Whenever I pack for a family vacation, I take with me a few books. Usually, there is a poetry book, a psychology-based textbook, and a book on a topic I know nothing about. Most recently, I decided to dive into the fields of affective neuroscience and biology. I’ve always fancied the thought of being a biologist. Perhaps in a different life, I would map the biological pathway of consciousness or that part of our subjective realization of being separate yet intertwined with the cosmos, that which we call life. Perhaps even further, I would figure out a way to capture that mysterious subjective self who consciously decides things for me, setting in motion a whole range of neurochemical activities that ultimately lead me to take action. Sometimes I picture myself deep in meditation having touched that moment of stillness, unperturbed space of nothingness where everything I have ever known is revealed to be precisely the opposite. Yet, I know I would be joining a group of consciousness researchers of the likes of David Chalmers or Benjamin Libet who have spent years explaining consciousness to concede that it is difficult, if next to impossible, to fully capture its non-measurable aspects.
How is all of what I process physiologically and at the neural level account for my consciousness? You see, consciousness that I am most interested in studying is not the functional or the performance aspects of what most consider to be consciousness such as my ability to discriminate, categorize, react to environmental conditions or even describe my moods and mental states of my well-being, levels of attention, listening, and self-control. What I am interested in knowing is all of its unattainable aspects- that which is not measurable otherwise it is disturbed from its natural state (whatever that is), and can only be experienced from within, and only accessible when I let go of all that I perceive to be real in its multitude of forms and understandings beyond my rational, spatio-temporal dependent brain.
Owning Your Leadership
In the absence of such understanding, I stand in sheer admiration of all those leaders who have purposefully chosen to quiet their minds, suspend all of what they were taught to be, and venture into the unknown without any doubt of who will emerge. These leaders not only have been able to liberate themselves from the grips of corporate rules and outdated management practices, but they have turned their attention inward to be more giving of themselves so that they can do more.
In this month’s Guest Client Blogger we meet one such leader, Fil D’Urbano, who has made it her personal mission to turn her own rational world of management, control, and authority upside down and open herself up to a creative inner world of leadership, teacher, and student. Knowing which parts of her held the greatest gifts for those she led, she was able to shift into a teacher-mode and embrace the act of teaching as part of her leadership presence. Although I will never truly know the subjective manifestations of consciousness that created her inner voice that called for a change in her external experience, I do know this: It is not solely atoms and proteins that hold the answers to consciousness nor is it explicitly our neuronal representation of external experiences. I suspect it has something to do with an inner manifestation of desire to connect with what is most meaningful in life and the understanding that we are the creators of the life we desire to live, and not the other way around.
