The grey zone: reaching out to patients with disorders of consciousness – podcast

Author and speaker Carolyn Myss , who used to teach that you could manifest what you want if you just think right, evolved beyond that. When she was in Seattle in the s she asked an audience of to raise their hands if they had been able to create the reality they wanted. Not one person did! As you are reading about to you and by you, your belly may have tightened again.


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Allow any holding you discover there to melt away. Smile and let this softening move all the way down into your pelvic floor and around to your back. Instead of being the victim to your life and or needing to make it be any particular way, which is the endless game of struggle, you begin to get an inkling that Life is something to be listened to, opened to. This is where you start evolving into the next phase of higher consciousness, where Life is happening in you.

At this level of consciousness you begin to realize something very startling: When you experience Life through your thoughts, you stop experiencing it as it is. We see them as we are. If you are honest with yourself, it has probably been a long time. Instead it comes from your stories about what is happening. It comes from inside of you! Then on another gray day you could be miserable.

You may say it is because the day is gray, but it comes from your story about the day, not the day itself. This is where you begin to live what we have been calling the you-turn. You become less interested in being a victim to your life or even trying to make it be any different than it is. You realize that the healing you long for comes when you turn your attention within.

When you get to know the spells that are the source of your suffering, you can unhook from them and come back to Life.

Animal consciousness

The more you become curious about what is happening rather than reacting and controlling, the more you come to a wonderful realization that your life is for you. Rather than Life being something that is happening to you that you must control, you realize there are no ordinary moments! And you are one step further on the journey to higher consciousness. Life is not a random series of events. It is a highly intelligent unfolding that is putting you in the exact situations you need in order to see and unhook from the spells that keep you separate from its flow.

No matter what is happening in your life, you finally understand that Life knows what it is doing. At this level of consciousness, rather than Life being something you have to mold and shape into what you want it to be, you begin to show up for Life exactly as it is. Yes, the flow of Life includes pain, loss and death.

But resisting the pains of Life only turn them it into suffering, and the suffering that comes from resistance is always much greater than directly experiencing your pain. Instead of tightening around your experiences and turning away from them, which only thickens your cloud bank of struggle, you bring your attention to your experience, whatever it is.

Even little moments of curiosity about what is going on right now sprinkled throughout your day are powerful! Every time you respond rather than react to what is going on inside of you, what was formerly bound up begins to loosen. Remember, your natural state is free-flowing aliveness. When that aliveness gets trapped in the spells, your energy and joy dim. When the spells receive the light of your attentiveness, they let go, and the trapped energy flows freely, bringing with it the bliss of openness.

Life is setup, to bring up, what has been bound up, so it can open up, to be freed up, so you can show up for Life! Close your eyes for a few moments and open into this living moment of your life. Hear it, sense it, feel it. This is the only moment that matters in your whole life for it is the only moment where Life is happening! The for you phase of higher consciousness shows you that there is no such thing as an ordinary moment in your life and helps you to see that Life is speaking to you at all moments.

This is where you recognize that Life is trustable. It is not always likable, but it knows what it is doing. Imagine a life where you trust Life implicitly. Every morning you wake up with a sense of adventure. Your belly is soft, your mind is curious and your heart is open. Rather than struggling with Life, you open to it, even when you are facing deep challenges. If you find yourself caught in reaction, you give your reaction the attention it needs to let go. Just as when you unkink a hose, the vibrant flow of energy that is Life can now move freely through you and this brings forth the joy and aliveness you so deeply long for.

Creativity that you could never imagine on your own becomes clear to you, blessing yourself and everyone you meet with the wisdom of the meadow of Life. You experience deep gratitude for absolutely everything. You see that your life is dependent on every ounce of creativity that has ever happened in the universe.

You also see that all that has happened to you, even the difficult, has been a part of your journey back into Life. Step by step Life is bringing you into higher consciousness, into the ability to be fully here for Life. Now you can relax and show up for the adventure. You are no longer a separate being. Instead, you merge completely back into the creative flow of Life, understanding that everything—every rock, person, cloud, molecule and ladybug—is you. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.

What an amazing miracle. As you look closely at the Six Phases of Higher Consciousness, you will see that the first two are about fixing, changing, resisting and trying to control Life Life is happening to you and by you. Throughout both of these levels of consciousness, there is a veil between you and the living experience of Life because neither phase is about showing up for the creative river of Life. The next two phases of higher consciousness are about using your mind to be curious about what is happening rather than resisting and controlling.

In Life is happening in you , you recognize that the storyteller inside of you is what separates you from Life. So rather than trying to change anything, you become interested in what you are experiencing in any given moment. The more you are here for Life, the easy and the difficult, the joyous and the sorrowful, unhooking from all of your spells, the more clear it becomes that Life knows what it is doing and it is for you. The final two phases of higher consciousness are all about coming home to the meadow.

