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Consciousness
While consciousness may be difficult to explain many common references to consciousness outline it is a combination of an individual’s state of awareness of thoughts, feelings and external experiences that give us some form of recognition of self.
The word itself is derived from the Latin, meaning joint or common knowledge. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness:
“Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.”(1)
Our conscious experiences are always changing; our consciousness may shift from moment to moment, this constant state of flux alters our state of awareness in a ongoing dance of the mind. In totality we know that our conscious mind is the controlling influence, the control system of everything we do, say, think, feel and experience.