The Emergence of Consciousness

I have argued that our brains are physically designed to make us cognitive and spiritual changelings headed toward wider and deeper awareness of our selves, others and our worlds of meaning. We are expansive. We model the world with data constantly being arranged in our brains. As the models develop, they come to include a model of ourselves. One of the incredible results of the expansion of the universe within us is the gradual emergence of an awareness of that self model. It is this emerging awareness of self that makes possible (among other things) reflective thought, projected futures, story telling and conscious deciding.

According to Eric Erikson, this self awareness blossoms and passes through a critical period during adolescence.1 Apparently, our models of life (all ten levels of modeling referred to in chapter 2) have to reach a high degree of complexity and integration before identity and consciousness of self can take center stage. Typically, writes Erikson, it takes about twelve years to reach that complexity. Identity development remains center stage for as long as twelve more years before being upstaged by the need to develop strong patterns of intimacy. Those patterns are built on one's identity.

I began the previous chapter with a frame from my own biography. That moment matters in this discussion because it marks a point in my pilgrimage when I was just beginning this "identity crisis." I became aware of my self as an integrity in process. I suspect all of us can recall similar occasions of awakening, especially during adolescence, when one beholds one's self. Perhaps this accounts for the overwhelming numbers of teens who report religious experiences and conversions that marks a re-arrangement of and fidelity to life-long values, manifesto and symbols.

I do not want to imply that people have no identity before they are teenagers, rather I mean to say that it does not become a central agenda until those transitional years between about ages twelve and twenty-four. Indeed, the formation of one's self gets underway immediately at birth and the person you are throughout your adulthood is to a large degree set in the first 10 years.

I also do not want to suggest that we are never self aware before adolescence. At a very young age children are able to draw themselves, tell stories about themselves, imagine what others think of them and converse with selves. Clearly, we get to work on creating a model of ourselves early in the life cycle. Nevertheless, during adolescence, the development of a person's self-model becomes central. What it seems to be "doing" on that stage is learning to behold itself. Remember how Descartes concluded that "I think, therefore I am!" In that vein, the teenager concludes "I think of myself thinking, therefore I am!"

When I had my epiphany on a Sunday afternoon at thirteen, I felt as though I had woken up, shook the sleep from my eyes and stood before myself. "I" was there. I was, as Karl Jaspers named the experience, "dasein." The German word means "being there." The existentialists used the word to stand for "human being."2 The term fits my experience. The self aware person knows that he/she is aware of being there.

The fact that we can know of our being-here has prompted articles, books and research in cognitive science over the last two decades. One of the harder aspects of the research has been to define consciousness and self awareness. For my purposes, consciousness refers to the experience of being aware of one's thoughts so as to be able give a report of them to someone else. Self awareness is that state of mental focus wherein you think of yourself, your thoughts, your experiences. You behold yourself. We can focus our awareness on anything thinkable but focusing on ourselves thinking is not quit like thinking of anything else. It is a unique and powerful strategy for making meaning. It sets atop a ladder of liveliness and exists because of the levels beneath it. Each rung represents a new threshold in aliveness. [see figure 12.1].

At the bottom of this ladder is biological life. All living organisms participate in this level. It has one basic requirement shared by all the levels above it: the ability to interact with the environment.

Above that basic level is the level of alertness. Being alert implies that an organism can also be at rest. The rhythm between states of readiness and rest can be see in most animal organisms. Alertness is the state of being ready for something to impinge. The environment around a single celled animal or a wolf can trigger automatic strategies that make it ready for special response.

Just above that is the state of wakefulness. Being awake implies a time of sleep or relative unresponsiveness to an environment. It took millions of years of evolution for sleep and wakefulness cycles to emerge and only animals with a relatively complex central nervous system seem to do it. Related to wakefulness, but more intense, is the ability to give attention. It is a prerequisite to the next level and requires sharp and discerning senses; especially hearing, seeing and smelling, the long range or "tele senses."

