Mainstream, mundane modern consciousness could be summarized as a closed-loop comprising consciousness-of-consciousness - CofC - that is, Modern Man is aware primarily of his own awareness.
From all else he is removed: consciousness stands between awareness and other Beings, and even between awareness and himself. This is an extreme form of abstraction - we are thinking about ourselves-thinking!
Thus other-people, the world - even one's own living self! - these things are not experienced directly. They do not strike the observing consciousness as absolutely real. Thus we get the characteristic 'relativism' of modernity: exactly because nothing seems really-real.
So, because nothing seem livingly-real, nothing is experienced as palpably alive - Modern Man inhabits what feels like a dead universe; and that deadness includes his own Being. (Leading to the common idea that consciousness is itself an illusion, or a functionless-epiphenomenon.)
Knowledge in CofC is indirect - a matter of 'theories', of 'models' - concepts that have been (mostly) passively-absorbed with ideology; all soon revealed as unsatisfactory, all over-simplified and dubiously-applicable - yet models-of-reality are all we have inside closed-loop CofC.
Lacking experiential contact with life, others, the self - Modern Man is easily persuaded that consciousness is separable from life... That non-Beings (computers, robots) are just-as-alive as Beings - hence the assumptions of Artificial Intelligence and sentient androids etc.
The closed-loop of CofC lacks contact with creation, therefore consciousness decays entropically - needs continually to be sustained by stimulatory inputs.
Hence our addiction to distraction; Modern Man's requirement to be plugged-into mass and social media, to sensory and energy inputs.
Hence MM's belief that death is extinction, annihilation.
Because from inside the CofC loop the innate tendency is to cessation; CofC is self-experienced as slipping-away, as corrupting towards dysfunction, as dying.
The answer? Primary Thinking, Direct Knowing, Intuition...
Yes; but the key is that - instead of consciously-directing CofC and trying to make our-selves experience the world as real, alive and conscious; instead of learning some technique of meditation...
Instead of trying and training - which are just another kind of modelling, and still in the closed-loop - we need to be led by love. And love is not something that can be directed, or had by effort.
Therefore we start-with love - some specific love we actually have for some specific Being... some entity (person, living-thing, grouping of persons etc) whom we already but unconsciously regard as alive.
And from that love of the unconsciously-alive, the CofC-loop brings something new; which is consciousness of this love, and consciousness of the life.
And this leads on to engagement, the two-way communication, the 'final participation' which is, of itself, a joining-with divine creation.
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