How to Stay Conscious?
We often reget from time to time, at which time, we often wish we can stay "conscious" when that situation happened. As it often happens, we will do it again when under a similar situation, and afterwards, we will once again regret.
Staying conscious is very hard, especially when we didn't realize why we lose our "conscious" in the first place.
By conscious, I assume we are referring to our ability to study all available information, including past experience, current events, and logical conclusions of all consequences, and the ability to do logical judgments on actions. It is important to realize, the key part of conscious is to do a "full" recollection and logical conclusion to the best of our ability. For example, your kid is making a lot of noise in the other room, and you gets angry instantly because you have a critical job currently needs concentration. Assuming you knows what "Super Nanny" knows, staying conscious means to realize the problem of your kid is boredom and require attention and your kid should come before your job and you should either play with your kid or find nanny support. However, collecting all these informations or logics takes time and it is not that easy as it seems. As a matter of fact, at the time you were disturbed from the work you are trying to concentrate on by the kid's noise, the informations your mind collects immediately is -- 1. You need concentrate on the job you are doing, 2. There is this noise keep you from concentrating and, 3. Your kid makes that noise, and ... you would see your logic conclusion based on these overwhelming informations.
So why we lose our conscious? The answer is we never really lose our conscious. It is simply we have naturally built precedences among huge amount of information we constantly receives and sometime, it takes too long before we recollect certain information that necessary to prevent regrets. Consciousness is actually a relative term. When we regret for certain things, we say to ourselves: "why we didn't think of this or that". But a further question is: "why we would particularly think of this or that -- among millions of informations available to us, including the temperature, wind, light, your wife's talking, ..., last episode of "super nanny", Steve Pavlina's last month's blog, ..., your wish of staying conscious yesterday, ...
Why particularly this or that?
We would never be able to process all the information through our best logic at any single time. "Full consciousness" is an idealism. Theoretically, and often we believe, we can achieve full conscious, but in reality and practically, that is not possible. Even it is possible, the process would take forever, and we would not be able to take actions fast enough to survive.
So with our amazing mechanism, we have developed *precedence* among all informations that we receive and possess. And for information with extremely high precedence, we will process it almost instantly and take actions before we "realize" it. For example, if your finger touches the hot coffee, it retracts. Well you say, that is extreme, it is almost a reflex. Then how about some one hit you, and you naturally hit back. And some one bad mouthing you and you naturally want to talk back. What happened here is we have built a very high precedence on information that concerns personal safety and when we perceive an information that our personal safety gets threatened, we process that information immediately before collecting other information. When some one maliciously hits you, you don't have time to recollect your past experience of the hitter and the information that he is hitting you is overwhelming.
Back to the example of parenting. When we trying to concentrate on some short term tasks, often informations that prevent you from completing the tasks takes precedence over other long term information such as your kid needs your attention and proper education. Therefore, especially for parents that are busy and strong in personal development, parenting is often a problem.
How to stay at better conscious? Without changing our mindset, trying to stay conscious as we often struggled at regretting time, is very difficult. Essentially, we are asking our mind to give up our ability to do quick responses to high-precedence-information which has developed through the long course of evolution. It is almost impossible.
What we should ask ourselves is not "staying conscious", but adjusting our precedence to the informations we receive and possess. Back to the example of parenting, we regret yelling at the kid. Wishing next time staying conscious is futile, rather we should raise the precedence of the well being of the kid, our long term goal and our essential happiness, and the feelings and emotions of the kid above the disturbance to a short term hobby project. Well, to raise long term information such as our life's well being above short term information such as completing certain short term project, is very difficult. Our ability to survive naturally placed short term information much higher than long term information. However, raising certain long term information's precedence height enough so that the information can come to our logic soon enough, hopefully before our reckless action take place, is not impossible.
How do we raise the precedence of certain information? Well, that actually we all already knows -- by thinking on it, by our desire for it, and by our focus. If you think about your kid all day, you would hear your kid's cry before you realize you have cut your finger (Do you have similar experience, maybe on stuff other than kid?) If you desire certain achievement, you would notice anything related to your success before anything else.