Next, then, is the focus of attention to problem solving. In lower animals, almost no problem solving goes on because the animal's nervous system includes behaviors that are initiated automatically as the animal encounters certain stimuli. But in higher vertebrates with enough cortex to allow it to gather information and put it to use, problem solving or "thinking" can happen. The problem solver may not be self aware, but nonetheless its cortex is able to gather and evaluate information and initiate appropriate behavior.

Along with problem solving, this level of aliveness includes the ability to have more complex emotions beyond states of alert and calm. Fear, excitement, anger, depression and pleasure can be identified in but a few species of animals and almost all of them are mammals. The larger the cortex in relation to the rest of the animal's brain, the more subtle and varied are its emotional states. The development in evolutionary history of the ability to have emotions and sensations (like physical pain and pleasure) laid the ground work for the experience of an inner life. This seems to be the exclusive property of primates. The next rungs are (apparently) the exclusive property of Homo Sapiens and properly belong to the category, "consciousness." They include:

- Our awareness of our thoughts and inner state (we know what we are thinking and feeling) along with a sense of choice about actions made related to the objects of our conscious thoughts,

Cognition done at lower "rungs" of aliveness are processes we do not choose, rather they result from the pandemonium of mental activity that accumulate to produce routine, unconscious behavior. The last rungs, however, represent the levels of aliveness that allows the self to choose behavior. The possibility of cognitive freedom rests at these last levels of aliveness. To act with freedom and to make moral choices are reserved for these last levels. Henry David Thoreau put it more to the point: "Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep."3 Social Philosopher Alfred Schutz called this highest of human consciousness "Wide-Awakeness." He went on to write...

By the term "wide-awakeness we want to denote a plane of consciousness of highest tension originating in an attitude of full attention to life and its requirements. Only the performing and especially the working self is fully interested in life, and hence, wide awake. It lives within its acts and its attention is exclusively directed to carrying its project into effect, to execute the plan. This attention is an active, not a passive one. Passive attention is the opposite of full awareness.4

Because so much of what we call "religious" life happens or is developed in our self consciousness, to be able to nurture, strengthen, widen and broaden consciousness in students is central to our work as educators. As we understand the phenomenon more fully, we will get clues about the nurturing, strengthening, broadening and widening of consciousness in general.

HOW IS SELF AWARENESS AND CONSCIOUSNESS EVEN POSSIBLE?

A pattern is emerging from among researchers about the origins of self awareness and consciousness. Here are some of the conclusions:

1.Self awareness and consciousness are "points" along a continuum of consciousness (see above). 5

All of them together, as they come and go through a day and over the years, is who we are.

In a sense, we are fiction, unreal, immaterial, a virtual reality being "constructed" of the meanings and story of a life.10 The self remains the same self over time even as it grows and is transformed. However, it is not always "there." It exists as it is needed. It is conjured by the brain processing information and making decisions that require mediation, resolution or judgement. Whenever I think, "What will I do next," my self is summoned (see Figure 12.2).

In summary, most of our actions, thoughts and perceptions get processed without our being conscious of them, they get processed in a sort of "pandemonium (to Use Dennet's metaphor) of simultaneous cognition.11 Consciousness happens when we turn our attention and concentration to some aspect of this fast-paced multiplicity of our brains. It can happen in at least four basic ways: 1) when the pandemonium fails to resolve a problem and we are stumped, 2) when we are aroused or alerted by strong feelings, 3) when we are "summoned" by an outside source (someone calls our name, we recognize a face or situation), and 4) when a strong memory is snagged by some experience. Regardless of how it is invoked, these things begin to happen: 1) attention is focused, 2) cognition slows down, 3)thoughts are thought about, 4)one's SELF seems to take control, 5)memories are gathered, 6) parts of the brain used to do the concentrated thinking begin to produce synchronous electrical pulses of 40 cycles per second, 7) we rehearse possibilities, imagine alternatives, and 8) our vital signs rise. What results from our self awareness might be a decision, an action, a conclusion, an experience of meaning and feeling, a creation, a destruction, or a pleasure. Whether something "punches" through to our awareness from the pandemonium or we are called by another person, our consciousness and the self that seems to direct it is created fresh each time.

