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John J. Bannan said:
How does a higher state of consciousness help us to reproduce and care for our children?
The idea of a "higher state of consciousness" is a human invention. That is, we arbitrarily assign it the status of being a "higher state". In reality, the higher state may well be more raw and primal.
It's a simple concept to write, but not necessarily the easiest to understand. Okay, at least, it seems that way by the number of people I confuse with it.
We generally think of the brain as a generative organ. That is, our thoughts occur there, &c. Something lights up with electricity, something else is produced. But this is the wrong perspective, I think. I prefer to regard the brain as a filter of sorts. It must receive, prioritize, and respond to stimuli. Our natural tendencies compel us to view ourselves as
creating these responses as if from nothing. Now flip that notion on its head: our responses are, in a certain and vital way, inevitable. We just haven't the means to track that inevitability.
It's not quite full-blown determinism, but rather the results of inhibition. We perceive a stimulus according to conditioned criteria, we prioritize and consider the stiumulus according to conditioned criteria, we respond according to conditioned criteria. In the end, we are filtering out information, paring down to the essential and utmost of the concept. Our responses, then, are the only ones we can manage under the circumstances.
Consider the Reticular Activating System in your brain:
... we also find the Reticular Activating System (RAS), an area which is enormously important because of its role in arousal and awareness. Our ability to think and perceive, even our power to respond to stimuli with anything beyond a mere reflex, is due to the brain cortex, but the cortex cannot function unless it is in an aroused state - awake. The brain cortex cannot wake itself up; what awakens the cortex from sleep and keeps it awake is the RAS. The RAS is also invoked in order to switch from perception of things outside us, to perception of things within our inner world. The RAS regulates and controls all our muscular activity and all our sensory perceptions; the cortex and RAS operate in a feedback mode, the purpose of which is to maintain an optimum level of arousal (see the following paper 'States of Cortical Arousal').
Sensations which reach the brain cortex are fed back to the RAS, and when the level of activity becomes too high, the RAS sends inhibitory signals to the cortex to reduce the excitation. Anxiety states occur when the inhibitory function of the RAS fails to keep cortical activity within comfortable limits. On the other hand, in a sensory deprivation situation, where the level of stimulation reaching the RAS via the cortex is too low, the RAS sends stimulating signals to the cortex to maintain alertness, frequently resulting in hallucinations. It is the RAS which switches on the cortex during sleep to produce vivid dreams. It is also responsible, during dreaming sleep, for inhibiting the activity of the whole spinal cord, so that the person does not literally enact the dream and possibly endanger himself. It is the function of biofeedback to facilitate cooperation between the cortex and the RAS, in order to achieve self-regulation.
The brain can receive, classify and respond to sensory information without such data penetrating into consciousness. However, if a repeated stimulus finally results in conscious awareness, this is because the RAS has been activated. This is the capacity of the brain for selective attention: when reading a book, especially if it is sufficiently interesting, the reader will be oblivious to surrounding distractions. This duality of perception is necessary to man's survival .... (
Trans4mind.com)
Put simply, as it was explained to me in psychology classes, the RAS is what lets you hear someone speak your name in a crowded, noisy room. Quite obviously, it does more, but all of that seems to be filtration; in fact, I learned about it by another name, the Reticular Autonomous Screen. Either way, it provides an example of the brain as a filter.
We receive information broadly and constantly. Why do you not perceive the motion of the Earth except by watching the stars in the sky? Why do we not hear the echo of the Big Bang without special equipment? Why do we not see infrared? All of these signals have been filtered out, and to the point that natural selection determined we do not need to perceive these things.
The "higher state of consciousness", in this sense, would actually be a more primal state of mind, one in which specific filters are arranged; while blocking out external signals, we focus on the processing of internal impulses. The trick, it seems, is to achieve this state without meditating, that is, while functioning in the world, that we might be able to see beyond the living conditions of society that have selected such a narrowly-censored view. The higher state of mind is an attempt to perceive what we are missing, what we have blocked out of our perceptions.
The evolutionary question, then, is whether humanity can endure while filtering more and more of its stimuli as irrelevant. The perceptive demands of farming in the nineteenth are not necessarily any greater or less than the perceptive demands of a twentieth-century assembly line, or technological labor in the twenty-first. Each generation is conditioned for even greater focus; filters are stronger, more numerous, or both. At present, society selects
against the higher state. The most successful in the species are ever-more focused, and the dreamers and mythmakers increasingly left out in the cold. The question is whether this progression can continue indefinitely. We have the power to affect the factors of our natural selection; we can easily select ourselves out of the living Universe. In this context, it would be a fascinating debate whether the "higher state" is vestigial, or something to aspire to. Perhaps it simply
is, a byproduct of our necessity. But nature is not extraneous: is it selecting out the "higher state", or does that "higher state" have a purpose and a value among the current generations of the species? I, for one, side with the latter. It will be our broader perception that eventually saves us from ourselves.
