Your Consciousness Is An Ecosystem, Not A Brain

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@November 6, 2024 11:09 AM (EST) – @November 6, 2024 12:39 PM (EST)

@November 7, 2024 10:30 AM (EST) – @November 7, 2024 11:40 AM (EST)

The One Thing

Make the ecosystem more of a through line. Tie every concept back to it.

There are many important ideas and concepts in this chapter, and it’s important that your reader knows how they all relate. Those relationships are a little muddy right now. I have to guess, for instance, how exactly the ego is related to the true Self.

I think you can solve this problem by tying each of the concepts back to the idea of the ecosystem, so that it has the effect of being like a conceptual map.

• What are the components of the ecosystem that is consciousness. Is this an exhaustive list: your consciousness, open heart, and true Self?
• What is your definition of the ego?
• Is the ego something entirely bad and to be overcome?
• What are the parts of consciousness I have access to normally, and what are the ones that I am closed off from? My understanding:
• I have trained myself to be governed by my patterns which serve to protect the ego, but my natural state is openness, peace, gratitude, and joy. I can return to that through a process of expanding my awareness, which involves opening my heart and noticing subtler emotions, energy, and information from my body and mind.
• Right now, the chapter feels sort of piecewise, with a series of different concepts. It’s important to unite all of them under one main idea for the chapter (consciousness as an ecosystem).
• Another option is to split this up into two chapters. Maybe one is about the characteristics of a dis-integrated consciousness and the other about the process and ideal state of a unified consciousness.

Feedback

• Beware of jargon. In any book on spirituality, I think this is a special risk. If your reader feels like they’re missing a concept, they’ll check out or feel lost. It makes the language feel a little empty, and it makes your point hard to follow. In this example, contributors is especially troublesome.
• Contributors is also an example of nominalization. When you have the choice, use the verb form of a word (contribute) instead of making it a noun (contributors). With the noun form, I have all these questions:
• What is doing the contributing? What is it contributing? And what/who is receiving its contributions?

What started to become clear through the juxtaposition of facing my pattern, interfacing with my heart, and connecting with my true Self is that is actually an ecosystem of contributors that determine what enters my experience.

My edit:

“As I started to face my patterns, interface with my heart, and connect with my true Self, it became clear that there is an entire ecosystem that determines what enters my experience.”

• The distinction between “storytelling voice” and “teacher voice” can be subtle. But it’s important to switch between them and match them to the content. When you’re teaching about ego for the first time, that’s a time for teacher voice, so that you queue the reader into the fact that they’re about to learn something new. Storytelling voice makes your reader expect to understand everything already. They’re looking for the story to progress (to be entertained), not for you to challenge their thinking and teach them something. Here’s a quick example of the difference. These two sentences have the same meaning, but they’ll land differently with your reader.

Storytelling voice is subjective, from your perspective:

I learned that more so than an inflated opinion of yourself, the ego is a survival mechanism innate to all humans.

Teaching voice is more objective and authoritative. You’re making a claim:

More than an inflated opinion of yourself, the ego is a survival mechanism innate to all humans

• Here is an edit for clarity on the glasses simile. As I understand it, the glasses are always there, always between you and True Reality. And your consciousness patters cloud your vision and tether you to your past and to your fears.
• This makes it seem like the glasses are only on because of the patterns.

It’s like you have a set of glasses on that interprets everything from your past imprints.

• This clarifies that the glasses are on regardless, but that your patterns prevent you from seeing clearly:

It’s like you have a set of glasses through which you interpret everything, but the lenses are clouded by your past imprints.

• There’s a counterpoint you don’t quite address in this chapter. It’s like a second part to your main claim that’s missing. You say:

We start developing patterns at a young age and before you know it, your entire way of filtering and responding to reality is oriented around keeping you safe.

And my first thought is: Why is this such a bad thing? I think you need a sentence or paragraph addressing this objection.

I believe, and I'm sure you would agree, that we create the illusion of danger and scarcity where there is, in fact, peace and abundance.

So, this point is missing it's counterpart. Your patterns are about keeping you safe. But you're safe already.

• This is a wonderful paragraph and a great time to step back into storytelling voice:

Once I clued into this, working on my patterns became more interesting than everything else. I still ran my company and hung out with friends, but there was now this added component of observing how I reacted to everything. At my startup, I found myself more interested in noticing how I was triggered in a meeting than getting my point across. With friends, moments I caught myself comparing myself or judging became opportunities. Looking at life this way changed the way I related to uncomfortable and agitating experiences. What once seemed like an inconvenience to avoid or plough through, was now recognized as an opportunity for self- awareness. This made all of life feel like a giant game of seeing myself more clearly, which I was growing to love.

