Something that has eluded me for years is becoming clearer.
I notice that my consciousness has two phases and that each of these phases is its ultimate decision maker in the area of its own functional competence.
It’s probable that it’s the same for others but I wouldn’t know that. I can only speak for myself.
The first phase is an observer whose decisions are ultimate in the field of principles and values.
The second is an actor whose decisions are ultimate in the field of operations and procedures.
I went for a long walk today (Friday) and just reviewed things from the standpoint of what I wanted and intended to see, etc. I noticed myself in an observer mode and noticed that I switched to an altogether different mode from time to time – an actor mode – whenever I bumped into people, needed to purchase something, or needed to recognize or interact with someone for other reasons.
The actor or operational mode generally followed the principles and values that the observer established, but not always. If it needed to extemporize or frame a response according to a different principle or value, it had the authority to do so while it was in charge of me.
Authority was divided. The need for the two to work together was clear. I didn’t want this to become the Humpty Dumpty situation that I lived in for much of my life where a surface and a deeper consciousness existed and the two had never met and didn’t know that each other existed.
I didn’t want to be dissociated, but to have the two phases of consciousness work together. And I saw that it took some agreement between the two before they did.
The observer phase required solitude, a minimum of input from the outer or external world. It was most aware of the inner or internal world. It became crabby if it didn’t have sufficient time to indulge itself.
It was not happy in an environment of almost-constant outer stimulation. It preferred stillness, It needed time to reflect, meditate, and think.
The actor phase arose whenever it was imperative to interact with the external world and had to give up its focus on the internal world. I observed myself learning how to walk down a street, navigate my way through the people, show respect to all, and yet keep to my own inner space if I wanted to.
And then I noticed as well how I behaved when the need to take others into account presented itself in a way that couldn’t be ignored. I watched the two phases of consciousness interact.
I’ve long favored the observer phase, but I realize that no one can just be in one phase and neglect the other totally. I’ve agreed to certain roles in life and must attend to the actor phase if I’m to satisfy these roles. I’m not as adept in the actor phase – not by a long shot. Hence the tendency to regard myself as “an intellectual.”
The observer phase had a mission and the actor phase had certain agreed-upon roles.
The mission of the observer was to delve deeper and deeper into consciousness itself, to find out more and more about what consciousness was and the ways consciousness operated.
The roles of the actor were elements of my soul contract that I had agreed to: blog writer, various types of wayshower, (1) future roles, etc. The two of them did not necessarily go in the same direction all the time. The pulls of the one could be very different than the pulls of the other.
I’ll have more to say in a future article. But for now I wanted simply to acknowledge that I see the two phases operating.
Footnotes
(1) “Wayshower” is not a claim to expertise or knowledge but a statement of willingness to lead, explore and report what is found.