Consciousness is programmed to plan, and wired to place great importance on being able to rely on its, and by extension, everyone’s plans – but foremost to its own.
And plan it does:
it plans when a plan is needed; it plans when one is not;
it plans when a review of the facts can be profitable,
and plans when it is a total waste of energy;
it plans when the plan has potential significance;
it plans when the effort is clearly going nowhere,
and consciousness plans when a plan is feasible,
and plans almost as vigorously when the whole idea is clearly a dream.
This endless, uncodified and unstructured planning is what ordinary people accept as their normal state of consciousness. It is just them thinking.
The planning of consciousness that is its basic survival function always puts it into another time and another place. It is exactly what planning is, and can be the literal difference between life and death. But when it is off the clock and just goofing around, ordinary minds in ordinary men take the activity to be just as serious and significant as the do or die variety. Put bluntly: man’s consciousness does not, as habit, make a real time distinction between what is clearly mere meaningless day dreaming, and vital planning.
If this is specifically pointed out, sane men will easily agree that such can, and may periodically occur in them, (worrying too much about a potential future event), but their neural programming is totally unequipped to have this as a permanent part of their consciousness, much less to realize that it is not a selective mental matter.
An all-encompassing one: to be aware of this, all of the time, is to have a life going on in your head that is quite unlike the one lived by others. They see shadows as being solid objects, dreams as real events, and meaningless, mechanical planning as having a material effect on the life you actually lead. You live a life. Your consciousness tells stories. If the story it is telling does not concern the life you are actually leading, then the story is but more moot plans; dreams which keep you from seeing what is really going on in life.
“Class dismissed.”
J.