But the effect of society is not only to funnel fictions into our consciousness, but also to prevent the awareness of reality. . .

Every society, by it own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feeling and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the form of awareness. This system works, as it were, like a socially conditioned filter; experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter. . . I am aware of all my feelings and thoughts which are permitted to penetrate the threefold filter of socially conditioned language, logic and taboos (social character). Experiences which can not be filtered through remain outside of awareness; that is, they remain unconscious.

Eric Fromm was a 20th century internationally renowned social psychologist, humanistic philosopher and psychoanalyst. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Fromm taught at the University of Mexico, as well as at Michigan State and NYU. He moved to Switzerland in 1974 and maintained a clinical practice and published a series of books. Fromm believed that freedom was an innate aspect of human nature and we either embrace it, or we escape from it. Embracing freedom is healthy and escaping freedom using escape mechanisms is the root of psychological conflicts.

 The main escape mechanisms that Fromm identified are: Automaton Conformity, Authoritarianism and Destructiveness. Automation conformity is changing one's ideal self to what is perceived as a preferred type of personality to conform to society, which means losing or hiding one's true self. We then are able to place the burden of responsibility on society instead of self. Authoritarianism is allowing one's self to be controlled by another. This removes freedom of choice by submitting to the freedom of someone else. Destructiveness, aims to eliminate others or the world as a whole to escape freedom. Destruction of the world is the last desperate attempt to save my self from being crushed in it.

Awareness, as Fromm describes it, is created by me once I allow it to manifest. Several factors determine whether I allow my self to be aware of different experiences. I do pass all I perceive through a belief filter and separate them by associations in order to identify them using an accepted mode of knowing. If my experiences get stuck in one of my filters, I put it in another category and mark it as not real, or a fantasy, depending on what is contained within the experience. I cover my awareness with a blanket of doubt and disbelief in order to protect my self from experiences that are not in my memory, or cannot be associated with another similar experience that is lodged in my body consciousness.

Fromm explains that different society's have specific filters that are filled with escape mechanisms, which inhibit awareness until these filters are reconditioned or are expanded to accept new experiences as acts of freedom. Embracing all experiences and accepting them for what they contain, in terms of awareness, is true freedom. But in order to expand in awareness, I consciously put these escape mechanisms in place in order to experience the pain that results from my own creations. I separate my self in order to conceive awareness. Consciousness is not aware of itself unless it separates and forms contrast in this reality.

 As the 20th century philosopher and Taoist Terence Stannus Gray, who wrote under the pen name Wei Wu Wei explains:

What, then, could be inconceivable, what in fact is and must be inconceivable? Only that which is conceiving, is itself inconceivable, for only what is conceiving cannot, when conceiving, conceive itself.

That means consciousness is always aware, but my ability to conceive that which I choose to filter is restricted by my own actions. Aspects of consciousness remain outside of my awareness, due to my established and staunchly rigid belief structure. When I begin to massage that structure and it becomes pliable and flexible and awareness begins to manifest, I conceive more aspects of my own innate freedom. It's similar to death in one sense, for I change my focus from one reality to other realities and begin to experience all of them simultaneously within an expanded time-space filter. Conceiving awareness is experienced on my own and does manifest at certain energy points in linear time, when I choose to allow my self that freedom. If I don't allow my self to die in awareness then I am a sorry traveler, but an eternal one nonetheless.

In Goethe's words:

As long as you do not know

How to die and come to life again

You are but a sorry traveler

On this dark earth.

The point is the earth is only dark if I conceive it to be, by filtering my experiences through an inconceivable belief system.

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 The conventional self is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I'm doing now. I am also what I have done and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost the more real "me" than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is.

