How to Master the Skill of Self-Consciousness
Each moment each of us and our organizations have a priority, and everything yields to and accommodates our priority. Even if not aware of it, our highest priority is our self-definition. It determines everything we do. Our self-definition changes as we mature.
During the first five layers of our maturation, it is "I am my physical body." As a Baby, the priority in our behavior is our physical body's survival. As a Toddler, the priority is recognizing differences. As a Child, it is using words to get what our physical body wants. As a Teen, it is giving priority to our physical body's newfound ability of exercising individual free choice. As an Adult, it is living according to our freely chosen beliefs of what are facts and illusions.
To master the use of words, up to the Adult layer we operate on the illusion we are each a separate part: "I am my physical body." The skill of using words allows us to be what is herein labeled "self-conscious" instead of, like other animals, only conscious. Basically, self-conscious is knowing what we are doing while we are doing it (being conscious), using words to talk about it with ourselves and others, exercising the three levels of maturity of free choice, and making, keeping, renegotiating, and living inside agreements with ourselves and others.
At the next layer, the Elder layer, we discover the most fundamental fact upon which all other facts build: the universe operates as an undividable whole, as one thing, or none of us would be breathing. Then our self-definition becomes "I am first the undividable universe that will not die and secondly my physical body limb of it that will die."
At the next and highest layer of maturity of being a human being, the Mature Elder layer, our self-definition becomes "I am the universe." The smaller skills of the first six layers of maturity have become habits that have allowed us to be self-conscious. From then on, our highest priority each moment is what throughout history has most often been labeled "Eldering." It is each moment giving priority to what we each judge is our best unique action of self-conscious participation in the fundamental process in nature: the maturation of the undividable universe. This results in the physical sensation of inner peace, our sixth sense herein labeled "the sensation of oneness." Its absence reveals to us our highest priority is not Eldering. Life is then using the presence or absence of the physical sensation of inner peace to guide our never-ending maturation in the skill of Eldering.
When you answer the 11 Questions in the order presented in the first chapter, you will not be able to fool yourself into thinking you do not know the universe operates as an undividable whole, as one thing. Also, you will then not be able to stop yourself from self-eldering yourself into full maturity in the skill of self-consciousness and the never-ending joy of maturing in the skill of Eldering.
Soon the highest priority of human beings will be the maturation of every child into full maturity in the skill of self-consciousness before their twenties. We now know how to do it, and maturation cannot be escaped or stopped. We are limbs of something we do not yet fully understand how it operates, but someday we will fully understand how it operates.
