liberating Consciousness

A detailed Summary of liberating Consciousness

Liberating Consciousness and the Self

What allows humans to become more conscious? One can see that it is not a matter of how one expands his or her consciousness; it is how one can stop constantly restricting and narrowing it. Humans are creatures that already have a wide-open and infinitely interconnected consciousness built into them. The fact that they choose to interfere and refine consciousness affects their state of being. In Zen in the Art of Archery, this exact restriction is what caused Eugen Herrigel's struggle in his to attain the "artless art" of Zen self mastery. The narrowing of consciousness into habits of end-gaining mentalities is also what the Alexander Technique attempts to alter. The technique enables the mind and body to recognize and free itself from unconscious layers of muscular and mental habits. Human restriction of the conscious mind into an "end gaining" mentality resembles the view of consciousness as what Daniel Dennett calls the Cartesian Theater, where consciousness is narrowed !

to a specific point of experience. In order to attain self mastery as "means whereby" one must abandon the notion of a Cartesian Theater, and view consciousness as an ongoing process of human experie

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His way out of this mess of restricting the consciousness is to propose what he calls a Joycean machine, a kind of mental operating system (like the computer programs Windows or MS-DOS) that acts as a controller, filtering the cacophony of inner voices into a silent self-narrative -- a stream of consciousness. To avoid the problem of infinite regress, he hypothesizes that this master controller is not a fully cognizant marionette observing the internal stage of the Cartesian Theater, but a "virtual machine". It is because of this mental software, he proposes, that we can not only think but reflect on our own thinking, as we engage in the step-by-step deliberations that occupy us when we are most aware of the plodding of our minds. In order to break the restriction of the mind into a mentality of endgaining, one must resist the concept of Cartesian Materialism and view consciousness as an ongoing process of revision and editing, like that of Dennett's Multiple Drafts model. !

The ultimate aim of Herrigel was to attain the Zen everyday mind. Painstakingly, from the first lesson onwards, Herrigel is taught how to breathe and to relax, even as his arms and shoulders strain at the pull on the bow. The Zen master warns him "The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede." With this advice, Herrigel attains the notion of allowing the bowstring to release itself, not the archer releasing it, all the while, trying not to think about technique, nor to strive to hit the goal. Eventually Herrigel achieved a purposeless and egoless state that allowed the arrow to shoot itself:

Cartesian Materialists believe that "unconscious" parts of the brain process sensory stimuli, filling in gaps and clarifying ambiguities, and then present the result to consciousness. It is as if the unconscious processes are preparing a show that is presented to consciousness. It is through the idea of the Cartesian Theater that the mind becomes trapped into the notion of consciousness resembling that of an end-gaining mentality. Viewing consciousness as a Cartesian Theater, all thoughts, ideas and experiences can be reduced to a specific point of consciousness. The "Cartesian Theater" is a stage where all consciousness occurs. It is the idea that thoughts can be categorized into preconscious, conscious, and post-conscious based on the observer. The point when the observer experiences the thought is the point of consciousness where everything "comes together" onto a stage of consciousness. After the experience has already been observed, it leaves the stage and becomes p!

Every action a person takes, whether an action commonly thought of as thinking, perceiving, moving or even the act of constructing personal meaning, is an act of that person as a whole and thus is expressive of the conditions of the coordination of the whole person. Attainment of the "artless art" of Zen archery, as portrayed in Zen in the Art of Archery, and the workings of the Alexander Technique reflect the coordination of the whole person- mind and body. Both the mind and body are dependent upon one another for acquiring total self-awareness. In order to attain self-awareness the consciousness of the self cannot be restricted into a fixed boundary caused by the concept of consciousness as a Cartesian Theater. Consciousness must be a freely flowing stream of experience, exemplified by Dennett's Multiple Drafts model. Only then can the mind abandon the

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2446
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)

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