Six faces of consciousness?
Reality can be overwhelming as so much is happening in each moment, it is a continuous bombardment of new sensory experiences grabbing your attention, you never get to slow it down to actually focus on one thing and it never stops. However it is possible to slow the process of your awareness wandering down a little by dividing and conquering, simplifying the inputs, by stopping the fruitless task of trying to bring every single thing into clarity. When you attempt to hold a single thought it is like herding a cloud into a definable box, you are trying to give it a form that it does not having, thoughts change depending on how much attention you give them, the more you give them the larger they grow, instead what is available to you is to simplify them, recognise, note and identify the inputs, and at it's most simple you can divide your consciousness into three main external senses of sight, touch and hearing (sorry smelling and tasting, they come and go for special occasions), and these three have internal mirror sides of the mind's eye, feelings and thoughts.
In simple terms you can imagine a box around your head (or whole body) where things are happening outside of the box and inside, the external and internal mirrors. The seeing sense is the front and back axis of the box, hearings is to the sides axis and touching is the vertical axis from top to bottom. By giving the three senses an axis of direction where they exist it makes them easier to identify. Humans are good at sorting especially when it is sorting into three kinds of something, if you had to divide a pack of cards into their suits or their numbers, it would take you longer to sort into thirteen piles rather than four. It is by simplifying that it is possible to sort at speed and consciousness happens very fast, sensations occur faster than you can label them with a thought, but you do have time to sense their direction rather than decide what kind of thought you are having a kind one, a jealous one, planning, memory, the list is too long and complex but reducing it to side axis of the head and that it is coming from inside the box, that is possible, and by repeatedly noting where the sensation is coming from, you get to ignore the content.
That is the power of simplifying, you get to ignore the infinite numbers of thoughts, sounds, sights, feelings that can arise and instead turn them into directions, and even with our eyes closed, we know forwards, sides and down, inside and out. We are not interested in content when we are simply want to slow the ride down so that things can come into clarity with undistracted concentration, when we are overwhelmed it is hard to do anything with single mindedness, you have to slow down to be smooth, and smooth is fast. When we meditate we concentrate on a single direction as a means to slow down, by bringing awareness to our breath we are concentrating on our external feeling of touch, we are reducing our sorting process from six options to two, touch of the breath and other. The box method accepts all our senses at once, we follow our awareness and note the direction of where our awareness is pointing, and we can note it without naming it with a thought.
It even possible to become conscious that awareness itself is really the direction that your awareness is facing, if you are cold that is your awareness pointing outwards, if you have a thought that is your awareness listening inwards, if you watch a bird it is looking outwards, if you imagine a bird that is looking inwards. It is by changing our direction of consciousness so often that a sense of self arises like the centre of a whirlpool that is just empty air surrounded motion of water, we confuse motion and change with agency, we remember that we have had these sensations before and we know that we will face more sensations in the future and we want them to be good, that is the human experience, and we are trapped in that habit and we believe that they are the only way to experience life. However do not take my word for it, there plenty of annoying monks who will tell you that life is impermanence, dissatisfaction (suffering) and no-self, that there is just awareness that points in or out, that we are that point between in and out, that gets turned around so much that we think that there is something there like the beam of light from a lighthouse, we think because there is a beam of awareness spinning round there must be a source.
And there might be a Source but it is not you, it is both internal and external, and quite beyond our sensations and senses, there is an internal source of wisdom, intuition, oneness, sense of right and wrong, and we can be aware of it, but it is not from the lighthouse, it is not internal to our sense of self, it is outside of us. If God talks only with silence, this is where God is doing the talking, it could be our collective consciousness, echoes of past reality, we will probably never know, except by giving it our awareness, and it only by slowing down the ride that we can start listening to it without our own stuff getting in the way.
It by noting the directions of your senses, that we are able to simplify enough to be able to deal with them at speed, real life speed, by just noting them we remove our interest in the content, we have nothing to react to, it is just the wind of consciousness blowing from a different direction, that is when we are able to notice the emptiness of the awareness itself, that there is nothing more to it, that is what no-self is, there is nothing behind that awareness, it just happens because of your reaction to the senses. Through it is always hard to use words to explain experiences, it is one thing to understand the model and another to actually experience it, that is why we practise, meditation is not relaxing it is hard and continuous like an accountancy exam, it requires you to keep bring your attention back to the habit of noting the direction of your awareness, that is how you form a habit, you keep on doing it everyday, that is why it is best to start small, the most you can do realistically everyday which might be five minutes or five breathes for most people, you need to imagine what you could do on busy day not just good days and then carry on doing it.
This is only one model for understanding the process of consciousness, there are many and all of them are right and wrong, as they all deal with an experience that you can not see to copy, which does not mean it a waste of time, if you are happy all the time, you do not need to pay more attention to your experience just enjoy it, though no one I know is that happy. The only reason to meditate is to make your life better, and if one model or method does not help try another, though realise that every model is trying to get you to the experience of meditating and like learning to ride a bike you are going to fall off many times, when you first meditate you are not meditating, at best you are making yourself aware of how out of control your sensory experience is and you are learning to pay attention by concentrating on how much is flowing through you at any one time. That is what the box model is for, it is just sorting through the mess like decluttering your house into categories of clothes, books, kitchen stuff, photos, and you do not even have time to decide if they bring you joy, you are just sorting and when you can forget that there is a self sorting and you are observing the six faces of consciousness that is when you are meditating, that is when you truly get to face yourself and be at peace.
