Evolution of Consciousness

Evolution of consciousness is not much difficult to understand if we enable our understanding of consciousness to encompass entire ranges of consciousness. Most of the people focus on a very small aspect such as self-consciousness and fail to understand because they are ignoring most of the scenario.

Consciousness consists of many layers and dimensions. Usually, human consciousness divided into three levels of awareness such as conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. It’s true that consciousness incorporates unconscious thoughts.

There are various theories which represent a different level of consciousness & origins and history of consciousness. Likewise, according to Buddhism theory, that consists of 8 or 9 levels such as sight consciousness, hearing-consciousness, smell-consciousness, taste-consciousness, and touch-consciousness. The sixth consciousness is usually at work in support of our daily activities. Memory, imagination or dreams also take place on this level, so the mind-consciousness might be at work even without immediate input from the five senses. The seventh, manas consciousness does not depend on the external world directly. It is the internal, spiritual, intuitive realm of life where self-attachment and the ability to distinguish one thing from other, capacities necessary for survival, reside. Eighth level is the Alaya-consciousness, it is a Sanskrit word, alaya which means storehouse. All of us can fundamentally transform our karma as well as create supreme value and happiness in our life by tapping into an even deeper, and more powerful level of consciousness. This is the ninth consciousness, also known as amala consciousness.

It stated earlier that many levels of consciousness begin with a brain or with the nervous system, but Merriam Webster defines consciousness in a different way. Different ways are the following:

• The state of being aware especially of something within oneself.
• The state or fact of being conscious of external things such as the object, state, or fact.

Every living body has some minor level of awareness of itself as well as of some things external to itself, or it may die. Cells need to aware of as well as maintain their internal environments, find food and avoid danger in their external environments or even die. Consciousness’s lowest level exists at the lowest level of life. The cell of an individual has cellular life consciousness.

Subconscious is a Personality

The subconscious also refers to everything that going on is not conscious. It acts as background in the figure-ground separation of the mind. In case, specific information is systematically kept out of an individual’s personal narrative, then, later on, that information will appear only indirectly in conscious experience. In case, there is the pattern to the information that gets suppressed, for example, providing the information or official status would damage important social relationships, then those patterns may appear to take on a personality.

It is also in the case that certain older parts of the brain, especially the amygdala in limbic system of the brain, form their own memories of strongly emotional events, such as fear, that get separated from the brain’s main memory system for information and events. The memories in the amygdala are not accessible consciously. The amygdala attaches strong emotional valences such as fear, anger, desire etc. to internal brain activity patterns generated by specific life situations. When a life situation is similar to a past fearful moment recurs, the amygdala will try to influence rest of the brain to steer us away from what it thinks might be potential trouble.