Katie Ledger and Dr Alan Watkins explore mindfulness, mindlessness, and the evolution of human consciousness.
Katie: Hello, and welcome to mindful or mindless. do we need an empty or a full mind? That's the topic this afternoon. Just want to remind you that. So we have a number of webinars we've been doing these for quite some time now are on our website, "complete-coherence.com" please go and take a look at those. They're either webinar, form or in podcast form. And do you share those amongst people that, you know, it's a big topic this week, and there are libraries, whole libraries devoted to the mind, and the stuff that we need to know to be able to kind of navigate our mind a little bit better? So as ever Alan is, is here and hi, Alan.
Alan: Hi Katie how are you?
Katie: Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. so mindfulness, I'm mindful that this is a very, very big topic and I'm mindful that we have probably around 30 minutes. I'm also mindful that, all of you out there, at any time, please just drop us, put in a question on the Q&A. or in the chat function, please do join in, cause I think this is going to be a bit more of an interactive session. So I'd like to know what's helpful for you. What's useful for you and where you're coming from. So Alan, my first sort of question, mindfulness or mindlessness. And I know I'm going to regret asking this question, but what's your take on this because it's, it will be different from anybody else's
Alan: yes, as you say, absolutely massive topic and, really something that is one of the most fascinating things I think about that.
and reflect a lot on this cause it's absolutely central to all of our experiences. and I think the start point is really to get some basic understanding of how the human mind actually functions. So for me, going to, the concept of, you know, what is mindfulness. we have to backtrack a little bit. Well. what is mind, you know, before we just bate mindfulness, you know, the process? All the content, you know, our minds can be full of. The idea of a raisin and the idea of ourselves. but you know, if we want to wind back a little bit and go, well, what is mind? And so that's where I start when I sort of think about these things and I'm going to try and just share a few thoughts.
and I really welcome people stopping interrupting me. I was, I'm just waffling on about the stuff that interests me, and I'd rather talk about the stuff that interests people listening. But, you know, it starts with understanding the nature of the mind and at the core, it's really about human consciousness.
So, but what is consciousness, you know, and that's something that's been debated in neuroscience circles and philosophical circles, you know, for millennia. And of course, nobody can really agree. So for me, some of the most interesting things about human consciousness are. The emergence of human consciousness.
So I was speaking at a conference some years ago on human consciousness, and, I think the best model of human consciousness. Which then leads us into a conversation about the mind is something called the Penrose—Hameroff of model, which is so Roger Penrose, the professor at Oxford, a brilliant mathematician and Stewart professor Stuart Hameroff, who is an anesthesiologist in Arizona state university.
And Stuart is very interesting because, you know, he puts people to sleep. So their minds seem to go somewhere. They're kind of chatting away and you give them the anaesthetic and boom. They've gone. and then there's all that data about people who seem to float above the operating table and watch themselves being operated on.
So what's going on there? So he was like really, really fascinated. And he got talking to Roger and Roger's a mathematician. And I remember talking to some years ago at this conference and we started debate to debate, like, how many neurons do you need for consciousness? And again, there's a range of views, right?
so some of the analysts, there believe that everything is conscious even a rock. but I think the sort of weight of opinion, in sort of scientific circles, is there's a critical mass of neurons that you need to be aware mindful-
What is that, do you know what that critical mass is?
20,000 is the view, you need 20,000 neurons to be aware, I mean genuinely aware now earthworms have less than that and they can move in the direction of something, but mindfulness really is underpinned by awareness.
And how many neurons do you need to be aware? And what awareness really is, or consciousness is the ability to fix, a piece of content, fix a piece of content in your consciousness, at a moment in time. So I'm aware of something, whether it's light or dark or food, no food. So I'm aware of it, right?
It's in my consciousness. So, and consciousness basically is, is a, it's a trick of evolution where we've evolved consciousness and it's sustained over time because it confers a survival advantage. So if we can hold a map in our mind of something, we survive better. And so. You know, in the evolution of living species, they were able to map something.
They're able to map what their environment is essentially and hold that in their mind. So in earthworm, you know, maybe just above a level of an earthworm going through, it would know where the bird is pecking. You know,it would know to avoid that and they would survive. So if they can hold it in the consciousness and again, in human functioning at consciousness exists in.
packets of time of about a quarter of a second. So we are aware as a human being for about a quarter of a second, this is called aquality, a quarter of a second, you know, we're asked something, ah, and then that collapses and then we're aware of something and then that collapses. So we have four frames, a second.
