The first tier of consciousness has a mysterious quality in that it offers a radically different way of thinking about brain functions, consciousness and human behavior. The idea of an unknowable first tier that remains behind the scenes of everything we do undermines our comfortable sense of being in conscious control that most of us take for granted. Nevertheless, we often encounter situations that involve this hidden first tier that we accept without questioning how they are possible.
Freud was a pioneer in daring to question and then attempting to analyze behaviors that are not under conscious control. No matter what we think of the explanations he proposed, he showed that not only do we lack the degree of conscious control we think we have but that we are often unaware of why we do the things we do. His concept of the unconscious and what Jung later added as the collective unconscious are both attempts to characterize hidden forces that originate in the first tier of consciousness.
When we are hypnotized, who is the individual that Milton Erickson believes represents us more completely that responds? When we take a lie detector test, who is the truth teller that yields the more honest, physiological response? When we hesitate and then decline a possible line of action because it doesn’t feel right, who is it that is objecting? When we have an out-of-body experience, who is doing the observing of what is happening to us? What does it mean to sell one’s soul? Where does one’s conscience reside?
I have been using intuition as my method in developing the ideas about the brain and consciousness that I have been writing about. Intuition, as Jung suggested, provides a “superior analysis or insight” to what consciousness is able to produce. I believe that the source of these intuitive insights resides in the physical core of experience. I have relied upon the core of experience I developed in the first tier of consciousness during my fifty years of work as a clinical neuropsychologist in developing ideas about the brain and consciousness. Creative thinkers often cite a mysterious, spiritual source for original ideas that they otherwise could not have developed. They experience this source as coming from outside of themselves because it is not consciously mediated.
The human soul is the ultimate example of an inner self that provides an unknowable source of greater wisdom about who we are and what we should do. It guides us in everything we do with an intimate, personal sense of what is right for us. It knows us so well that it sees through our errors, confusions, misunderstandings and self-deceptions. It represents, in all the ways I describe in The Two Tiers of Consciousness, the functioning of the first tier of consciousness. This continuous, physical core of experience grounds our subsequent identification of the entities and events that populate the conscious version of the world we know.
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