HOW DID CONSCIOUSNESS COME INTO BEING?

The need to survive and reproduce is at the base of all behaviors of living things. It is the basis of the evolution of consciousness. Here is a summary of the theory of its evolution. Every organism seeks to last and endure into the future. To my knowledge, humans are the only ones who are aware of this reality even though it is at work in all of life. For mobile creatures to survive requires a "knowledge" of the animal's field of living. To be able to recognize our world requires a point of view, and point of view means that we can identify "inside" and "outside," me and not me. This is important not only to keep safe from harm or attack, but to relate us to our own kind upon whom we depend for so much. Every creature has to be able to recognize "me" and "not me," "mine" and "not mine."

For all animals throughout evolution recognition of "me" and "not me" has been necessary in order to move about in its environment, identify food, mate and avoid danger. Vertebrates have evolved an elaborate array of senses to search and discover and the mobility to constantly move, forage, and hide. In a primitive way animals are always "asking," "Where am I?" "What is that?" and "What do I do now?" The "answer" to the last question for all mobile organisms is either: "Scram," or "Go for It."

The more complicated the organism, the larger its repertoire for "scramming" or "going for it." After some new thing, shape, smell, sound, etc, encroaches into an organism's field and prior to its decision to run or approach, the whole organism's neural network revs up to update the situation, laying down information that will tip it to action. This is the animal precursor to consciousness. This is not yet self awareness, but it is close. In evolution, regular heightened states of vigilance led some mammals to explore and acquire information for it's own sake, hence the development of curiosity. Our ancestors developed very mobile eyes, and heads that helped them satisfy their curious nature. We and our ancestors might be called the "Informavores."12

This "curiosity feature" led to important physical developments in the brain. The fast "dorsal brain" (visual cortex) took over immediate visio-spatial computations and real-time safety and piloting duties. The slower ventral (front and top cortex) areas were the informavor brain's storing and organizing areas.13 In primates, the functions spread further into the left and right cortex with its emerging specializations.

Up to this point the evolutionary changes happened genetically so that the better adapted genes (genotype) produced a better adapted animal (phenotype). The changes were pre-natal. Once born, you had all you were going to have in the way of equipment and strategies for survival. With the higher primates, post-natal "evolution" became possible because the animals could learn new and unique strategies for survival and curiosity.

In other words, the brain evolved to a state of plasticity and adaptability allowing it to "evolve" during its lifetime. A particularly good learning, skill or development would be recognized by others of the population and be copied. The more useful learnings actually speeded up the evolution or advancement of the group.

After that time, the hominids and pre-chimps branched in evolutionary history. Our large brained ancestors were poised for the biggest leaps in cognitive development up to that time.

Their brains were virtually identical to ours.

Accelerated by learned behaviors, the split nature of the cortex and by the fast calculations of the left brain, our ancestors learned to talk. They didn't just signal, they named things, invented vocabulary, used grammar, and told stories. From that time, language has dominated human history. Although the infant brain of today is physically identical to that of the ice-age baby, the child of today is given a whole new set of "software applications" that take advantage of the brain. The most important being its native language. With that software, we are able to more effectively model our worlds and track the chronological features of it - and of us in it.14

Language was used as a means of summoning help and getting information necessary for survival decisions. Our ancestors spoke to each other to get help finding food, water and shelter. Often, however, there would be no one around to hear a person's request. The person would be talking to him or her self. This self-request had the same effect as if someone else had voiced a need allowing the helpee to help him/herself.15

According to Julian Jaynes, as language developed and as tribes and families began to encounter other clans, early humans learned caution. They had to be careful about what they revealed about their needs to a strangers since a needy stranger could be a threat to a clan just barely making it.16 The result, says Jaynes, was that some of the wiser ones learned a sort of sub- vocal inner or self speech to rehearse what they would reveal to others first. They learned to imagine talking through a possible future to themselves. They would talk to themselves about the consequences of interaction with strangers and even make up a lie in order to survive. In the process, they had to invent a model of themselves they could move around in their mental landscape to "do" the rehearsing, In addition they "watched" the rehearsal evaluating the possibilities. You can't do that without a self, a "me" or an "I" in your imagination.