So our consciousness is discontinuous. We think we're live streaming. We're not, we're not live streaming reality. We bite reality. So we bite a piece of reality, one-quarter second big, and we have four of these a second, and they're going past the reader. It's such a space, the speed that we think our life is continuous, but it's not. Our life is discontinuous in these packages of time.
Katie: So is it like when you flip a book, you know, you flick a book and you get a moving picture
Alan: yeah like,
Katie: a picture
Alan: book. Yeah, exactly. Or, or, you know, it's, it's, it's very akin to a movie. when you watch film, it's 125 frames a second in normal speed. so our human consciousness operates, in the same way, is that we operate four frames a second, and they're going quick enough that we think our life is continuous and our mind fills in the gaps.
So we think it's continuous, but it's not. It's discontinuous. We have a moment of conscious awareness. That we are mindful of. So we have, our mind is full for a moment that then collapses and then our mind is full for a moment. And then that collapses, then our mind is full for a moment then that collapses.
Katie: And so what determines that pattern then? What determines whether, cause, cause I know people where our mind, my mind is not full every, you know, even, even twice every second.
Alan: Well, whether you think your mind is full or not is really you know, what, how aware are you of the content of that moment in time? So if you think about if anybody's ever used any video editing software, you have a picture, you know, like a single still frame.
and then you have a soundtrack and you have all sorts of other tracks. So it's that, what's the picture. Now your mind is full of that picture, but whether you experienced. Being full, your mind being full to the point of overloading is the level of awareness of what's in that picture. And not only what's in that picture, what's on the soundtrack, what's on the emotional track, what's on the identity track.
So it's quite a complicated thing being mindful. But when it's taught in the West, this whole sort of bandwagon of mineful, or we've got to learn to be mindfulness and etc. What most people who teach that, you know, it's sort of been degraded to simple awareness. Right. So when they
Katie: McMindfullness it's called.
Alan: McMindfulness exactly, you know, so hold a raisin in your hand or put a raisin in your mouth now, can you become very aware of the raisin? So the awareness itself is, is, you know, what's the difference between awareness, attention and focus. For example, they're three different functions. So I can be generally aware of something.
And then within the frame, I can start to attend to a bit of the picture or I can zoom right in and focus on something. So the awareness kind of a general sense of the whole thing, that would be the awareness, right? the attention is to attend to a specific sort of slight zoom in and a real focus, a real zoom in.
So there are three different things within the bandwagon of mindful. So that's why it's tricky because you know, we're confusing many, many things. So I actually think mindfulness is a, is a word worn smooth by a million tongues. I.e. people talk about it a lot, a bit like meditation. People talk about it a lot. But they mean so many different things. It's almost becoming an irrelevant concept. So I think it's more useful to focus.
Katie: So what is more? I was gonna say, what is more, what is more, useful than this, this in-between awareness and focus?
Alan: Well, you know, are we talking about awareness? Are we talking about attention? Are we talking about focus?
Are we talking about concentration? So if we can, you know, be more specific, then we can start to get a handle on these things. When you use general terms, a bit like leadership.
Well, leadership means so many things to so many people, it's almost an irrelevant word. You know, so you've got to zoom in on what specifically do you mean? Same like stress "oh I'm stressed!" or what exactly do you mean?
Do you mean you're frustrated? Do you mean you feel overwhelmed? You know, disenfranchised? I mean, what specifically are you talking about? And so we've got to get away from this sort of vague kind of platitudes and labels. That means very little and try and get it, get some much more precision to forensic precision in what we're talking about as we can't really even exchange views
So you talk about awareness, attention,
Katie: focus and concentration. and you sort of said, well, maybe meditation isn't, it isn't the best of things, but so much research has been, has been done on mediation.
Alan: No, I'm not saying meditation. Isn't the best of things I'm saying the label is misused so many years ago. The great pleasure to do some work with the Dali Lamas team on, you know, what happens when, you know, Tibetan monks meditate.
And I was talking to the Dali Lama's. right-hand man, who is a wonderful human being called Matthieu Ricard. Some people may know. Has written a lot of books, French by birth and a brilliant photographer and it converted to Tibetan Buddhism. And he was sharing with me that, you know, his view is that, you know, meditation is really a mislabeling of the phenomena.
