moreover, while we watch the birth of that consciousness we are confronted, at the same time, by the apparition of living bodies, capable, even in their simplest forms, of movements spontaneous and unforeseen. ”

“ Let us examine ourselves at the moment when a sensation is produced in us; we{48} shall recognize that there is perception only so far as there is some degree of attention, and that perception ends at the moment when our activity ends. One does not recollect what he did in perfect sleep or in a swoon; because then he had lost voluntary activity, consequently consciousness ”

“ But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time ”

“ Mental synthesis of psychic content in the unity of a moment-consciousness is a fundamental principle of psychology. ”

“ Through the conception of the subconscious as resolvable, on the one hand, into the unconscious, passive or active physiological dispositions, and, on the other hand, into coactive conscious states, the subconscious becomes simplified and intelligible. It offers a basis on which may be constructed comprehensible theories of memory, suggestibility, post-hypnotic phenomena, dreams, automatic writing and similar phenomena, artificial hallucinations, the protean phenomena of hysteria, and the psycho-neuroses, as well as the mechanism of thought. ”

“ We find that the modifications which are taking place more or less regularly in our possibilities of sensation, are mostly quite independent of our consciousness, and of our presence or absence. Whether we are asleep or awake the fire goes out, and puts an end to one particular possibility of warmth and light. ”