Consciousness Models and Meditation: From Role Models to Spiritual Abstraction
When you have trained and structured consciousness, it too develops its own awareness. We have created a personality with conscious and unconscious aspects, but here lie many realities we don't know, and not knowing them, they bind, tie, and limit us. For example, there are models here - what model does one have? We said what your goal is, but something even more precise would be: who is your model, who do you want to become? Because it's not what you want to do, but who you want to be - that's the most important thing. One doesn't think about it, but they already have the model within themselves. Why? Because they saw a movie - there's the Batman model. They watched the film, identified with it, and now have the idea of the solitary hero who takes justice into their own hands. Or there's the Superman model, or the model from comics - yes, there are 10,000 of them: Frodo, Gandalf, thousands of invented ones, but also historical characters. There's Maradona's model, for example. It depends - if you want to become a great chess player, you can either have a broad idea like "I want to learn chess" (which is not very effective), or you have a specific model: "I want to become Bobby Fischer" or Nakamura. Then you have it more precisely - you learn Bobby Fischer's style, follow his games, reconstruct all his matches, learn how he plays. You become like Bobby - crazy like Bobby Fischer, because you cannot separate any model. Every model has... unfortunately, we now live in a state where these models are grafted onto us when we don't even have defenses against them. You watch an animated character, watch a movie, identify with the protagonist, see if you like them or not. Then what happens in life? Your model is who you will become, because in life, at certain points, while these personality aspects develop, if someone has Warren Buffett's model, they start studying financial aspects, adopting his values. If there's another model, they follow those values. When you reach a choice in life, each of us chooses what we consider best for our life. It's very rare for someone to consciously choose to do something foolish - usually one acts according to the line they consider best. What you consider best depends on your model. This model isn't King David, isn't Saint Francis, isn't Jesus Christ. One should take the best model - Jesus Christ or Buddha, Zarathustra, figures who are at least instructors of humanity. The best is Jesus Christ because fundamentally, Jesus Christ knew how to speak to everyone according to their level of understanding. So you can be at any stage, and if you read the Gospels, you have a conception of Jesus Christ that effectively gives you a model, a direction that is the maximum you can actually think of. But you can have any model. The point is that if you don't choose one, you already have one anyway - you're just not conscious of it. When you manage to understand that you moved because someone - a political party, some person - put that model there, it's because you're separating from it. You've reached a level of awareness where you realized that's a model and you're separating from it. When you no longer have a model, it means you've somehow exhausted your relationship with society. Society has a whole series of things that must channel you somehow. It's like having a mother who gives you guidance - if it's a child, the mother says "go brush your teeth three times a day," and they protest. But then the child grows and says "I don't care." Later, when they grow more, they say "actually, my mother was right - brushing teeth three times a day isn't so wrong." There are indications, guides that society gives you, until you reach a level where you no longer need them, and you understand they are wise guides - not put there by chance - so you adopt them without being crushed by them. To recognize them requires having developed some capacity for introspection. So what must one do? Abstraction consists of withdrawing attention from everything - not only from the conscious part of personality. During meditation exercise, one must not feel - the body must feel nothing. If something itches, you ignore it - it's a signal the body gives, but your attention, your consciousness must not participate. The mental aspect - your thoughts can come before you, but they're not yours. There's no participation from you. You can disperse them, or they have no meaning, like the noise of a passing tram - you hear it or you don't, whatever. Emotions are the same, the most difficult part. But this is only the conscious aspect - you must also withdraw from subconscious realities, from all aspects of personality. Here one sits with eyes closed, body immobile, but always thinks in terms of a body - man, woman, certain age, in a historical period, Italian, Swiss, European in the twenty-first century thinks...