Self Awareness and the Future

There are clearly several levels to human consciousness. Inhibition is the price we pay for the higher levels. Some people seem party only to the lower levels and operate with little inhibition or self reflection. Think of tony Blair taking a nation to war. Most party to higher levels of consciousness wrestle painfully with even simple food choices. Those who have high self reflection can be inhibited to the point of paralysis. It can lead to drug taking to try to blow down the self inflicted walls. MDMA sees users dancing where self consciousness prevailed before. Signing along with a football crowd. For years I was far too self conscious to dance. But through drugs I learnt that it is only once you lose self consciousness that you find these other parts of being. As one gets older self consciousness lessens, so does the desire to dance. Currently there is a fashion to consider MDMA a softish drug. Most people I know, however, who did it regularly suffered depression or worse. It is years since I did it. Perhaps one day I will write about those years in detail.
 Buddhism advocates techniques to loose ones self. There is a couple of millennia of research to tap in to regarding consciousness. They have similar ideas to the self illusion and bundle theory. Watching my dog I see that he will eat something if it tastes good. I can look further, see that too much cream cake makes people fat, so eat stuff that tastes crap. Through self reflection we have deferred gratification. Deferred gratification is something drug addicts, for whatever reason, never picked up in their youth. I can remember kids I grew up with wo could save their pocket money even at a young age. Having a parent die at a young age. Seeing the thing you love and depend on most, taken away must have a profound effect. Trusting the future goes. Why defer gratification if love is temporary and prone to disappear when you need it most. But there is a price too. Those lucky kids from secure backgrounds can defer too long. Miss opportunities for fear of losing what they have. A drug addict, a criminal is made way before they are able to choose their path. The idea of responsibility is evaporating along with our belief in free will. Increasingly it seems medieval to treat criminals and drug addicts as if they were choosing how nature made them. The attitude is the same as burning epileptics at the stake for being possessed by evil spirits. It is 208 years since admiral Nelson sailed out. I have been alive for nearly a quarter if that time. It is not surprising that we are still shaking off outdated thought habits.
 Contemporary times have seen the greatest peace mankind has ever known. The greater us has grown and grown. We are now able to stretch our empathy to all other people's, creeds, colours, sexualities. Through our reason and belief in the consciousness of others we are escaping from superstition, religion and violence. The consequences of this are overpopulation. And ultimately we will be forced to address this. If we don't, as with all animals that become overpopulated nature steps in. Disease, starvation. Something will return balance to the planet. Hopefully some will live on. A smaller mankind.