The more you live the truth that Life is for you, the more you relax into the flow, bringing you to the joy of Life moving through you. As your cloud bank dissipates, you not only recognize the meadow again, you recognize that you are the meadow! Life is you and you are Life! Most people live in the first two phases of higher consciousness, to you and by you , never knowing that right in the middle of these beliefs is a doorway into the last four. Life is waking you up from the contraction of the first two and into the opening of the last four. This is not only for your own healing, but for the healing of all beings, because as you see through your cloud bank of struggle, you become a healing presence in the world.

There is a paradoxical truth that is important to acknowledge. It is also true that most days you will experience a number of these phases. It is not about getting rid of any particular phase or making one better than the other. They are all part of Life, and as you evolve, you will recognize and be able to embrace them all. In order to evolve into and through the last four levels of consciousness, the tattered threads of your trust of Life need to be rewoven. With this book, he transforms our understanding of the innerscape, the unbounded world we occupy every conscious second of our life experienced by thoughts, suffering, awareness, joy, and reasoning.

This is more than a book—it is a treasure. Buy the Audiobook Download: Apple Audible downpour eMusic audiobooks. Also by Michael Pollan. See all books by Michael Pollan. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Looking for More Great Reads? Download our Spring Fiction Sampler Now. LitFlash The eBooks you want at the lowest prices. Read it Forward Read it first. Stay in Touch Sign up. What is most interesting then, is the evolutionary appeal that arises with the concept of self-recognition.

In non-human species and in children, the mirror test see above has been used as an indicator of self-awareness. In , a group of neuroscientists attending a conference on "Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals" at the University of Cambridge in the UK, signed The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness see box on the right. In the accompanying text they "unequivocally" asserted: A common image is the scala naturae , the ladder of nature on which animals of different species occupy successively higher rungs, with humans typically at the top.

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Dogs were previously listed as non-self-aware animals. Traditionally, self-consciousness was evaluated via the mirror test. But dogs and many other animals, are not as visually oriented. According to the biologist Roberto Cazzolla Gatti who published the study , "the innovative approach to test the self-awareness with a smell test highlights the need to shift the paradigm of the anthropocentric idea of consciousness to a species-specific perspective". Research with captive grey parrots , especially Irene Pepperberg 's work with an individual named Alex , has demonstrated they possess the ability to associate simple human words with meanings, and to intelligently apply the abstract concepts of shape, colour, number, zero-sense, etc.

According to Pepperberg and other scientists, they perform many cognitive tasks at the level of dolphins, chimpanzees, and even human toddlers. They were able to solve problems such as two birds having to pull strings at the same time to obtain food. In another example, one bird stood on a perch to release a food-laden tray, while the other pulled the tray out from the test apparatus.

Both would then feed. The birds were observed waiting for their partners to perform the necessary actions so their behaviour could be synchronized.


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The parrots appeared to express individual preferences as to which of the other test birds they would work with. It was recently thought that self-recognition was restricted to mammals with large brains and highly evolved social cognition, but absent from animals without a neocortex. However, in , an investigation of self-recognition in corvids was conducted revealing the ability of self-recognition in the magpie. The results of the mirror test showed that although magpies do not have a neocortex, they are capable of understanding that a mirror image belongs to their own body. The findings show that magpies respond in the mirror test in a manner similar to apes, dolphins, killer whales, pigs and elephants.

This is not only of interest regarding the convergent evolution of social intelligence, it is also valuable for an understanding of the general principles that govern cognitive evolution and their underlying neural mechanisms. Octopuses are highly intelligent, possibly more so than any other order of invertebrates.

The level of their intelligence and learning capability are debated, [] [] [] [] but maze and problem-solving studies show they have both short- and long-term memory. Octopus have a highly complex nervous system , only part of which is localized in their brain. Two-thirds of an octopus' neurons are found in the nerve cords of their arms.

Octopus arms show a variety of complex reflex actions that persist even when they have no input from the brain. In laboratory studies, octopuses can easily be trained to distinguish between different shapes and patterns. They reportedly use observational learning , [] although the validity of these findings is contested. They have boarded fishing boats and opened holds to eat crabs. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. About forty meanings attributed to the term consciousness can be identified and categorized based on functions and experiences.

The prospects for reaching any single, agreed-upon, theory-independent definition of consciousness appear remote. Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror. Cognitive bias in animals and Emotion in animals. Neural correlates of consciousness. Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.

Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates. Cephalopod intelligence and Pain in invertebrates.

Animal cognition Animal communication Human—animal communication Animal rights Artificial consciousness Awareness Brain in a vat Cognitive ethology Consciousness Descartes' Error Emotion in animals Epiphenomenalism Explanatory gap Externalism Hard problem of consciousness Internalism and externalism Meat paradox Mind—body problem Neural correlates of consciousness Philosophy of mind Problem of other minds Self-awareness in animals Sentience Sentient beings Buddhism Spindle neuron.

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