In both cases, (talking to your self and rehearsing encounters) "inner speech" or reflective thought was the result. Jaynes claims that reflective thought and thinking about one's self was not possible until the development of language, inter cultural travel and commerce.

Developing an "I"

So, today when we think, calculate, and problem solve, the thinking is done within the context of a history of memories and ideas attached to a accumulated sense of self. The "I" that is me has gradually taken shape as a concept and sort of metaphor of that which has been Jerry for 50+ years. When I consciously survey my world, become aware of my thinking, and even behold this self I have accumulated, I become, I am self conscious. Consciousness, however, is not the thinking, but the awareness of thoughts and thinking. The awareness occurs when something we think of causes heightened emotions, attentiveness and/or confusion. It is rather like awakenings and glimpses of our selves in action that over time is recalled as a stream of consciousness.17 This stream gets organized into a personal narrative we can tell to others. It could not happen without language and relationships. Helen Keller's blindness and deafness made language and relationships all but impossible until Annie Sullivan became her teacher. With Annie's help teenaged Helen discovered herself and the people who loved her. The key was Annie's genius at giving Helen language. Keller later wrote...

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness... Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.18

Self thinking is a kind of miraculous loop of thought wherein we think about us thinking or acting, or being.19 When we are able to make a loop in our thinking so that we examine our selves in our stream of consciousness, we are self aware. It happens as a result of the interplay of human relationships, language, metaphorical thought and after accumulating enough experiences to make the loop.

Consciousness and self awareness requires some specific skills and experiences.

*To be self aware requires concentration on a task or decision so that we can bring into play logical processes that override automatic strategies of the subconscious. In other words, as we are able to concentrate attention, resources and options in memory, we enable consciousness. To be self aware requires concentration on the tasks we are doing, the memories that are relevant, and on the sensations that keep us in touch with the world. Lose your concentration, and you lose self awareness.

*To be self aware requires the ability to access memory and meanings on purpose. It requires self knowledge, a considered life, and an active mind that can decide to be self aware.

*To be self aware sometimes requires the ability to rehearse one's actions and decisions before making or taking them. It means being able to imagine a condition, situation or outcome. It might require us to imagine a plan before it is implemented, a consequence prior to its causes, or a possibility before it could come about. The more we know of the world, the better will be our rehearsals. The bigger the picture of creation we can include in our conscious considerations, the more reliable will be our rehearsals.

*To be self aware requires "inner speech." Inner speech is the dialogue we carry on between "me" and the model of "me." I imagine myself and talk things over with myself. It can have the same range of depth, respect and clarity that we show in interpersonal speech. For those who do it best, it is honest, skeptical, probing and affirming. We are affected by what we tell ourselves as much as we are affected by what others tell us.

*To be self aware requires strategies for recall and inner speech that address all our seven intelligences including doodling, singing, playing, sculpting, pacing, visual search strategies, working, writing and reading. All these expressions can deepen and broaden self awareness.

WHAT ARE THE FEATURES OF SELF AWARENESS AND CONSCIOUSNESS?

Stay with me a bit longer. I promise to get back to earth and the point for religious education soon. I hold stubbornly to the conviction that if we nurture and tend to souls, then we ought to know all we can about the science of soul raising. When science can show us a way into that understanding, we better pay attention.