• Can you weave the ecosystem idea throughout the whole first section? Right now, it’s only in the intro. Maybe bring it back at the end, before transitioning to the “Disintegrated vs. Unified” subsection. The first section doesn’t need to be about the ecosystem, but it’s important that the reader doesn’t loose track of that idea, since it’s the frame for the entire chapter.
• Watch out for repeating transitions and paragraph/sentence structures. In this draft of the first section of this chapter, there are four paragraphs that start the same way:

The more I worked with my response to life each day, the more I began to understand how consciousness functioned.

The more I worked on my consciousness patterns, the more obvious it became that the majority of the activity in my mind…

The more I studied, the more I learned about the ego and how it functions.

The more I uncovered these patterns, the more accessible my true Self became.

• There’s this really important paragraph that has a lesson and a story about connecting to more of the ecosystem. I revised it for clarity and flow, and to remove the explicit mention of repatterning and to add a mention of the ecosystem.

The more I uncovered these patterns, the more accessible my true Self became. This first manifested in the ease and clarity I could connect with it during the repatterning practice. Increasingly, I could drop into the practice and start receiving very clear information quickly. This familiarized me with its texture and what it felt like.  Information from my true Self felt calm, neutral, and clear. Thoughts from my patterns felt charged, speedy, and all over the place. I naturally began to develop an acuity around recognizing the different contributors like they were artists on a radio. This attunement helped me start to recognize emergent information from the true Self outside the practice. I started to receive insights or directives with the same marked quality as I was going about my life. I began to experiment with following these. One of the first times I did this I got this very distinct ping in my awareness to go for a walk. I was sitting at my desk and in the middle of my workday. I was unaccustomed to this and after years of maniacally sticking to my do list, I felt a lot of resistance to following it. This nudge felt like it was interfering with my productivity. I realized this resistance was a pattern, recorded it on my Freedom Log and decided to roll with it. I popped out for a stroll and immediately ran into someone I had been thinking about reconnecting with on the sidewalks of Manhattan. This synchronicity ultimately resulted in us doing business together. I didn’t know what to make of all this, but it certainly got my attention. It seemed as if this new form of intelligence I was gaining access to could see around corners in ways that previously alluded me.

My edit, in which I split the paragraph between the lesson and the story:

Thoughts from my patterns felt charged, speedy, all over the place. I naturally began to develop an acuity for recognizing these like they were artists on the radio. The more I uncovered these patterns, the more accessible my true Self became. The information from my true Self felt calm, neutral, and clear. And it wasn’t coming from my brain but from some other part of the ecosystem. This attunement helped me receive insights or directives as I was going about my life, and I started to experiment with following them.

One day, while sitting at my desk in the middle of a workday, I got this very distinct ping in my awareness to go for a walk. I was unaccustomed to this, and after years of maniacally sticking to my to-do list, I felt a lot of resistance to following it. This nudge felt like it was interfering with my productivity. I realized this resistance was a pattern, recorded it on my Freedom Log, and decided to roll with it. I popped out onto the streets of Manhattan for a stroll and immediately ran into someone I had been meaning to reconnect with. This synchronicity ultimately resulted in us doing business together. I didn’t know what to make of this, but it certainly got my attention. It seemed I was gaining access to a new form of intelligence that let me see around corners in ways that had previously eluded me.

• This is a great insight and a satisfying point of growth to witness in your story.

I would cry during movie scenes that never used to affect me and feel gratitude at depths previously inaccessible to me. All these years, I perceived my emotional stability as a badge of honor attributing it to my maturity and level-headedness.

• In a couple cases, you had a list without a comma before the and in the list (e.g., “Our thoughts, emotions and imprints also exist as energy that contains information.”). This is the serial or Oxford comma, which is optional. I suggest using it in all cases, for clarity:

Our thoughts, emotions, and imprints also exist as energy that contains information.

• This is fascinating and concise — well said:

I learned that the heart’s original state is to be open. It’s why you see so much joy, wonder, and boldness amongst children. They haven’t yet developed patterns which cause it to close or function in such a conditional way.

• Are these all of the parts of the ecosystem? What else makes up the ecosystem of consciousness. It'd be helpful to have a taxonomy/map if there is one.

A unified consciousness ecosystem is when your consciousness, open heart, and true Self function as one.

Resources

Watch out for nominalization (see Purdue Owl).

Nominalizations are not always the wrong choice, but they often create vague and confusing sentences.

Here’s a suggestion I made that makes use of nominalization (configuration instead of configure):

The configuration of this ecosystem massively impacts the quality of my life.