Alan Watts the British philosopher wrote that interesting statement in his book The Way of Zen, published in 1957. If I ask my self who I am, I do start putting a mental image together of what I've done and where I've been. I am a composite of yesterday waiting for tomorrow and never seem to get yesterday out of the way in the present moment. I constantly live a historic dream of my own making and continually try to wake up, but I find my self falling deeper into a waking sleep, as linear time shows tracks of my past on my physical body of now. I identify with those tracks and in a way wear them as badges of achievement and perseverance. The self that exists in the now is stuffed in a body of distorted memories that create a future with similar distortions.

As Ken Wilber mentions in his book Spectrum of Consciousness, my ego seems to be happy today if I promise it a happy tomorrow. The good news seems to be in a bright future, not a bright present. I endure pain and misery waiting for that future, but I don't enjoy it, because it doesn't exist now. When it does arrive my ego will only be content if I offer it another bright future. I continue to create insanity in order to be sane. I spend so much time running towards the future that I identify with running and I run right past it in the present, so I never really know who I am or enjoy that self. I find my self not enjoying the present because it has no future and if it has no future then it is dead in my belief system.

Trying to get a handle on the present and living it without associations that form from past beliefs is an enormous challenge, but it is one that I can experience. When I start to examine who I am from not only a physical and linear perspective, but from a psychological and metaphysical perspective, I open the door of awareness a little more. I still have beliefs about the past and the future, but I begin to immerse my self in the present. When I use my imagination in the present I create thoughts that are expressed as energy in some way. By following those thoughts from pure energy to manifestations, I find hidden fragments of my own consciousness waiting to be accepted and released in some form. Life in the present is about action and expansion and the awareness of different realities, so I can experience them. I tend to fear them for I have no past experiences to associate them with, but when I allow them to show themselves, I sense the incredible amount of energy that I have in every moment and that is enlightenment.

By accepting a changeable past and a probable future, I learn to live in the now. Both the past and future are creations of the present, which in psychological time happen simultaneously. Like the bark on a tree my ego is the buffer for this camouflage reality. I keep it healthy by making it aware that I am like the roots of a tree that need the energy of life now, not in the future.

The hour is striking so close above me,

So clear and sharp,

That all my senses ring with it.

I feel it now: There's a power in me

To grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real

Without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

And they come towards me, to meet and be met.

No thing is too small for me to cherish

And paint in gold, as if it were an icon

That could bless us,

Though I'll not know who else among us

Will feel this blessing.

Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours was written around 1903. He was twenty-three when he started it and had already published three volumes of poetry. Book of Hours was published in 1905. The inspiration for the book came from what Rilke called "inner dictation." Words came to him in the mornings and evenings and struck him with the force of a persistent awareness, which is actually the inner senses manifesting thought in physical form. The inner senses using innate electrical intensities shape the reality I experience and that beholding can be as extensive as I want it to be. There are no restrictions that limit my creativity once I cross the threshold of wisdom and express the innate power within me.

 Rilke's thoughts are energy and as energy manifests physically in my reality, it acts as a catalyst. I imagine my self functioning in the world within me. When that happens my inner senses ring a bell of awareness; a new world takes shape and in every second of it, nothing is too small to cherish. The act of beholding this world ripens my own beliefs. Creative enzymes flow through me in an intensified dance of consciousness. My energy is painted with the gold of awareness. The blessing of abundance fertilizes my blue veins and spouts the red blood of physical metamorphic resonance in the endless action of creation.

 All realties wait for me to discover them. Each inner experience is real when I become aware of it. Each dripping thought frolics within a dewdrop of awakened energy that restlessly expands into a catechism of wisdom without beliefs. No longer hampered by conventional gravitational realism, I can wander from cloud to sky, as I pick molecules of radiance from the consciousness of the sun, which fuels the universe within me.

Success has no footprints in a world where judgment floats on a carpet of tolerance. Fear has no motive in a universe that flowers in multi-colored vibrations of acceptance. Love has only equals when a mirror of truthfulness reflects the genesis of consciousness.

Experiencing essential aspects of awareness, I see a self and behold the beauty between time and space. Each moment of beholding strikes the wires of my own electrical intensities and another quality of consciousness becomes me.

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