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Meditation And The Three States Of Consciousness
By Elizabeth Penning

Meditation, properly speaking, begins once the thoughts and emotions have been silenced. It is a state of intense inward awareness, a state in which a persons' attention is no longer engaged in the outside circumstances but is wholly engrossed in the superconscious experience. Meditation may be defined also, as any practice of which the goal is to reach to the superconscious awareness.

There are three states of consciousness: not only conscious and subconscious, in which most people know at least something of, but also the superconscious in which few people know anything of.

The conscious mind is our normal waking state of awareness. It represents only a small part of our total consciousness. A far larger part of it lies in the subconscious. The subconscious, popularized in modem times by Sigmund Freud, is the hidden but often dominant part of our psyche. We experience something of the subconscious during sleep. The subconscious is active also during our wakeful hours, where it influences our behavior and our very attitudes toward life. The subconscious is like the vast ocean with its floor of mountains, valleys, and broad plains. Conscious awareness sticks out from this ocean like a little island. Invisible to the island dweller is the great underwater region around him: the innumerable habits, tendencies, and unformed impressions that underlie the conscious mind. They represent a dimmer, but nevertheless very real, part of our total awareness.

The superconscious represents a much deeper degree of awareness. It is what is believed to be the true source of all awareness. The conscious and subconscious minds filter that higher awareness, stepping it down, like the transformer that converts a high voltage to a lower one and makes it available to our homes. Superconsciousness may be compared to the infinite sky with its vast number of stars. Although we know that the stars are always there, shining, we can only see them when the sunlight does not fill the sky and obscure them.

In this analogy, the sunlight represents ego-generated thoughts and feelings, which blot superconscious awareness out of our mental sky. That Superconsciousness always stays with us. It is simply not active to our normal waking consciousness. As the name states, superconsciousness is situated above our normal state of wakefulness. From that higher level come our occasional deep insights and inspirations, when our minds are in a calm and uplifted state. Those insights may penetrate the light of ego-wakefulness similar to brilliant comets, which have sometimes been seen in the sky even in bright daylight.

Author Details:
Elizabeth Penning, copywriter for various web sites writing articles about natural health and other related subjects for sites such as the A-Z of and Information Junkie.

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