Awareness and My Brain

Welcome!

If you need some background or haven’t already read them, have a look at the introduction to this series – I’d like to ask you a question, and the first post – In the (recent) beginning. They will give you an idea of what brought me to NextStage Expanded Awareness Society and why I became a student. For the rest of this series of posts, rather than focus on a chronological review of what has happened on my Journey (my current notes document is 95 pages long), instead I’ll share some themes of my training and realizations I’ve had.

Also keep in mind that I’m a beginner, and what you’ll hear in these posts is what I’ve learned and understood – not necessarily what I was taught or what I need to understand. This series of posts are not meant as instruction, unless you feel that you could learn to pilot a 747 from a toddler. They are my own experiences, but I hope that in reading about mine, you may find more reasons to move along yours.

So how do you expand your awareness? And when you do, what will you become aware of? Since I tend to be a linear and logical thinker (and I’m working hard to overcome that), allow me to start with this: what is awareness?

According to my version of the Webster dictionary: Awareness is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects, thoughts, emotions, or sensory patterns. Therefore, expanding your awareness involves knowing, perceiving, feeling and being conscious of more events, objects, thoughts, emotions or sensory patterns. What I had always suspected, but now accept completely as the obvious truth, is that there is more available to be aware of.

The sensory-brain connection that I’ve been interpreting the world with my entire life made me aware of only a tiny fraction of the available information. The problem wasn’t my sensors, my body always has been fully functional (mostly anyway, it is pushing 45 now).

It’s my brain. Western society trained my upper brain to ignore what wasn’t obvious, or didn’t fit in with my society’s values and expectations. Your upper brain, where most of our waking awareness operates from, is actually very adept at only “seeing” what it wants to see and ignoring the rest. We notice things that our upper brain thinks are important (or has been trained to think are important by experiences we’ve have had in the  past) . It will even change information it’s sensing to fit with what “should” be there if it can’t easily recognize or interpret what is actually there. If you’re not convinced of this fact, a quick Google search will reveal a library of scientific literature to you. The fact that optical illusions exist is proof alone.

A great deal of my training is focused on reconnecting my conscious awareness in my upper brain, with my lower brain where those society filters don’t exist. My lower brain (and yours) is where those filters and interpretations aren’t in place. It’s where all that other information is still being received, and is still available. With the my training and practice over time, I’m starting to bring some of that information up in to my conscious awareness where I can act on it.

Why are dreams sometimes so crazy? Because your higher brain is mostly offline. This is also why dreams are often far more than random things we dismiss or forget upon waking. Since your lower brain has access to far more sensory information, your awareness of that additional information can come through when dreaming.

When the Weird Dream Fairy visits you, don’t dismiss her lightly! As my training has progressed, my dreams have become more and more wild, more vivid and involve more than one sense. For most of my life, my dreams have been strictly visual, but now they involve most if not all of my senses, including smell. I always try to take notes about what I remember and as my Practice goes on, it gets easier to remember these happenings. It’s also very difficult to forget a 50 foot dragon-shaped fortune telling machine, or two huge humpback whales swimming by my bedroom window.