SEEMS

The second doorway

Consciousness and the Inner World

When we begin to study the inner world, the first thing we notice is how vast it is. Every person carries a different world inside. One person may be full of fear, another full of ambition, another full of sadness, another full of curiosity, and another full of restless thought.

Even in one person, the inner world changes from morning to night, from youth to old age, from health to sickness, from peace to stress, and from one situation to another.

How to Adjust the Inner World

The inner world is not only vast and always changing it is a wonder that we can study it.  If we try to list every thought, every emotion, every memory, every fear, every desire, and every story that passes through a person, we will drown in detail.

It would be like trying to understand a city by recording every sound, map every building, and record the motives of all the people. This is way an impossible task. Instead we make large categories and adjust how strong they are and how they interconnect. 

We also limit ourselves to just the parts that deal with experience. 

By adjusting the strengths of the major components we are one step closer in controlling the inner world. 

The Basic Functions

Many who meditate on the inner world tend to break the inner world into five items: Senses, the Ego, the Emotions, the Mind, and the Soul. We can remember these using the mnemonic "SEEMS".  Our awareness, also called our consciousness moves through these five systems. We can experience  entertainment, who we are, various emotions, use our mind, and enter our soul. These are the great players inside.

These five groups by no means explain a whole person.  We vary too much, and we are all different. They are generalities.  But each person we know tends to gravitate towards to one or more particular function at any time. 

More so, we have will power that allow us to change which system we want work with.  There are other systems that our out of the range of a well power.  For instance, the subconscious is not amiable to being adjust adjust by will power alone. We do not have direct control of our blood pressure or heart rate. So the emphasis  will center on what we have control over.

As we listen to music there comes a point we want quiet. As we eat, there is the last bite.  There is a point where money and wealth do not matter.  We can be happy for just so long.  We can use our mind to a point we need to stop.  Thus each system has a volume control we can automatically adjust.  We can also use our will to move from system to system, during one up and another one down. Each system has   The manual adjustment is easier to make when sit in our soul because the soul is the upper management function.

Now lets take a closer look at each system.

The Senses

The senses are the open doors between the outer world and our inner awareness. Through sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, the world becomes real to us — though not exactly as it is. Our eyes, for instance, hand the brain a rough and incomplete signal, and the brain quietly touches it up so the world looks whole, easy to read, and at its best moments, beautiful.

Each of us receives the world a little differently. One tongue tastes a dish as plain; another tastes the same dish as a small celebration. One person hears an old song and feels joy; another hears the same song and feels the ache of a memory it carries. This is part of why two people standing in the very same place can seem to be living in two different worlds.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying the senses — good food, good music, a beautiful view, the comfort of touch. But when we learn to look through love, the senses become something more than pleasure. Love notices the particular gold in late afternoon light, the patience in someone's hands, the small kindness offered without being asked. Love finds beauty even where nothing was built to impress us.

The deeper invitation is to take the resources of this world — our time, our talents, our money, our relationships, our days — and use them not only to entertain ourselves, but to build something that outlasts the moment. A meal cooked with care, a skill passed on to someone younger, a garden planted for people we will never meet, a kindness remembered long after we are gone — this is the senses turned toward meaning and legacy, rather than the senses turned only toward the next distraction.

The Ego

The ego is the part of us that builds and protects a personal identity. It says, "This is who I am. This is my name. This is my work. This is my belief. This is my side. This is what I deserve." It is the costume and the script we wear so the world knows how to address us, and so we know, at least roughly, which way to turn each day.

Across a life, that costume changes many times. We are a child, then a student, then someone's partner, a parent, a professional, eventually someone older looking back. Each season asks us to redefine who we are — new roles, new titles, sometimes a new name for ourselves entirely. This is not a flaw in the ego; it is simply how a living identity moves through time.

But underneath every redefinition there is a quieter, steadier core that does not change with the costume — the one who has been watching all along, through every role we have worn. Learning to feel that core, and to return to it again and again, keeps us from mistaking the costume for the person wearing it.

And because the ego is so often busy defending and judging, it needs, more than almost anything else, to be loved. Whatever we have done — the mistakes, the harm we caused, the years we are not proud of — the deepest healing of the ego comes from forgiving ourselves as completely as we would forgive someone we truly loved. Self-love is not an excuse for old wrongs; it is what finally frees us to stop dragging them everywhere we go.