I said, well, what would you have called it? And he said it should really be called familiarization. Because meditation what you're doing or what certainly what the Tibetans are doing when they're meditating is they're not doing what people in the West have been taught, which is close your eyes, you know, slow the breathing, relax and fall asleep most of the time or, or just relax, you know?
So it's, it's sort of degraded into a relaxation technique and that's not what meditation is to Tibetans and they're the world champions at it. And, so what you'll see if you ever like any of that Buddhist iconography, you know, in your garden, a little Buddhist statue, you know, with the hands and all that, you'll see there's a little bit of eyeball underneath the eyelids.
So you're not meant to close your eyes. You're meant to close your eyes to 80%, right? Your eyes are slightly open because what you're doing is you're actually concentrating. You're familiarizing yourself. With a specific emotional state. So if you learn to do the meditation of loving and kindness, for example, what you're doing is you're doing a technical exploration of the phenomenon of loving and kindness.
Or if you do compassion meditation, what you're doing is you're technically exploring, like, you'd take a book out of the library and study. You're studying compassion as an experience, not as an intellectual concept, but what does compassion feel like when I'm experiencing compassion? So meditation, probably a better label for it would be familiarization.
And that's what Matthieu was saying to me. So these words of, you know, meditation and mindfulness have become sort of degraded bandwagons in my view, and it's much more helpful to human beings in their day to day lives to say, well, look, I'm going to practice how to concentrate. And that's a really, really useful skill.
Most people, you know, particularly those with attention deficit disorder can't concentrate. Most adult human beings. Can't concentrate for more than a few seconds, but I can tell you that. And they've done neuroscience research on this that some of these Tibetans can hold their fix of their concentration on a dot on the wall for four hours, four hours without breaking concentration.
And you can see in the EEG readout that they're still concentrating. So when you really honed skills and the magic of the mind as it can do all these amazing things. You can become aware of things. You can attend things, you can focus on things, you know, you can familiarize yourself you can sharpen all these different functions of the mind.
And that's what we've got to get into, is with forensic precision the functions of the mind and start to train those memories, recall all those sorts of things. So we should be talking about the phenomenon, not these big general labels.
Katie: So obviously there's a number, there's a number of phenomena there. you know, what, what do you suggest given, given where we are as a, in a, in the West, particularly? What, what do we need? There is a lot of huge levels of anxiety and emotional wellbeing issues. Where, instead of
kind of mock mindfulness, what, what should we, what would be a better use of time, effort, concentration, and focus.
Alan: Yeah. So again, going to some of the basic functions, let me see if I can share aside here. which is start by, you know, what are the sort of five basic functions of the mind. Right. So I don't know whether you can see this. So these are the five basic functions of the mind. So this is where most people operate. Most of the time I'm awake. Right.
Katie: for some people though, isn't it.
Alan: Clearly. And certainly the work we do Katie is, you know, we talk about waking people up, but I'll come to that. That's a slightly different phenomenon, but wakefulness, right. I'm actually awake or am I asleep?
And when I'm asleep, I'm either in dreaming sleep, you know, rapid eye movement dreaming, or I'm in dreamless sleep. And when you go into a dreamless sleep, basically it goes black. so when you're dreaming a lot of people, when they're dreaming are sort of slightly aware that they're dreaming. you know, so that's that.
And then when you drop into dreamless sleep it all goes black and your consciousness disappears a bit like Stuart, when he sees the patient disappear somewhere, they're unconscious, right? So that's dreamless sleep, but it's not like your brain activity goes to zero. There's still brain activity going on.
so that's different states of mind if you will. And then there's a state called witnessing, which is the ability to observe a phenomenon and that's a different state, a much sharper state than general wakefulness. And then this is a state of mind called non-dual mind and I'll come back to that. So these are the big five as we call them the big five basic functions of the mind.
And so most people are in this state most of the time, I'm awake. and, you know, my mind is full of something, you know, the mortgage COVID the future, whatever it is. Right. and so when we're, mindful, what are we mindful of exactly? You know we can be mindful of ourself, which is obviously self-consciousness, or we can be mindful of a raisin.
You know, in terms of how we've been trained. So if we take the self as an example, right, we can, there are 10 levels of self-awareness that you can cultivate. So I just wanna run through these because they're relevant to the whole phenomenon of mindfulness and our own evolution and sophistication. so when we were about one year old, we became aware of ourselves as a physical entity.
