In my experience, I think I started becoming conscious only after I first started my practice with meditation thirty years ago. I think, we are all unconscious all the time except when we meditate. There is an aliveness in us, in our body, in each cell of our body and in the space around our body. We are usually unconscious of this aliveness as we remain stuck in our cycle of thoughts in our thinking-mind which is focused on the world outside.
Meditation starts happening when we return back to the awareness of the aliveness within our body. The breathing process is one of the biggest clues for us that something amazing is happening inside us right now. We are not doing the breathing, it is happening within us. Although we can engage with this process and play with it by changing the pace and rhythm of our breathing, we did not start it by ourselves and we are not going to voluntarily stop it by ourselves. Someday for sure however, it is going to stop. Until then we do have a choice of whether to be conscious of it or unconscious of it.
To be alive right now is to be conscious of our breathing and expand this consciousness to the whole aliveness in us. I call it Awareness, to hold a background state of awareness throughout our life. In the beginning it would be momentary and we end up loosing consciousness as soon as we go back to our routine life. As we gradually give up our ingrained habits to replace it with a new habit of holding a stance of active acceptance, it becomes easier to not lose consciousness for progressively longer duration.
I suggest you read the article linked below to find out one way to do this.
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Selvan Srinivasan
· 1y
How can I meditate 24*7?
Yes it is possible to hold a background state of Awareness or be present in the here and now or be connected with your grounding or meditate 24×7 as you call it and yet be completely focussed on something else in the conscious part of your mind or logical / analytical mind (you call this without being aware). Before I tell you how to achieve it, I would like to explain what is happening here. Let me take the example of a juggler in a circus show. This person is able to juggle several things simultaneously but if he or she looks at one particular thing they will drop all the other things. So their conscious attention may be focussed on the audience and they may be making some funny face or saying some joke to entertain the audience but simultaneously they are probably juggling ten different balls of different sizes. Their conscious mind is mindful about the audience and talking with them and their unaware mind (as you call it) which is actually their background state of awareness is taking care of the hand movements to keep all the balls in the air in continuous motion. In other words, this juggler is being present and grounded or being mindful with all the balls he/she is juggling and and not aware of it because they are simultaneously entertaining the audience with their jokes and facial expressions. What happens normally when we work and are not being mindful is that we end up having very bad body posture which ruins our health and it turn reduces our efficiency and productivity at work. But if we stop working and start spending equal amount of time in meditation and exercise, we are not able to concentrate and complete our work on time. We would like to do both and this seems to be the aim of your question. The answer is to slowly cultivate a habit of returning back to your presence or grounding often during the day consistently. I suggest you begin with the following two practices for a few days and then see how you fare with your maths. 1) Selvans Deep crossing: https://youtu.be/qq6iKZquuVI 2) Selvans Short Meditation – Witnessing the Four Simultaneous Activities The first one takes three minutes and the second one takes five minutes so together it would be a ten minute practice. I suggest that you do this practice upon waking up in the morning and once again just before going to sleep at night. In addition please also repeat this ten minute practice once every two hours throughout your day. If you can do this consistently and cultivate a habit out of it you will be able to achieve what you aim for in a few months. I have answered a similar question before and you might be interested to read that answer here For more information and plenty of free resources to aid with the practice of meditation and deep healing, please visit my website.