The Emotions

Emotions move through the whole body, not just the mind. Fear truly is frightening. Grief truly is heavy. Love truly is sweet and warm. We give them familiar names — joy, anger, sadness, shame, fear, love, surprise — but the truth is, our emotional life is far richer than any short list of names could hold.

Part of growing emotionally is learning to notice the feelings that don't yet have a common word, and giving them one of our own. There is the particular feeling of starting a new project — equal parts hope, nervousness, and a kind of bright, clean energy. There is the settled, quiet feeling of real love for another person, which is calmer and steadier than the excitement of infatuation, though no less deep. There is the specific hankering for one particular thing — not just hunger, but a longing for a certain dish, a certain song, a certain person's voice — that has no single ordinary name at all. Naming our own emotions this way makes our inner life feel less generic and more truly our own.

Emotions can also feel like a hurricane, sweeping us into a constant search for pleasure, drama, victory, or relief, and just as easily into anger, grief, or shame that seem to lodge themselves and refuse to leave. To release a feeling that has become stuck, we usually have to do the opposite of avoiding it — we have to turn toward it, feel it fully and honestly, and only then are we able to shake it off and let it move on through us.

The Mind

The mind is a magnificent tool when it is given something real to do. It can solve problems, design machines, write books, study the stars, repair what is broken, plan a trip, learn a language, and follow an idea all the way to its conclusion. A directed mind, working on a worthy task, is one of the finest instruments a human being has.

But a mind left without a task tends to keep talking anyway. It comments on everything. It replays old conversations, rehearses arguments no one is having, and worries about futures that may never come. Left to run on its own, the mind does not rest — it simply goes looking for something to grab onto.

What it usually grabs onto is the subconscious. The subconscious is an older, more primitive layer of mind that reacts instead of thinking things through. It does not ask what is true or wise; it asks only "is this dangerous?" and answers in a hurry. Much of what it produces is plain nonsense — it narrates the obvious back to us, telling us we are tired when we already know we are tired, that the task is hard when we already know it is hard, as if repeating the obvious were the same as solving anything. When the directed mind goes quiet and the subconscious is left in charge, we end up with noise dressed up as thought.

The Subconscious and the Primitive Mind

The subconscious sits mostly out of reach of direct control. It is a layer woven from old memories, old fears, and old survival habits, and it forms much of what becomes automatic in us — our quick reactions, our gut fears, our instinctive flinches. It rarely pauses to ask what is true, wise, or good for the whole person; its only real question is, "What gets me out of danger right now?"

This way of operating was built for an older, far more dangerous world, where threats really were close and constant. In a modern life that is, for the most part, safe, the subconscious has not gotten the news. It still treats small uncertainties as emergencies. It exaggerates. It takes alarming headlines at face value and quietly suggests that everything might be falling apart — when a simple walk outside usually shows ordinary people doing ordinary things, the world neither ending nor even especially threatening that day.

Because the subconscious is so constantly active, it is happy to feed an idle mind an endless stream of reactive chatter, restating what we already know as if it were new and urgent. With practice, we can learn to set a gentle boundary around it, slow the flow, and stop mistaking its noise for the truth.

The Soul

We are not the senses, the ego, the emotions, the mind, or the subconscious. Beneath all of them is something simply watching the whole show go by — our inner world and outer world both. That quiet witness is the soul.

The word "soul" does not have to start out as a religious claim. Here it simply means the deepest center of experience — the place that observes, directs, and decides. It is where our will and our basic sense of being alive actually live.

And here is the most useful, practical fact about the soul: at almost any moment, we have the power to switch our attention to it instead of staying caught in the noise of the mind or the reactive chatter of the subconscious. It is a far better seat to sit in. The soul does not rush, does not panic, and does not need to win an argument. It is steady. It is quiet. And from that steadiness, it consistently makes the wisest decisions available to us.

When we rest in the soul, we also open onto something larger than ourselves — the soul's own connection to God and to the angels, a source of guidance, comfort, and love that the senses, the ego, the emotions, and the mind cannot reach on their own. This connection does not arrive as noise or pressure; it arrives the way the soul itself works — softly, steadily, and without demanding anything from us.

If we live mostly in the senses, we chase the next pleasure until we drop. If we live mostly in the ego, we become defensive, anxious to be right, anxious to be seen. If we live mostly in the emotions, we are carried by every wave without a boat. If we live mostly in the mind, we talk and think constantly and rarely simply notice. But if we learn to live, even part of the time, in the soul, we come from a place of light and peace, watching life with love instead of being swept away by it.