I mentioned Julian Jaynes earlier in this chapter. In a landmark book called The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes describes the connection between the growth of human civilization and the development of self awareness.20 He brought together anthropology, history, literature, cognitive science, and philosophy to make the case that self awareness is as young as five or six thousand years, having developed just after the rise of towns, cities and commerce. When people began to make contact with strangers and travellers, they soon found it was wise to be cautious. For their own well being, Jaynes theorizes, early humans had to imagine themselves in situations of unfamiliar and risky social encounters prior to making contact. They would mentally rehearse the interaction, imagining themselves in that future encounter. One could not imagine that contact without having a model of oneself to practice on. Thus began the development of self awareness.21

There are six features of self awareness, according to Jaynes, that we have come to nurture in each other with our language, stories, and culture.22 We still depend on those features.

First, Jaynes says that our conscious awareness is organized Spatiality rather than sequentially. What we attend to (whether it is a memory, a book, speech, sounds, sights or different combinations) gets "placed" in our thoughts in the same spatial way they seem to exist in the world that we sense. If we have to attend to a lot of things, they get strewn around our virtual world. We consciously go from thought to thought like turning from scene to scene in a play, or page to page in a book. Russian psychologist Alexander Luria reported a case of a patient that points to the "landscape" nature of our conscious thoughts. The patient was plagued by what is popularly called a photographic memory. Everything he committed to memory remained in his consciousness and crowded his thinking when he tried to interact with others. He was overloaded with things he felt compelled to attend to. Quite by accident the patient reported to have discovered a way to forget. He simply hid the unwanted information in his imagination. He put meaningless and unwanted memories of addresses and names behind imaginary trees, hung a conjured cloth over them, or he would put a person who kept popping into his thinking in a shadow or some how camouflaged the person. By using the spatial nature of consciousness he hid memories like easter eggs.23

Related to the spatial nature of the landscape of consciousness is the second feature Jaynes called excerption. Excerption refers to the fact that what we are aware of is partial, as if it were seen from one angle at a time. One cannot think of a person's face and the back of the person's head at the same time. Our mental picture may shift quickly from one perspective to the other, but we do not normally hold them in our mind simultaneously. "Ah," you say, "but I can imagine the two views side by side." Yes you can and so can I. We can do it by imagining two people. But each of the imagined people will still be "seen" from a single perspective. As our senses receive only part of an experience, so our consciousness of what we sense or remember sensing is partial.

Third, says Jaynes, in that virtual reality called imagination, an analog "I" that can move about, interact, explore, and experiment. It is through the "senses" of the analog "I" that we "experience" the virtual world. It is an analog of the integrity of our thoughts and history. It is the model of what Dennett calls the "central meaner," "the center of narrative gravity," the self. It is an analog of one's self

Fourth, there is a metaphor "Me" that we can "watch" do things in our virtual world. The Analog "I" "watches" the metaphor "Me." In a dream state, these two fictions come and go. We dream our dreams and then remember them as a story unfolding before us and then we ourselves seem to step into the picture and act.

Fifth, conscious moments (especially self aware moments) are remembered as and are part of a personal narratization of our lives, an unfolding biography. Conscious experience is stored and recalled as a part of a narrative stream. Each episode, or moment of consciousness is perceived as a picture or a scene, even a collage of scenes, but we recall them as or in a sequence.

Finally, Jaynes says that consciousness conciliates what we are aware of to eliminate as much ambiguity, dissonance, and lack of integrity as possible.

Religious thinking and being is at least wide-awake, conscious living. It is the mental state wherein a person is conscious of God, of one's relation to God and one's being in creation. Consciousness is a precondition of being religious. These six characteristics of consciousness can point to ways to nurture, strengthen broaden and widen consciousness in others. They are teaching-learning strategies that can be included in a learning event in any of the points along the Spiral of Learning described in an earlier chapter. I believe that the points on the learning spiral themselves nurture consciousness, but there are some strategies that can be applied that will prove useful in nurturing self and consciousness. I present them in the categories suggested by Jaynes.

