What does it mean to be conscious? Lately, new scientific evidence suggests that even simple organisms without brains seem to display conscious movement that exhibits beneficial outcomes. But what of human consciousness? Is our consciousness, the consciousness of each one of us, essentially the same? Have we all come out of the same mold that society constructed for us to pop out of?
There may be deeper, higher levels of consciousness. A person who is satisfied with — and comfortable with — an ordinary mind may not be capable of existing as a deeper, more dynamic kind of consciousness. A mind full of conflict, fragmentation, stale traditional patterns, traditional beliefs, and conditioned habits would likely be deficient in what a deeper, more dynamic consciousness entails. A mind stuck in a rut of ordinary, endless thinking would be incapable of the insight and wisdom that a deeper consciousness effortlessly reflects.
Society shapes young people into automatons who do not question things deeply. Students are generally made to conform, endlessly react, and obey. Such conformity leads to stagnation and the erasure of uniqueness. Minds that accept and take on superficiality then become bereft of great insight and depth. It may be that a little consciousness is a superficial consciousness. We need to be revolutionary (not in a violent sense, but rather in a profound, harmonious, compassionate, and dynamic psychological sense). When we transcend inner conflict and disorder, the outer disorder (of society) naturally and beautifully dissipates.
Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog 
Tom, I like to think my mind is still like a sponge, ready to absorb more info as days go by. That’s a good thing and some things I absorb by osmosis, like sport info – I am not a big sports fan of any team, local or otherwise, but if I hear/absorb enough about sports I can carry on a conversation about the winners/losers. That’s a great shot of the grasshopper with the buggy eyes.
I don’t follow sports at all. To me, it all appears to be too competitive in a world that has far too much conflict already. And besides, players for the Bears are not from Chicago (for the most part) anyway; they are from all over the place, which renders the whole thing as being a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
It’s not a grasshopper; it’s a katydid. It blends in well, which keeps it safe from a lot of hungry predators.
I think in a lot of instances, if your family followed sports, you may grow up liking sports … in my case, my parents never watched sports, but read instead. When they weren’t reading the newspaper cover to cover, they were reading a book and encouraged me to do the same. We did watch TV, but “The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau” or “Animal Kingdom” or “National Geographic” (we also got the NG magazine as well. My grandparents were hockey and wrestling fans and watched Saturday matches at Maple Leaf Gardens all the time when I was growing up.
I always get grasshoppers and katydids mixed up – if I saw katydids outside, I might do the same thing as I’ve never seen one, except in photos.
I loved Jacques Cousteau, Animal Kingdom, and National Geographic. David Attenborough is awesome too! Steve Irwin’s stuff was wonderful too, but he unfortunately died young. Attenborough is super great! Attenborough is very hateful of Donald Trump, because of Trump’s endorsing fossil fuels and being against green energy.
Don’t worry, grasshoppers and katydids are very easy to misidentify with each other.
You explained this very well. I think in the end, we are all in for a big surprise.
I’m very appreciative of you saying that, Marlene, (in tyour first sentence). It means that you a looking deeper into my posts than is the case with (not-so-conscious) many.
I would say the loss of critical thinking is a key contributor to the automaton syndrome. Without that the “shape” condition gets very narrowed and without that variability there is limited individualism. Just my thoughts of course raised by your thought provoking question.
The distinction here between conditioned cognition and consciousness itself is directly relevant to this idea. New Argument from Consciousness This video explores the meta problem of consciousness proposed by David Chalmers and argues that naturalistic processes couldn’t have given us knowledge of consciousness This is my video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJVvZNi0Fi8 Disclosure: this comment was drafted with AI assistance.