A Split in Consciousness

Written by Mathew Naismith

As I most often do, before I start writing about a particular subject, I try to research in material that is on a subject that I am about to write about. I also rely on actual experiences either it being my own and/or someone else's.

The following material I came across in my research is as follow. The external material I have presented here is worth reading through, even if you come to sections you don't agree with.           

https://iahip.org/inside-out/issue-61-summer-2010/the-evolution-of-human-consciousness-and-spirituality

Extract: What is wrong with modern man – and woman? Particularly in the West, we are constantly dissatisfied, striving, looking for more, whether it is consumer goods, fame, fortune, power, a longer lifespan or spiritual kicks. As Anne Wilson Schaef (1987) has pointed out, we are living in an addictive society. Morris Berman is a cultural historian who has attempted to make sense of our malaise in a remarkable trilogy about the evolution of Western consciousness.

The person accepts the world as it presents itself, including the split between Self and World. Spirit is not separate, but is immanent within the world: it is ‘the smell of the forest after rain, the warm blood of the deer’ (ibid:11). In this way of being, the secular is the sacred.

And yet, I don’t share Berman’s disquiet about out-of-body experiences or altered states of consciousness. Can we not work against some of the unacceptable faces of the ascent model of consciousness while retaining transcendent religion? If I was graced with the experience of ecstatic fusion with God, I certainly wouldn’t say no. At the same time, I have got the message from Berman that it is time to stop searching above, behind and beyond and value what is here.

Actual Experience: After watching most of the James Bond (007) movies, as I have found in just about all media, sensationalism is becoming more and more extreme. The violence and brutality within the James Bond movies escalated, nothing was left to the imagination. This reminds me of the Roman arenas, where violence and brutality escalated over many years to the point of outright butchery. The senses of the people needed to be entertained to a greater extent each time, are we any different today?

Yes, we deceive ourselves more, people are not being brutalised in the movies therefore the media today is nothing like the Roman arenas!! This is after knowing that just about all the brutality that is depicted in the media today has and is occurring, most often to a greater degree than what is depicted in the media. Think of it like this, if you hear that people are being tortured in a certain way or children are being used a sex slaves, it's like a fungus, what you see growing above ground is nothing like what is bellow the ground.

Has, what I call the feel good industry, escalated to this point that we need to be entertained and/or made to feel good in some way on other people's suffering? If it doesn't tantalise our senses or makes us feel good it's negative!!

It is obvious to people like me that we don't want to sacrifice our security in feeling good. Any truth that threatens this is often simply judged as a negative, therefore subsequently ignored, or accepted as being an everyday part of life and ignored.

So what do we do to secure our feel good tantalisations? Create more media sensualism and/or create ideologies that ignore the negatives, like child abuse and torture, to feel good on a more regular basis. Being excessively positive takes ignoring the negatives, of course like the media and the Roman arenas, we need our senses tantalised more and more. It gets to the point that anything that doesn't tantalise our senses is judged as a negative.

So what are we manifesting? Materialism is manifesting what ideologies like love and light are manifesting, more suffering, not less. Think of it like this, what occurs when your child's disrespectful and rude behaviour is ignored? The act of ignoring this kind of behaviour just to feel good manifests worse behaviour, are we any different on a collective scale? There are a number of Western ideologies that are quite obvious in how unaware they are in what they are actually manifesting within their own actions and inactions.

As the inserted article implies, we are separating one from the other to simply tantalise our senses more and more. Separating the negatives, like what doesn't tantalise our senses, and judging them negative to just feel good is the deliberate act of splitting consciousness into what does and doesn't tantalise our senses. We then deceptively talk about being of oneness and unconditional love in the West!!

However, what seems to be occurring is that a number of people are awakening to what we are doing on a collective scale by observing what is presently occurring, of course this does take a lot of self-honesty and honest self-observation. It is wise to look at the collective consciousness as the self, no matter how many parts this consciousness desires to split itself into just to feel good. 