Spatiality

The spatial nature of our conscious thoughts is natural. Yet it is a characteristic we can strengthen, making conscious thinking clearer. Diagramming with paper and pen is a way of spreading out ideas and experiences for conscious consideration. In chapter two I used the diagram of "circus" to talk about the experience of circus-ness. Encourage students to doodle or diagram their ideas and feelings. Try it yourself. Diagram fear. Use words, pictures lines and figures to spread out before you fear's experience, causes, results, thoughts and memories. Any idea or feeling can be spread out like a diagram. Or perhaps it can be drawn as a scene, or series of frames. It can be danced, acted, built and sculpted as well. Any spatial method of "spreading out" ideas, experiences and feelings will clarify them and give us another opportunity to be self aware.

Excerption

Our conscious moments are always excerpted from a larger context. They seem to belong to a bigger picture. I recall a workshop I attended on parenting that might illustrate. We were asked to imagine our children in their favorite place at home and what they were doing. I imagined seeing the place from the point of view of an adult standing at the back door of our house looking over at my sons building a skate board ramp. I was annoyed as I imagined the scene because of the mess and noise their play caused. The leader of the workshop then asked us to imagine it again but from the perspective of the child, their height, their angle and from their experience. I was surprised at the difference in meaning a new perspective could provide. What they were doing was fun and important. By encouraging and leading us to report, reflect on or recreate moments of meaning from several perspectives and angles, the leaders helped us to deepen and broaden our consciousness and discover meaning by sampling several excerpts from an event.

All our experiences are excerpts from a larger context. A story or experience gathers its meaning from its context but we consciously experience only a piece at a time. We experience moments that are excerpted from something larger. In fact, we gather our self image from the excerpts of living that we accumulate over the years. By telling our excerpted stories, we bring again to consciousness our selves even as we present our selves to others. By listening to each other's excerpts, our consciousness is deepened and widened by being invited into another's stream of awareness. There is no more valuable gift one person can give another outside of living the moments of our stories in companionship.

This is the theme of a beautiful book by psychiatrist- educator-author Robert Coles Called The Call Of Stories. In it, Coles weaves a fabric of meaning and value by telling and reflecting on the stories he has come to know as a reader, listener, psychiatrist and educator. He writes,

...Stories are renderings of life; they can not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisors - offer us other eyes through which we might see, other ears with which we might make soundings. 24

When we take part in the rendering of another's story, our self models are permitted to jump into another's biographical or imagined story stream. To some degree we "live" the other's story in a way similar to living and remembering our own biographies. We need to encourage the telling of stories. As students tell their stories (or draw them or write them), encourage them to tell them from unique perspectives. Suggest they tell their life histories from the perspective of a sibling, parent, or pet. Suggest they video tape their own biography, make a mural of the events of a year, or display photographs of a period of transition.

When you tell stories, use different perspectives of the characters, location or pieces of it by using pictures, artifacts, or role playing. Encourage students to imagine walking around as the people in a religious story or experience. Fresh angles make a difference in the way people build their versions of stories and experiences. By doing so, they may pick up a new perspective for knowing and developing their selves. Just think how we have changed the way we have thought of the earth now that we have photographs and movies from space. Since we excerpt, encourage new points of view, seeing with the eyes of people different from them, and walking in the shoes of other pilgrims. It will raise the consciousness of students.

Analog I

We "look" at our conscious thoughts from our own "eyes." "Look" and "eyes" are in quotes because our eyeballs have almost nothing to do with the experience. The "one" who sees our thoughts is the self, a complex idea of us that represents the physical being now reading this book. That self, in fact, is really who we are. We can lure students into wider and deeper consciousness by encouraging self reflection and inner speech. Encourage students to refer to themselves. Pay attention to the number of times people refer to themselves. You may be surprised at the absence of first-person singular referents. Encourage the use of diaries and poetry as personal disciplines of inner speech. Spend time talking about honest inner speech. That is, encourage students to have inner dialogues with themselves but ones that are totally honest. Encourage private prayer. Prayer is similar to inner speech, but the dialogue is between oneself and God. The similarity is that God does not stand before us like a friend, and so we need a metaphorical God in our minds to turn to. I am not implying that we just make up God, rather, that we somehow imaging God in our conscious landscape and aim our honest inner speech in that metaphorical direction.