So when you regret again next time, don't just blame your self "losing conscious", think about your precedences.
Staying conscious is very hard, especially when we didn't realize why we lose our "conscious" in the first place.
By conscious, I assume we are referring to our ability to study all available information, including past experience, current events, and logical conclusions of all consequences, and the ability to do logical judgments on actions. It is important to realize, the key part of conscious is to do a "full" recollection and logical conclusion to the best of our ability. For example, your kid is making a lot of noise in the other room, and you gets angry instantly because you have a critical job currently needs concentration. Assuming you knows what "Super Nanny" knows, staying conscious means to realize the problem of your kid is boredom and require attention and your kid should come before your job and you should either play with your kid or find nanny support. However, collecting all these informations or logics takes time and it is not that easy as it seems. As a matter of fact, at the time you were disturbed from the work you are trying to concentrate on by the kid's noise, the informations your mind collects immediately is -- 1. You need concentrate on the job you are doing, 2. There is this noise keep you from concentrating and, 3. Your kid makes that noise, and ... you would see your logic conclusion based on these overwhelming informations.
So why we lose our conscious? The answer is we never really lose our conscious. It is simply we have naturally built precedences among huge amount of information we constantly receives and sometime, it takes too long before we recollect certain information that necessary to prevent regrets. Consciousness is actually a relative term. When we regret for certain things, we say to ourselves: "why we didn't think of this or that". But a further question is: "why we would particularly think of this or that -- among millions of informations available to us, including the temperature, wind, light, your wife's talking, ..., last episode of "super nanny", Steve Pavlina's last month's blog, ..., your wish of staying conscious yesterday, ...
Why particularly this or that?
We would never be able to process all the information through our best logic at any single time. "Full consciousness" is an idealism. Theoretically, and often we believe, we can achieve full conscious, but in reality and practically, that is not possible. Even it is possible, the process would take forever, and we would not be able to take actions fast enough to survive.
So with our amazing mechanism, we have developed *precedence* among all informations that we receive and possess. And for information with extremely high precedence, we will process it almost instantly and take actions before we "realize" it. For example, if your finger touches the hot coffee, it retracts. Well you say, that is extreme, it is almost a reflex. Then how about some one hit you, and you naturally hit back. And some one bad mouthing you and you naturally want to talk back. What happened here is we have built a very high precedence on information that concerns personal safety and when we perceive an information that our personal safety gets threatened, we process that information immediately before collecting other information. When some one maliciously hits you, you don't have time to recollect your past experience of the hitter and the information that he is hitting you is overwhelming.
Back to the example of parenting. When we trying to concentrate on some short term tasks, often informations that prevent you from completing the tasks takes precedence over other long term information such as your kid needs your attention and proper education. Therefore, especially for parents that are busy and strong in personal development, parenting is often a problem.
How to stay at better conscious? Without changing our mindset, trying to stay conscious as we often struggled at regretting time, is very difficult. Essentially, we are asking our mind to give up our ability to do quick responses to high-precedence-information which has developed through the long course of evolution. It is almost impossible.
What we should ask ourselves is not "staying conscious", but adjusting our precedence to the informations we receive and possess. Back to the example of parenting, we regret yelling at the kid. Wishing next time staying conscious is futile, rather we should raise the precedence of the well being of the kid, our long term goal and our essential happiness, and the feelings and emotions of the kid above the disturbance to a short term hobby project. Well, to raise long term information such as our life's well being above short term information such as completing certain short term project, is very difficult. Our ability to survive naturally placed short term information much higher than long term information. However, raising certain long term information's precedence height enough so that the information can come to our logic soon enough, hopefully before our reckless action take place, is not impossible.
How do we raise the precedence of certain information? Well, that actually we all already knows -- by thinking on it, by our desire for it, and by our focus. If you think about your kid all day, you would hear your kid's cry before you realize you have cut your finger (Do you have similar experience, maybe on stuff other than kid?) If you desire certain achievement, you would notice anything related to your success before anything else.
So when you regret again next time, don't just blame your self "losing conscious", think about your precedences.
posted by Hui Zhou at 11:00 PM
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