What would occur in my own relationship with my wife if I demanded that my wife makes me feel good on a regular basis? Probably the same with what occurs in a number of failed and/or discordant relationships!! If you have to use external sources to feel good, what does this say about the way you are leading your life? Look at the collective consciousness in the same way as personal relationship is my advice. The relationship isn't there to just make you feel good is it? Neither is the collective consciousness or existence as a whole, of course there are some people who demand that their relationships fulfil their desires to feel good on a regular basis, as they do media, the modern day Roman arena. It's simply a gift when a relationship makes you feel good, abusing this relationship in demanding more and more from this relationship is only going to end up creating more suffering, not less, as is being observed at present.

It is wise in life not to expect your immediate environment to be just there to fulfil your pleasurable desires on a constant basis. Think of it like love, love is not present to make you feel good, feeling good from love is a special gift that love can often create at times.......    

Relationships - Focused Intentions

Written by Mathew Naismith

I am going to get quite personal here, being that relationships are of a personal nature, a nature of focused intentions. Of course if our intention where not focused on the relationship, it would not be personal. Personal to me means to focus our intentions on the other person within the relationship; you cannot truly have a personal relationship with another person if we do not have the right intentions of focus to start with.

In my 53 years, I have had only one girlfriend, my wife, this doesn't mean I did not experience focused intentional relationships with other women, this means to experience focused intentional relationships, one does not have to be of a girl or boyfriend status.

Before and in the early part of my relationship with my wife, I was experiencing intentional relationships with two other women, of course my wife was not my wife at this stage. My wife to be was another intentional relationship that I was experiencing at the time.

What I am talking about here is intentional relationships, not casual relationships, there is a difference. Intentional relationships refer to a relationship that our focus is on the other person on a personal level, this can incorporate lust or desire but this is not our main focus. In an intentional relationship, the focus is on the whole person, not one part of the person, for example, the way they look or smile. The focused intentions are on the whole person as a whole.

One of my intentional relationships was with a woman who loved sex, to the point of experiencing sex with multiple men at the same time; I however was not personally into this kind of experience myself. It became obvious to me though that she never experienced an intentional relationship before.

We were walking down the street one-day and I reached out for her hand to hold while we walked, she looked at me in total amazement. This women was treated as a slut/hussy by other men because her main focus of her relationships was based on sex, nothing else, in this case the whole person no longer existed. This woman was conditioned to accepting relationships that were not focused on the whole person, only part of a person, of course this kind of relationship is anything but based on intentional relationships.

It would seem at no point did any other man try to hold her hand while walking anywhere, mainly because she was labelled a slut/hussy, a person of ill repute. Men, who love sex, are labelled mucho or studs; however, women who love sex are often labelled and treated as sluts/hussies. I knew of this women's main focus but this did not worry me. The rebuttal I received from my family and friends was amazing, how dare I treat a known slut/hussy as a whole person. In my own mind how dare I not, it was this simple, I was not going to allow prejudice, bias or ill judgement to stop me from treating another person as whole being.

You see my main focus was on the whole being, if I was to only focus on parts of the being, I would have judged in accordance with a lot of other people. Being who I am, I focused my intentions on the overall being, which neutralised all other aspects, which then allowed us to experience an intentional relationship together, a relationship constructed around the whole being of a person, not parts of the being.

You certainly know when you experience a true relationship, it's whole, the same goes with our whole self which includes our whole environment, not just parts of the environment we have more desire to experience than other parts of the environment. How many peoepl look at our present environment like a slut/hussy? In doing so, we are missing out on so much because our main focus in on part of the whole, not on the whole.

We should all have a personal intentional focused relationship with our environment just the way it is; instead, we focus on parts of this environment while in disdain of the rest of the environment. Where is our personal intentional focused relationship in this? Of course within this mentality, we are going to be more in ill judgment of our environment, not less.

As I treated my women with respect void of bias or prejudice, I treat my whole environment with the same respect. I take my environment personally on an intentional relationship level, this means I embrace and accept the whole of my environment just the way it is, however, like in any relationship, if the intentions are one sided, it's time to move on or try to amend this situation.

In the end, I moved on from my other intentional relationships to marry my wife to be, I certainly have no regrets, but I also have no regrets in showing these other women in my life what an intentional relationship is like.

Your focused intentions must always be on the whole, only within this can we be whole ourselves and free from separation.