Metaphor Me

Sometimes we think of and imagine ourselves. That sketchy image is the metaphor of who I am. We need that metaphor to plan, rehearse, practice and even to remember. It takes on the form and style of our selves but can also be braver, meaner, kinder, stronger, and weaker than we actually are. It is hypothetical. It is a very useful creation. Encourage the image of that metaphor by suggesting that students draw it, write metaphors for it, display photos of each other, and fantasize about it.

Narratization

Narratization and excerption are similar things. Narratization is always an excerpt. There is no other way to strengthen the ability to string one's life together in a story than to tell it. Our story is a sequence of events we can unreel. Like a film, our stories follow a main character (a "me") through encounters that reveal themes and motif. Let students tell their stories all kinds of ways. Invite them to act them, dance them, paint them, mold them, write them, cook them even! And in the process don't forget to tell yours. We must model story telling.

Not only ought we to tell our own stories, we enhance consciousness by telling all manner of stories. Donald Miller in his book Story and Context reminds us of six components of story telling. If any of them are missing from the tale, the story is drained of its power.

He writes that the story teller shouldself consciously stand within the story, getting a feel for the tensions and potentials of it.

Then, as the story gets told, he or she should stand to one side of it so as not to overpower the story with his or her own self. Third, the teller should narrate the story in a way that keeps detail, feeling and meaning connected.

Fourth, he or she should keep the tension of the story's drama at the center of the telling.

Fifth, the story needs to be presented with a point of view about living in general.

Finally, The teller should seek to make the telling a "word-event."25

These components help engage the imagination of listeners and lures them into identifying with another.

Identification with someone else is an exercise in self awareness except that the analogue "I" assumes another identity for a time. There are dangers in identifying with another too closely but those dangers are slight compared to having no chance to "walk in another's shoes." By skillfully telling our stories to each other, we flex our self awareness in expansive ways.

Encourage students to put their stories in the context of larger narratives: their family story, their cultural context and within the great myths and rituals of their people that gives their story meaning. Encourage them to be story collectors. Encourage them to discover story themes among various ethnic groups, novels, movies and television stories. As people claim their story in the context of the great themes of their people's story, they begin to see those themes in the events of each day. To nurture that skill is to make self aware theologians.

Conciliation

Finally, explains Jaynes, being conscious means having an awareness of the contradictions, ambiguities and strangeness in one's life, and having the urge to conciliate or unify one's thoughts and meanings. Everyone's life story has elements and episodes that on the surface seem contradictory. Jaynes writes that being conscious will bring us face-to-face with ambiguity and contradictions For some this is not a pleasant experience. It can discourage self reflection and deepening consciousness. Look for ways to encourage students to confront and deal with the contradictions, ambiguities and strangeness they encounter in what they are aware of.

Encourage students to uncover the unity that underlies diversity and discontinuity. Invite a trusting group to tackle a problem of ethics, religion and meaning together. Each self wants what they are conscious of to fit in some way in their world of meaning. We know that not every thing will. There are solutions to many problems, but to others, there is only mystery. Encourage students to make a place for mystery, wonder, indecision and incompleteness even while urging them to discover continuity.

Nurturing awareness will nurture the student's self, strengthen its character and durability, broaden it's grasp of God's creation and deepen commitment to other selves. It is an essential task for religious pilgrims.