Prior to that, we're just pooing and crying. Right. So we exist, but we don't know we exist. And the reason self-awareness, you know, mindful of self is so important is because it's one of the main things that distinguishes us from most of the animals and all the animals, most of them because some animals are self-aware.
But. about one year old on the human journey, we become aware of our physical self. There's a beautiful moment. If you see this, a child looks in the mirror and starts to raise their hand. "That's me, that's me. Oh my goodness. That goes up that hands going that", you know, and they think, Oh, that's weird.
And then they do this lovely experiment. If you see have one year old, do it, they put their foot in their mouth and they bite their foot because they think, Oh, I can feel that I can feel my gums and I can feel my toes that I'm biting and they bite the table. Hmm, that's weird. I can feel like gums, but I can't feel the table.
So it curves to them on a vague level. I'm the thing that hurts when you bite it. Right? So when I bite my foot, that hurts in my foot, but when I bite the table, my gums hurt, but the table doesn't, I can't fill the table. So you get an awareness at this basic level of physical awareness that I'm here, right?
No more sophisticated. And then, you know, the terrible twos kick in because until the emotional awareness develops, you don't even know that your emotions are separate. So you've separated as a physical entity. You know, you're separate from your mother. She's different, because when you bite your mom's finger, your finger, doesn't hurt, but your gums do.
So that's your mom's finger. That is so you're physically separate from your mum, but actually, when I'm upset, you know, my mum needs to be upset because there's only one emotion here. There's our emotions. So that's why you see the terrible two children in the supermarket, screaming their eyes out. Cause they can't get the chocolates. Cause they're baffled. Why don't you want the chocolates? We're hungry. We want the chocolate. There's only one emotional yeah. Desire for the chocolate and we want it. So why aren't? you know, and then he's screaming and bawling. So, and then about two to three years old, they realized that your emotion isn't their emotion.
So prior to that, you get the terrible twos, right? Very, very egocentric. and then again, it's a beautiful moment. If you see it, like if you've ever seen this thousand-yard stare from a two-year-old, tears of rage going down their cheeks like we want the chocolate, why aren't we getting the chocolate?
And they're looking at you baffled. "Why aren't you crying?". Do you want the chocolate, why aren't you crying? And that's the emergence of the separate emotion I'm emotionally separate from you. And many psychologists make a big deal about this, call it psychic death and all sorts of things. But, it's emotional separation. I am emotionally separate, not just physically separate emotional, separate, and that's happens around about two years old.
And then I won't go too much into all of this. Cause it's, it's, you know, it's all in the book,the Coherence book, but conceptual awareness is when I start to get proper consciousnesses it's cause I start to label my world. And language is critical to the acceleration of consciousness. I start to label, you know, mum, dad, bat ball, dog, cat
Katie: but they're just concepts.
Alan: Concepts, that's right. So, you know, language is just concepts. It's a sound to represent something. So the sound, [inaudabile sound] it means this stuff on and around my face. You know [inaudabile sound] this stuff here, it's a noise to represent something. So just concept. Yeah. So that booms and between the ages of three and six, we get six new words every single day and really acceleration of human consciousness.
And then we get to concrete awareness, which is where most human beings stop in their evolution. So, concrete awareness is the rules that govern the concepts. That's what we learn there. And it's, it goes from six to nine years old is where it really blossoms. And so most people's evolution up this stops, about nine years old. So many human beings are the developmentally disabled. They've stopped, evolving past, level four.
Katie: What do we need to do to get from four to five?
Alan: Wake up. That's what we talk about. Wake up, you know, wake up in it, become woke, smell the coffee. What's really going on in life.
Now the first attempt to wake up happens in early teenage years to become transpersonal, to start to realize there's something could be on yourself, which is why Gretta Thunberg becomes interested in ecology and goes on a big mission, but all children go through that or attempt to get beyond themselves, beyond the rules of themselves and the rules of society and see a bigger picture.
and it causes teenage conflict, right? So the whole of teenage conflict is, you know, why do I have to be home at 10? You know, why can't I be home at 11? And it's really a developmental stage. And of course, parents fight that, battle it and try and suppress it. But it's development. They shouldn't suppress it.
They should work with it. Right. Because it's really their child evolving, you know, and parents desperate attempt.
Katie: It's pushing boundaries. Isn't it?
Alan: Yeah. Pushing the boundaries. Yeah. To try and maintain control. We suppress it. And so the battle rages in most households and, you know, to a greater or lesser extent and, you know, regardless of whether the parent or the child wins here, usually when that child leaves home, You know, and obviously that's much later. Now I can tell from personal experience, kids don't leave home.
