Filters of Consciousness
By: Michael Woronko
Tags: Philosophy, Consciousness, Life, Life Lessons, Inspiration

“The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.”

― Francis Bacon

Imagine for a moment that our consciousness, with respect to pursuing desires, functions in a similar way to that of our sense of smell. That, encoded within each of us, is every desire we can choose to have and that, once we know that it is we want, we’re on the hunt to fulfill that end; that, like smell, the receptor needs to be bound with the right-fitting olfactory signal to consecrate a satisfying match.

Or like vision, with our ability to perceive a workable portion of the light spectrum given our ocular ability to translate electromagnetic wavelengths into colors and, from this, be able to make chemical or physical assertions about reality.

The brain filters information in such subtle ways so as to categorically align us towards achieving our intentions — whether that intention is to pick an apple or pick an internet service provider. It does this through something that, truth be told, we’ve had a rather difficult time linguistically defining: we may call it intuition or subconscious intention, for instance.

This intention functions as a filter, allowing us to conveniently disregard the infinite noise around us and be able to identify, with remarkable precision, what it is we want to do.

Circling back to the light spectrum analogy — if we had been granted the ability to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum (say, the whole lot of radiowaves, gamma rays, microwaves), we’d be overwhelmed by the input of information; thankfully, as much as we may consider it a sad limitation, we can only perceive visible light waves. This ability, to filter, is inherently and indescribably useful in easing our navigation through physical (and, arguably, non-physical) reality.

To lean on an old example I had once presented: take, for instance, someone who’s trying to play poker professionally, enough to make a comfortable living. They begin watching international poker tournaments, getting to know the iconic names in the poker community, maybe even attending a few tournaments and amalgamating themselves into that atmosphere and the many orbits that inhabit it. They talk poker, walk poker, dream poker, and imagine themselves being among the most famous poker stars one day. Suddenly, opportunities are being created. Simply by attending a tournament, by immersing themselves in that world, the future poker star is creating blips of opportunity and activating potential fields of probability: they’re making connections, accessing channels of information, picking up on the evolution of the game, building a vocabulary, etc. Their subconscious mind is tuned in to hear words like ‘ante’ or ‘hold’ that would otherwise be ignored as background noise as they walk through a casino. More importantly, they’re consciously (if not subconsciously) creating and aligning themselves with the kind of opportunities needed to eventually ascend the ranks of the poker world. They’re filtering reality to their benefit, through their conscious effort to achieve an end.

It’s such a simple yet breath-takingly complex process, something that has been both relegated to over-stated bins of pseudo-scientific spirituality while also collecting dust on the shelves of antiquated psychological redundancy.

It’s nothing new but, because it’s such a slippery and versatile concept to grasp at from so many angles of study, it has become lost in the cracks of understanding, preventing most of us from appreciating it in its pure and undiluted, uncontaminated form.

We can achieve whatever we want to achieve — not really because we have the spiritual gusto within us, not exactly because of some higher consciousness and not necessarily because our intangible reality effectuates our tangible world, but simply because we can. It’s a biological gift, privilege, and advantage that has liberated the human animal from the confines of unaware and seemingly meaningless existence.

In short, it’s a big deal.

Yet we’ve saturated the understanding into variable forms of absurdity. But I suppose that’s besides the point and, if anything, beating a drum with no reverberating purpose.

So, in the spirit of usefulness, let us move on to how we can leverage this understanding to some kind of benefit.