Tag: consciousness

I’ve spent a lot of time around doctors and nurses and low level bureaucrats.

Way too much time.

I’ve learned a couple things as a result, however.

You get the best care from doctors or service from anyone else when they feel you as a human.
The best way to get them to feel you as human, is to feel, and act, as if they are human.

Ian’s rule of doctors is as follows: all the best doctors really care about their patients and are upset when their patients die or are hurting.

Obviously my experience is not “study wide” but it’s far more than most people and I have literally never had a good doctor who didn’t attach to me on a human level.

Now some people are just like this: they treat everyone as another human. When you do so, there’s a queer acknowledgement that the other person is like you: they have feelings, thoughts. They hurt sometimes. They matter.

But most people don’t, because that acknowledgment of others as human means you open yourself to care, and when you care you can be hurt thru the other person. (You can also, and people forget this, experience great joy and happiness thru other people. One of the four Buddhist emotions which are trained is “happiness for other people’ being happy.” After all, no matter how shit your life is there’s always someone whose life is going great.)

Jobs where you see tons of people in trouble going by, there is a temptation to shut down. To treat them as objects and simply do your job by the book. It’s self protection. But, again, in my experience, for whatever reason, if the care isn’t there, in most jobs where the real tasks is helping people, if you don’t care, you don’t do a good job. It shouldn’t be that way, maybe. If you do all the right things without giving a damn, it should be the same, right?

But it isn’t.

There’s a tactical level here. I made a connection with one doctor who injured himself by asking about it and following up. Of course, if I hadn’t actually cared that he was in pain, just asking would have meant nothing. In another case I had a doctor spill out his problems with his daughter. He was a good guy, and had always been a good doctor, but after that he took extra care of me.

But the tactical level isn’t important, it’s an outgrowth of the correct attitude. We’ve all met people who we know care about us the second we meet them. Some of them are the true Saints of the world: those who genuinely care for everyone. Others, we just made an instant connection.

But it’s this care that matters most. If you care about others, most of them (there are always exceptions) will be aware of it, even if only subconsciously, and they will reciprocate, again, often without even realizing they’re doing so.

Of course the best way to do this is to just care about everyone, at least somewhat. If I’m aware someone I don’t know well is unhappy, I’ll usually try and be kind to them even when I’ll never meet them again. Why not? I take particular care with people like service workers, homeless people, janitors and so on. These people are regarded by most as human appliances (janitors, service workers) or as unpleasant human trash (the homeless.)

They don’t get a lot of kindness or care, so a little goes a long way.

We’re all human. We all can suffer. And we don’t have anything but each other. This is true between us and animals too, in a different way. Not human, no, but they feel pain, many of them feel love, and we are lesser if we do not see the bond of consciousness between us.

Generally, as I used to write a lot, the right thing to do is the right thing to do. For you, and for everyone around you.

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The Simplest Way to Control Consciousness

By Ian Welsh

On December 3, 2021

2 Comments

I remember fairly clearly the day when, while trying to choose what to read in a bookstore, I realized that what I was choosing is who would control my consciousness — my mind — for a couple hours.

It wasn’t a thought I’d never had before; after all when we watch TV or a movie, or read a book, we want our consciousness to be changed for a while, but the “I’m letting the author’s mind control me” epiphany was direct, vivid, and somewhat alarming.

We think of ourselves as our bodies and thoughts, and as everything else as “outside” us, but that’s wrong. We never experience anything but ourselves, we experience nothing but our own consciousness. It is literally impossible to experience anything that isn’t yourself, including these words.

This is true regardless of your metaphysics. The material world may well exist, but what of it? At best, you experience it as a representation in your consciousness.

Because I’m slow, it took me about year to apply the “mind control” understanding to my environment. Every room I’m in, every vista I see, every road I walk, and every person I see or hear or talk to is in my mind. The environment — cars, people, walls, buildings — controls and forms my consciousness.

There isn’t any question that this effects me, what I think, what mood I’m in. There’s vast research literature on something as simple as the what mood different colors cause.

So my environment, my day to day environment, where I live, work, eat, sleep and walk, what I read or watch, and who I talk to or hug — that’s my consciousness.

Now I meditate, and I have more control over the emotional tone of my consciousness and the thoughts I think than a lot of people, but still, the environment is a huge influence. If I see people fighting, or I’m threatened, yeah, I can influence my emotional reaction, but I have to and sometimes I can’t. If, on the other hand, I interact with friendly, even loving people, it’s a lot easier.

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Likewise if I’m walking through some slum, full of despair, that changes my consciousness. If I’m in a beautiful room full of plants or pictures, I feel better than if I’m in a room of crumbling concrete, stained and stinking, because my consciousness changes to be like wherever I am. My consciousness IS my environment.

So the simplest way to control consciousness isn’t meditation (much as I have benefited from meditation) it’s to control your environment — the rooms you live in, sleep in, and work in. Your neighbourhood, if you can. The people you interact with, to the extent you can.

If something’s bad in your environment and you can change it to something better, you’re directly changing your consciousness for the better.

And even the most self-controlled, disciplined mind, is affected by environment. If you’re in an awful environment (and the most important part of an environment is the people), you have to constantly manage that; it’s a stress.

So beware of the environment you live in, please, and don’t assume you’re some Buddha who can just shrug it off (which, even he didn’t — and couldn’t — before he was the Buddha).

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: consciousness

Acknowledging the Human In Each Other

The Simplest Way to Control Consciousness