Consciousness

Understanding awareness, intelligence and the human mental mind

Few questions have occupied humanity as persistently as the question of what we are. Not what we look like, not what we can build or measure, but the nature of the consciousness and awareness behind all of that.

You are reading these words right now. Yet before you read them, before you formed any opinion or accepted any idea within them, something was already present. Something that received these words, processed them, and formed a response. That something is your consciousness. It is so close to you, so woven into the fabric of every moment, that it remains the least understood aspect of human existence.

At The Life Force Institute, we approach consciousness not as an abstract philosophical subject, but as a living reality with direct bearing on how you think, how you feel, how you relate to yourself and others, and ultimately on the quality of your life. To understand consciousness in this way is to begin to comprehend who you are and how your mind functions.

This article is the anchor point for consciousness knowledge on the site. It begins with the foundational question of what consciousness is, moves through an understanding of the human mental mind, and arrives at the mastery of the mind. Each of the topics stands on its own merits while simultaneously forming part of the connected body of work. The links provided throughout these articles will guide you naturally toward the next stage of the journey.  This consciousness article provides links to associated topics of Understanding Thought, Inner Knowledge, Cognition and Active Intelligence.

A Map to Understanding Consciousness

The word consciousness is often used interchangeably with awareness, mental mind, thought, and intelligence. However, in any genuine inquiry into the nature of consciousness, these distinctions matter enormously.

Consciousness is not the same as thought. You can observe your thoughts, which means something within you stands apart from them. That which watches is not itself a thought, nor is consciousness part of your brain. The brain is a physical organ whose activity correlates with experience, but does not define your identity or sense of self. Consciousness is the field of awareness in which all mental activity takes place. It is the space within from which thoughts arise, emotions are felt, and perceptions register.

Consciousness also has multiple dimensions. There is the ordinary waking awareness through which you navigate daily life, and there are deeper levels which you may encounter only fleetingly. Beyond both lies the Life Force, which animates human existence and underlies all conscious existence.

Your mental mind is the instrument through which consciousness operates in ordinary life. To understand your human mind, it is helpful to understand its principal faculties and the roles they each play.

Perception is the faculty through which your mind receives and interprets information from the world and from within. The mind actively shapes what it perceives according to its existing beliefs, experiences, memories, and emotional states, making perception far more subjective than most people realise.

Imagination is the capacity to envision mental images and possibilities beyond what is immediately present to your senses. As a form of visualisation and contemplation, imagination is one of the most creative instruments available to your conscious mind, shaping not only the inner world but, through action, the outer world as well.

Memory provides your mind with continuity, context, and accumulated learning. It also supplies the raw material from which the passive intellect operates, the repository of conditioned responses and habitual patterns that so often govern behaviour without conscious input.

Will is the faculty of conscious choice and directed intention, most directly associated with the active intellect. Most of what passes for decision-making is not the product of genuine will, but of the passive intellect selecting from pre-programmed responses. The cultivation of true will and the capacity to choose deliberately should be one of the primary aims of your conscious journey.

Intellect is the reasoning and comprehending faculty of your mind, allowing abstract thought and the capacity to evaluate and discern. As explored in the article on Active Intelligence, the intellect operates in two distinct modes, passive and active, and the distinction between them is of significant importance.

These faculties are the interwoven aspects of a single instrument, your mental mind. The quality of your life is determined by how they are developed and balanced. The mind working with refined perception, disciplined imagination, clear memory, genuine will, and active intellect is fundamentally different from one driven by distorted perception, unexamined memory, and the automatic reactions of the passive intellect.

Your mind is an instrument, not who you are. It is a tool of extraordinary sophistication, placed at the service of the conscious being who inhabits and directs it. Properly understood and directed, the mind is one of the most useful instruments in existence. Left to its own devices without conscious governance, it can become a source of considerable challenge. The difference between these two possibilities lies entirely in the relationship between you as a conscious being and the instrument that is inhabited.

The Nature of Mental Activity

Most people treat thought as something that simply happens. In reality, thought is an energetic act with consequences that extend well beyond the mind within which it arises. A thought is a creative act: it shapes perception, generates emotion, and directs attention. Yet consider how seldom you consciously choose what to think.

The mental chatter of the average waking hour arrives largely unbidden from the passive intellect. Real thinking, the deliberate engagement of the active intellect with a chosen subject, is comparatively rare in most lives, and yet it is the foundation of everything that makes human consciousness distinctive and powerful.