Katie: You're not feeling bad about it Alan?
Alan: No no! So, when the child leaves home a much bigger parent called society, pushes them back into the concrete. You've got to follow the rules. So society as a parent pushes you back into the concrete and you've got to start following the rules.
You got to get a job. You got to get a house, you got to get a good relationship. you've got to get a car. You gotta climb the greasy pole. You've got make money. All of those things get a mortgage, blah, blah, blah. and then they, most people would go back to sleep, just following a set of rules. Their life becomes a stereotype, and then most people never wake up again.
Unless you have a disaster in midlife. So this is the evolution of awareness. So what am I mindful of? Am I just mindful of rules, right? Am I mindful of concepts? Is my mind full of just the anger and rage and frustration? And as you know, we talked before the commonest emotion in business by a factor of four is frustration.
Frustration is four times more common in business than any other emotion, right. Is my mind full of that, or is my mindful of my own physical awareness of taking photos of my backside all the time and posting them on, say Facebook, you know, what's my mind full off. you know, and it's slightly determined by how evolved I am when you're up this end, your mind is full of different things.
Right. So our mindfulness in terms of content, it depends on your level of evolution. and in terms of the process of mindfulness is different from the content of mindfulness. If that makes sense.
Katie: Yeah. Just, going back to meditation again, you know, partly there's been quite a bit written about, about the effects of that. And, one, one writer talking about the fact that meditation is, is all about losing one's identity is about. Realizing there is only one of us.
Alan: Well, that's a certain type of meditation. See, that's what happens is that, you know, meditation is, it's a bit like in the, in the seventies, you and I are probably old enough to remember that the love is series of cartoons were big in the seventies.
Right. And it was love. And there were a thousand statements, you know, the end of that sentence, "Love is...", dah, dah, dah, and then they sold all these cards and it was, it was a big business at one point. The same with meditation. Meditation is. Well, it's many things to many people. That's why it's become a meaningless word.
so losing yourself is a certain type of meditation, right? you know, you can meditate where you meditate on the phenomenon of self. so it might be when people say that what they really mean when they say, I want to lose myself in meditation is to say, well, look, actually, I can meditate on a certain emotional state compassion meditation.
I'm meditating on this single, emotional state. But if I meditate on the nature of identity and I realize that who I think I am is based on a load of rules that were sort of baked into my mind by my parents, usually. so my identity is wrapped up in who my parents told me I was, you know, so if you say to a child you're clumsy, you're clumsy, you're clumsy, you're clumsy.
Eventually, the child believes that clumsy, whether it's true or not. cause they've been told it so many times you're useless. You're useless. You're useless. You're brilliant. You're brilliant. You're brilliant. You know, like whatever you've been told, you know, because child children don't have critical facility, you start to believe it's true until you start to look beyond the rules, right.
And start to realize, well, there's a load of nonsense. This isn't true. Why is it? Why do I even believe that to be true? You get into transpersonal awareness and you start to do a lot of very deep work, get into integrated awareness. Then you get into pure being awareness. And so as you go further up here, You know, here, when you get to level seven, you start to experience a level of selflessness.
So the lower down you're very trapped by your ego. And as you go further and further up, you stop your ego starts to disappear in the, in the rearview mirror. Right? And your sense of the importance of this idea of self. Starts to recede, right? It seems to be a fanciful idea and, and frankly, load of nonsense or as one as America's leading Zen master said to me, once when I was doing some work with him some years ago when you've meditated on the cushion for 40 years like I have Alan, you come to a realization that the self is just a collection of ideas held together by spit.
I.e. it's nothing. There's nothing there. It's just a, it's just a notion. And so then when you get to.
Katie: That's quite scary for many people, isn't it? That thought that there might be nothing there.
Alan: Well, it's a construction. So you can say it's scary, but another way of looking at that, it's incredibly liberating, right? So I'm liberated. I don't have to be anything or be anybody or, you know, and, and I'm not constrained by this notion of who I thought I was.
And frankly, it's really interesting, particularly in the leadership literature. I mean, you hear a lot about, the phenomenon of something called authenticity in leadership, right. Is that, authentic leadership. I mean, it's funny to me cause it feels like it's, Tourette's, you know, authentic leadership, authentic leadership, like a Tourette's sort of jerk, but if you don't know who you are, what you're being authentic to, Well, you know, your sense of self is very unevolved and so authentic leadership. You're being authentic to what exactly. And know on the journey of evolution of self, right. What's interesting is as you further go further and further up that ladder, the whole notion of self starts to crumble away and become less and less important.
