thought So how conscious are we? There have been only a few moments in my life where I felt like I've grasped the fullness of what I have done in my life, that all those choices are me. Most days it's hard to even guide what the hell I'm thinking about. Most days thinking is just another thing that my body goes ahead and does, like breathing, moving my legs to walk, arms and hands to type etc.
Granted there is some evolutionary advantage to this... if we were always locked into a state of awareness of what we were doing, thinking. Humanity'd have never made it out of the forests of Africa. But we as humans tend to hold ourselves miles away from "animals", and I begin to wonder how true this is. It's curious to look at our society, and see how really far out of control it is, how far out lives tend to be out of our control. From a mile high perspective, how different do we look from an ant colony? Lots of people following the ( visual and linguistic, rather then chemical ) trails of other people, building structures in very similar ways, generally bunched up near centers where those visual and linguistic structures are created ( ie. where the queen lives).
I'll go on about this more in another post I think. But here is one last thought. Someone once asked the Buddha, "are you a god?". He replied, "no." "Are you a Saint?" He replied the same again. "Then what are you?" the puzzled person asked. "I am awake."