A significant insight from the study of consciousness is the distinction between the passive and the active intellect, a distinction with roots reaching back to Aristotle. The passive intellect operates automatically, often below the threshold of conscious awareness. It is the accumulated record of experience, habit, and conditioning, everything learned to function without the need for conscious deliberation. The active intellect is where genuine conscious engagement takes place.

Consciousness does not operate in isolation from emotion. Thought and emotion are so closely intertwined as to be almost indistinguishable, and the reactive cycle between them is one of the primary mechanisms by which the passive intellect maintains its hold over your life. The emotional energy generated by unconscious thinking reinforces the patterns of the passive intellect, making them feel more compelling, and steadily reduces the space available for the active intellect to operate. Active intellect is the faculty through which free will is exercised, allowing you to stand apart from the stream of automatic thoughts and emotions, and choose deliberately rather than react habitually.

The Observer Within

One of the most transformative aspects of consciousness is the observing self, the dimension of awareness that can watch the activity of the mind without being identified with it. Cultivating this faculty is central to the Life Force Institute’s approach to consciousness, not as a detachment from life, but as a quality of presence that allows full engagement with experience without losing oneself within it. Without this observer capacity, introspection tends to become merely another form of mental chatter, the mind talking to itself, generating stories rather than genuine insight.

Your aim should be to establish a balanced relationship with your mind, one in which the active intellect, informed by consciousness and guided by the deeper intelligence of the Life Force, holds the governing role, while the passive intellect serves as the repository of accumulated skill and experience rather than the silent dictator of automatic behaviour.

Beyond Your Mind

Beyond the passive and active intellect lies a subtler form of intelligence that most people have yet to encounter. Inner Knowledge is not information acquired through study or experience. It is a direct knowing that arises from within, requiring no process of logical reasoning. Inner knowledge and intuition are aspects of consciousness that lie beyond the reach of the mental mind alone, a reminder that your consciousness extends considerably further than ordinary thinking.

At a deeper level, intuition is a signal arising not from the mental mind but from the Life Force itself. It is important to distinguish this from the vague and emotionally coloured impressions sometimes described as gut feelings. Genuine intuition carries a quality of clarity quite distinct from the projections of the passive intellect, and learning to recognise the difference is itself a significant step in the development of consciousness.

Working with consciousness in a deliberate and transformative way is central to the Life Force Institute curriculum, and two concepts of Cognition and Active Intelligence are fundamental to achieving increased awareness.

Cognition is the practice of entering a state of quiet, purposeful mental focus. Unlike conventional meditation, which aims at the emptying of thought, Cognition works with the active application of purposeful thought. Through the tools of ekagrata and creative imagery, the active intellect is directed toward specific intentions, held in the quiet space beyond the noise of the passive intellect. Without this purpose to anchor it, stillness can simply become an opportunity for the passive intellect of the mental mind to perform its usual routines unchecked. Cognition provides the conscious intent that transforms stillness into genuine mental mastery.

Active Intelligence is the lived expression of that mastery, the capacity to bring the full power of conscious choice into daily life. It is an ongoing practice, the continuous and disciplined choice to engage with life consciously rather than reactively, to learn from experience rather than simply repeat it, and to exercise genuine freedom of will.

Most of what has been described in this article, the structure of the mind, the passive and active intellect, the observing self, belongs to the domain of the mental mind. Yet the understanding of consciousness points to something beyond even this.

As your practice of Cognition deepens and the passive intellect’s grip loosens, the Life Force begins to awaken and assert a different quality of awareness. This is what is called the Life Force Mind. It is not a higher mental faculty in the ordinary sense, but a shift in awareness, from the mental mind as the governing instrument of experience to >the Life Force as the primary guiding intelligence, with the mental mind now serving as the tool it was always intended to be.

This is the horizon that all the preceding work moves toward, not a distant or impractical aspiration, but the natural evolution of sustained engagement with the principles and practices laid out in these works on consciousness.

Why does all this matter?

Most people move through their lives in a state of waking sleep, not unconscious, but not genuinely awake either. The ordinary mental mind, with its automatic thoughts, conditioned beliefs, and habitual patterns, creates the illusion of a fully conscious life while operating largely without conscious direction. The result is a life not freely chosen, a life lived in reaction to experience, rather than in genuine engagement with it.

The work of consciousness detailed in this and associated articles is the work of waking up. Not dramatically or all at once, but gradually and irreversibly, through the patient application of attention and intelligence to your own inner life. This is the work that The Life Force Institute has been dedicated to facilitating for many decades.

Begin where you are. Read with attention. Bring what you read into your own experience. And notice with awareness the world within and around you.  You will find there is far more to consciousness than just your mental mind.