And so what you'll see in highly evolved human beings, I mean like Mandela is their level of selflessness is amazing. There's a lovely story. when he had his 90th birthday and Mandela experienced all the sort of, you know, celebrities flying in for a photo with Mandela and Bono turns up and Tony Blair turns up and all these leaders and they're all turning up for a photo with the great man, you know, and he sits there and he was very politely tolerating this all day.
And it's probably not what he wanted to do with his day, but all these people turned up. and at the end of the day, when they'd all gone and all the dust had settled, he turned to the photographer and says, "Would you like a photo?" I.e. The photographer was just as important to him as all these dignitaries, you know, so unconcerned with his own importance, we're all just human beings, right?
That's a level of selflessness that you don't see in most global leaders. And you certainly don't see it. It's not a quality talked about much. but it's what you eventually get to this notion that the self is a slightly indulgent idea. You know, and when you're having to protect, how dare you say that to me, I'm having to protect this fragile sense of myself.
So I get easily offended and I take things personally because I'm having to protect something. But when you, you know, are liberated from all of that, it's much easier to listen to feedback because people could take a pot at you. You're not predicting anything. Right. Cause you don't have a strong sense of self alright.
Katie: There's a good question here from Luke, Alan. What levels do you believe you've entered Alan. And how often do you deliberately enter the ones of five and above? Are the reasons and purposes of being in these different levels, detailed, somewhere?
Alan: They're detailed in the coherence book. Right? So get that. It gives you a lot more than I can explain in a half an hour. but one of the things we do when we coach people is you can do something called a pointing out instruction. So it's an eyes open technique. You're not meditating, you know, you're not in a visualization, just having a conversation. It takes about two and a half hours is I can talk you into level 10, right?
I can talk. And level 10 is, you know, level eight, by the way, historically level eight was called Nirvana. so that's, that's up until about 300 years ago, there were only eight levels because human beings hadn't realized. so it was it's called classical Nirvana level eight. so it's that level of, unity in duality. Right. Unity in duality. So it's a unity experience. So it's this sort of blissful state of unity of oneness, if you know, in spiritual terms. So I'm at one, Oh my God, this is Nirvana. This is wonderful. And then that was the sort of the ultimate state of reality in human conscious experience up to about 300 years ago.
But then some clever people pointed out that there that you were experiencing the unity. So there was the experience unity and there was somebody experiencing the unity. So that's a duality, there's an observer and an observed. Oh, my goodness. Yes, you're right. So it's not true unity. So that's when level nine emerged, which is essentially pure awareness where the observer disappears. Now, level nine some people have actually physically experienced it, but it's very brief for most people. So it might be that moment where you're stood looking at the Grand Canyon. And just for a moment, you evaporate you become the Canyon, or if you've been in the forest in nature for a moment, that your whole sense of self evaporates, you are the forest.
So there is no observe and there is no observe. There's just the experience. That's level nine conscious experience. so, and level 10 is the level, even beyond that. So, and so level 10 is kind of what the Buddha experienced under the Bodhi tree state of enlightenment, essentially. Now in two and a half hours, I can talk anybody into that as a firsthand experience.
And as you know, because you and I have done it, Katie, it's an amazing experience, right. And it completely resets your entire mind and your, you know, your sense of self because once you've experienced at that level, there's no going back. You've seen the world very, very differently and you can't now and see it in that way, but you can't, you know, hold that most of the time when you're wandering through Tescos.
You know, non-dual experience when you're getting a can of beans off the shelf. So most people-
Katie: Pretty unlikely to happen isn't it
Alan: You can, I mean, I've tried to explain it. You can actually shop in a non-dual state. So that's quite an interesting thing to do. So to answer the question from Luke, right, is the, you know, you have to work. So each level you've got to work to achieve these new levels. so it's this notion that States of consciousness can be experienced, but levels have to be earned. So take an example. I'm going to take two people who I'm going to talk into a firsthand experience of enlightenment. and one of them is basically operating most of the time in concrete awareness, not really awake. and so, because they've never experienced anything beyond level four, when you talk them into level 10, They've got no way of comprehending it. So you give them the experience and then they come out of it and they go, Whoa, that was weird. And they have to reject it because they can't integrate the experience.
