The consciousness is in charge of the Organism but in a way it doesn’t physically exist. The consciousness is the name given to all the currently activated sensory, motor, and memory neurons. I call the memory neurons of the consciousness the mental plane, though you can think of them as the “imagination.” When the Organism sleeps, the consciousness exists solely within the mental plane causing you to dream.
Since the consciousness has no physical form, it must use the Organism as a tool to interact with the world around you. It’s important to recognize that you can only ever see the Organism of another person and they can only see the Organism of you. The consciousness exists within the Organism but it cannot be seen. Intentions cannot be seen, we can only see actions.
Our consciousness starts out centered around self but we soon meet new people. People are stored in memory the same as other ideas but we recognize other people as self-thinking like us. When we are very young, we don’t think about other people existing when we aren’t around. Our understanding of a person is only based on our experiences with that person.
Since we cannot see intention, we all have limited views of every other person. The neural cluster of a person is called a character.
We create a character for everyone we meet and everyone you’ve learned about in stories. We even create a character to describe ourselves. Synapsing self to our own character gives us our perspective. When your consciousness synapses self to a character other than your own, you can see and think using a different perspective; this is called empathy.
Our perspectives are always limited because our characters are always limited. A limited perspective means that anything you do or make to express an intention will be interpreted differently by everyone. Art is the process of expressing intentions to be interpreted by an audience. Everyone is an artist because nobody knows anyone else’s exact intention; we can only interpret.
A specific type of art is communication: the process of using the Organism to transfer ideas from the consciousness of one person to the consciousness of another. There are three general types of communication: physical, emotional, and intellectual.
Physical communication includes any physical touch. Emotional communication expresses our emotions and usually inspires a mirroring reaction from the audience, called sympathy.
Intellectual communication is our most accurate yet complex way of sharing our intentions, using language to represent concepts. In fact, when intellectually communicating, your consciousness accesses each word specifically to “find the words” and synapse them to the motor center to let you to speak.
Empathy gives us the ability to gain the perspective of another person which means we must accept that others are constantly creating and updating a character describing us. The person you are, the person you see yourself as, and the person other people see are all very different. Everyone you meet or who hears about you creates their own unique character for you.
When the Organism does anything, we expect our actions to influence other people’s characters of us. We can also expect others to expect us to act with intentions. Empathy can quickly get pretty deep in the “I know that you know that I know that you know…” cycle. As you would guess, interacting with and around other people can take up a lot of brainpower. Communicating and empathizing with others makes up the complex process known as socialization.
Our characters can be very different from the actual people they represent. The phrase “I feel like I don’t even know you anymore,” describes that difference. The best way to make your character more accurate to the real person is to communicate with them. The more you know about a character, the less likely that character will feel like a possible social danger. Social dangers stimulate fear just like physical dangers.
When socializing, we’re constantly creating expectations involving other characters. Sometimes those expectations involve fear and give us anxiety. When our expected neural paths don’t stimulate fear, we call it trust. The people we know best are the ones we know pose no danger to us. However, just one violation of your trust can break a trend and leave you skeptical.
We love synapsing new information to characters, especially if the character is relatable, meaning it is synapsed to self. We can use characters and our anticipation to create stories in our mental plane while we continue to take in new information. The pleasure release from forming all those synapses is the reason we enjoy drama but our favorite stories are the ones that feel complete at the end.
Completion of an idea releases pleasure and completion of a character within a story is what makes a good ending. Completing an idea with many synapses releases a lot of pleasure and means an idea makes sense. We use the word meaning to describe the causality that completes our deep thoughts.
Remember, neural paths are connected chains of activated neurons. The more neurons that are part of the path, the more pleasure is released when it is completed. The idea that has more synapses than any other memory is self. Completing a synapse of self with the surrounding world allows you to reach enlightenment. In other words, you know who you are and how you fit into everything.
Enlightenment first comes with a pleasure releasing realization and continues releasing pleasure any time the neural path is activated. The large pleasure release caused by a large neural path gives us something I like to call the Feeling. When a single thought is connected to many other parts of the brain, it releases more pleasure when activated. The overwhelming pleasure can also be felt when another character synapses to self and is why so many of us are looking for a “soulmate” to “complete them.”
Understanding how the consciousness works is equally as important as understanding the Organism. Throughout your life, you’ll have thoughts that feel foreign and you may even attribute them to characters like your conscience or heart; sometimes even ghosts or god.
Remember, the Organism makes up all of the neurons that aren’t currently part of the consciousness which means thoughts can originate from it. Automated neural paths, ones that are very practiced, can activate without the consciousness. The thoughts that come from the Organism are easily mistaken to be from another character, but they are yours!
Learning about how your brain works allows you to accept the Organism and control the consciousness. You can’t control your emotions but you can control your expectations. When you master your brain, concepts like freedom, humor, and fun feel like nothing more than functions of your mind.
I’ve always been under the impression that life is what you make of it. You now know how your brain works; it’s up to you to create the life you want to live in. All characters are limited and you can become any character you want.
Your consciousness is who you are and you have complete control over it. The Organism will work with you as long as you work with it. You are what you know and there is no such thing as “normal” or “standard.” Listen to the Organism and trust your consciousness, being different from everyone else is one of the best parts of being alive.