SELF AND RELIGION

Black Elk Speaks26, by John Neihardt, was turned into a powerful play about the history of the Lakota Indians not long ago. In it, Black Elk and his community tell the story of their people as they struggled for survival and meaning over the four hundred years of European dominance. Woven all through the story of the people was the mythic background of the Planes Indians and their disciplines of spiritual consciousness. Their myths and rituals helped them to know themselves and maintain a link with the spiritual reality that they saw behind events. Their stories were like maps for their souls. Their spiritual disciplines were cognitive routines for creating states of consciousness and self awareness that placed them in contact with the great themes and meanings of the Lakota. These routines put them in a place of spiritual awareness and freedom. Even under the oppression of the Europeans, they could be free. Even in the face of death and terror, they had hold of a cosmic thread of meaning that helped them join in the creative "hoops" of meaning that structured their community life and personal biographies.

Black Elk's story reminded me that spiritual disciplines of prayer, meditation, worship, dance, singing, fasting, and work invokes consciousness. In consciousness we can choose among actions, character, principles, even emotional states. Our religious life (at its best) can serve as a ladder by which we ascend to levels of awareness and understanding that puts our lives in durable and redemptive context.

Like Black Elk climbing a ladder to a meditation spot on a mesa, our religious life gives us access to meanings that harmonize our stories and lift them through the struggle for meaning into the light of conviction and belief. Like Black Elk's songs to the Great Spirit, our religious life can put us in touch with the creator and our brothers and sisters soul-to-soul. Any conscious moment is an ascent to the place where selves can meet and grow.

Learning can go on without consciousness, but it is the learning of a robot. It is learning without the possibility of soul transformation. Conscious learning opens the way to the transformation and the growth of one's self. Conscious learners and teachers need to employ the routines that invoke awareness. Maxine Greene calls this level of living "Wide-Awakeness."27 Any other way of learning, she insists, is superficial. Story and ritual, religion and community are at the center of those routines. The glory and blessing of human nature is this gift: the ability to search for meaning and discover it, to manifest hopes and futures in action, to know one's self and be grateful, and to know something of what lies behind, beneath and above the sensed world.

To know that all this is possible because of protein, genes, nerve tissue, neuro-transmitters and a whole lot of carbon is the astonishing fact cognitive science leaves us. It is this fact, that matter cradles spirit, which makes it possible for us to join Black Elk in his prayer to that which is at the heart of things:

Great Spirit, lean close to the earth that you may hear the voice I send. You towards where the sun goes down, behold me; Thunder beings, behold me; you where the summer lives, behold me! You in the depths of the heavens, an eagle of power, behold!...Great Spirit, my Grandfather, all over the earth the faces of living things are all alike. With tenderness have these come up out of the ground. Look upon these faces of children without number, and with children in their arms, that they may face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet. This is my prayer; hear me! The voice I have sent is weak, yet with earnestness I have sent it. Hear me! 28

1 E. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963): 261

2 R. Winn, A Concise Dictionary of Existentialism, (New York: Book sales, Inc., 1960): 22

3 H. Thoreau, Walden, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963): 66

4 A. Schutz, Collected Papers I (Netherlands, The Hague:: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964) 213

5 D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991): 21-25

6 R. Ornstein, The Evolution of Consciousness (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991): 34-39

7 G. Taylor, The Natural History of the Mind (New York: Dutton, 1979): 187

8 Dennett, 364-366

9 Ornstein, 208-214

10 Dennett, 368

11 Ibid., 240-241

12 Ibid., 181

13 Ibid., 181

14 Ibid., 190

15 Ibid., 194-199

16 J. Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976): 204-215

17 Ibid., 214

18 H. Keller, The World I Live In (New York: Century Co., 1908)

19 E. Hearth, The Creative Loop (Reading Mass: Addison-Wesley Co., 1995): 134-148

20 Jaynes, 1-18

21 Ibid, 219

22 Ibid., 59-66

23 Taylor, 248

24 R. Coles, The Call of Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989): 7

25 D. Miller, Story and Context (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987): 117-118

26 J. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1961)

27 M. Greene, Landscapes of Learning (New York: Teachers College Press, 1978): 42-51

28 Neihardt, 5-6