So, because they've never had anything like that and they've got no equipment for understanding it. But if you put the work in each new level becomes incredibly profound. Put the work in, so somebody who's done a lot of studies and a lot of reflection and meditation, if you like, and the right type of meditation properly guided, it becomes a more and more profound experience.
So talk, them into level 10, it becomes a profound phenomenon. Talk the average guy off the street into level 10. And they just go "uh!". That was weird. Anyway, back to the beer.
Katie: Can I ask a question on about how can overbusy people find space to embody this way of being day today?
Alan: That's a great question. And the simple answer is, is practice. So, you know, ever-present awareness. So, what tends to happen is we, because when we're addicted to the rational objective observable world and what we would call the world of "IT", the stuff out there, Oh my God. It's very distracting. Have you seen this car? Have you seen that pair of shoes that handbag, the materialistic world, right? We can, Oh, it's dazzling and etc. You know, when we get drawn into all of that and we forget there's a world in here. Inside of ourselves and we get disconnected, we get what we call "IT" addicted. So, you know, you've got to recognize, and that's one of the reasons why, when we do the work with client organizations, the first thing we teach everybody is your world is in three dimensions.
"I", "WE", and "IT", it's not just, "IT". So wake up to the realization that you're three-dimensional human being, not a one-dimensional human being. You're not a human doing, just doing a series of task and targets. There's a human being turning up to do the doing. So be aware of that. So start to look inward and start to wonder who's this human being that's turning up to do the doing and how can I evolve that?
Cause it's a game-changer. So if you just look at the commercial reality, you can totally transform your life by game-changing your human being. In fact, that will make you way more successful than just trying to eke out a few extra percentage points on the exterior world. You transform who you are, it will transform your ability to do anything.
So that's where the real acceleration comes in the, in the evolution of, "I". so how do you do that every day is you start studying, you start practising some of these things I've talked about and it completely game changes your life. So you start to wake up and grow up your human beingness.
Katie: Another question. do you think that awareness, which I experienced deepest when there is no thought in the mind, do our senses work in that moment?
Alan: Yes, they do. and again, start to explore this. In fact, your senses can still work in dreamless sleep. There's a, there's a yoga technique called Yoga Nidra, where, in that blackness, when you're going to dreamless sleep, you can penetrate the black with awareness.
So it's really interesting, even though you're in brainwaves, you're in dreamless sleep, you're still aware. So you can cultivate an awareness even in dreamless sleep. And even when there isn't any particular content in your consciousness, there is nothing to be observed, right? There's still an awareness.
So that pure awareness, right? That's level nine on that ladder of 10 pure awareness. Alright. and so you don't need content to have awareness. It's a different phenomenon. so there's the process of awareness and there's the content of your awareness, they're different things. And they-.
Katie: So are you. Okay, going back, are you saying that becoming more sophisticated, becoming more, developed if you like in the, "I" will help in "IT".
Alan: It's an absolute game-changer because the more mature, the more sophisticated we are as human beings, the better we are able to lead, the less sophisticated, the more likely we are to cause suffering to others, and of course, suffering to ourself and to our nearest and dearest and make bad choices and bad decisions that cause problems.
And that's the point about evolution is we've got to wake up and grow up as individuals. We've got to wake up and grow up as collectives as teams, and we've got to wake up and grow organizations, and we've got to wake up and grow up the planet because the clock is ticking. The world is beset by lots of very difficult problems, like COVID, like climate change, like many of these things we talked about before and our only chance out is vertical development. We've got to get out of the swamp. And the only way we're going to get out of this swamp is by growing up.
Katie: Okay, thank you for that, Alan. And thank you for your questions as well. We've had a number of people on, thank you for joining us today. we have another webinar in two weeks time, which is the 23rd of July.
So it's the fit for the future series, but that one is called. Should I stay, or should I grow? Is it possible to grow your business whilst working from home? I suspect the answer to that maybe. Yes, but as ever, it might take a little bit more explanation than simply one, one word. so just to let you know, I know there's a couple of people asking, can they have this as a webinar or a podcast?
Yes, it will be out in the next couple of days on our website, complete-coherence.com. So please do go and have a look at it that, and also share it and you can get people to sign up for the series of webinars as well. So I really hope that you can join us, hope that any of your friends or colleagues can join us. Please spread the word. And I will see two weeks time. Thanks for joining us.
Alan: Thanks Katie