Controlling consciousness is learnable

Just because To control consciousness is to override biological and social instruction is not something that we could tangibly see, it doesn’t mean that they’re not trainable (Similar to relative pitch ear training). Many discipline or culture have proven how controlling consciousness can be learnt. Yoga is a good example of a discipline that involves or requires the mastery of consciousness. The fact that yogi are able to do them after years of practice is no different to how a software developer could create softwares after years of practice.

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References

Mihaly, Flow (p. 25).

After all, mystical explanations are not necessary to account for the performance of a great violinist, or a great athlete, even though most of us could not even begin to approach their powers. The yogi, similarly, is a virtuoso of the control of consciousness. Like all virtuosi, he must spend many years learning, and he must keep constantly in training. […] The skills he yogi gains are at the expense of the more mundane abilities that other people learn to develop and take for granted. What an individual yogi can do is amazing - but so is what a plumber can do, or a good mechanic.

Backlinks

• Autotelic personality
  • Although everyone can learn to enter the flow state (Controlling consciousness is learnable), not everyone have the same level of ability to make everything they do enjoyable. People with an autotelic personality has a greater ability to enter the flow state than an average person, they have the habit of converting everything they encounter into an flow experience (Flow experience is an autotelic experience). Any activities can be converted to enjoyment. This means, based on the The prerequisites of flow experience, autotelic individuals are very good at challenge finding and skill building by themselves.
• Meditation is a practice to control consciousness
  • Controlling consciousness is learnable, and meditation is a form of practice to control consciousness. It is a fallacy to think that meditation is a practice to empty your mind, it’s a practice that focuses your attention on something at will (To control consciousness is to be able to focus attention at will). Think about meditation as a gym for mental control. Yogi would meditate by focusing their attention on their breathing. Other meditation trainer would encourage meditation by focusing on counting from 1 to 10. It doesn’t seem to matter what you focus on, as long as you are training your focus.
• The key to flow is to control consciousness
  • Fortunately, we don’t really have to waste our psychic energy to such disorder, as long as we can control our consciousness. To control consciousness is to override biological and social instruction, and To control consciousness is to be able to focus attention at will. Controlling consciousness is learnable.