Stages of Consciousness: Part-1 Perception

People may describe you as a "dreamer". You have a wild sense of imagination which enjoys making clever, spontaneous and farfetched interconnections between ideas or things. You can find a way to relate even the most disconnected concepts, although the outcome may be amusingly ridiculous. You are an animated, playful, lively and curious person who has one foot in reality and one in wonderland. Sometimes you feel quite detached from reality, and enjoy remaining adrift between different speculations. You are free spirited and like to upgrade your perception of life continually. Because of this, you are also transient in both your interest and attention; gravitating always to where your inspiration takes you next.

You can be a bit of an idealist, as you remain optimistic about the possibility of accomplishing great things. You rarely disregard the idea of something being possible, and like to entertain notions, philosophies or even people which others are far more suspicious of. This accepting energy can be contagious, as you have a way of lifting away limitations from people's minds through your optimism.

Stemming from this receptivity, you can easily become immersed in many genres and are quick to assimilate mountains of facts into a working understanding. This immersion into diverse fields, often completely opposite of one another, can lead to the formation of a very hodgepodge identity and worldview. You are an eclectic collector of ideas and enjoy assimilating them all under a single umbrella.

At times your own energy can be too much for you to handle, and you may experience yourself as being scattered or unfocused. When the present moment or conversation brings associations into your mind, your attention branches endlessly from every idea - leading to a loss of the original thread. While this makes you an excellent brainstormer, it can also be debilitating and even paralyzing when confronted with a large task that requires linear focus and perseverance.



You are dabbler and juggler of ideas. You like to entertain hypothetical scenarios, especially those that compound separate theories together. You have an integral approach to information, and like to interrelate everything in as many ways as possible. You carry a child-like sense of wonder always about you, which motivates you to look at things with fresh eyes and from rather unusual perspectives. You like to abandon convention and normalcy; experimenting in your own fantastical direction.

You love to explore uncharted territory, and are deeply fascinated by what lies at the edge of our understanding, as the unknown gives your mind an endless puzzle to muse over. Still, different isn't always better, and your uniquely formed perception of the world can lead to a detachment from reality, and a degree of naivete about how the world truly operates. You may become immersed in fictional worlds (whether in video games, books or media), abandoning reality periodically.

Self expression is important to you, and you enjoy giving life and form to your ideas. You are a creator; driven to manifest, in some way, the stories and sensations you form in your mind. Your sense of creativity will often display a mishmash of different styles, or a unique style formed from this conjunction. Often we will find a witty, comedic levity in your work, as your nature is not the most weighted, and your energy carries a youthful playfulness.

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You often experience a level of confusion with new input, as it takes you a while to figure out what to do about evolving situations. In new environments, you may often feel overwhelmed, as if the world is moving too quickly. You don’t always have the best sense of perception, and details slip by your nose due to this lack of ability to accurately absorb information. Spontaneity is not in your nature, and your attention is quickly diverted to familiar patterns and interpretations, rather than alternative speculations.

When confronted with a truly new scenario, you may feel hesitant, lost and will begin to speculate imaginatively or suspiciously into the uncharted. These imaginations can be quite fantastical, often unreliable and fueled by superstitions. Because of this, if at all possible you try to find ways to connect your present to your existing memories and concepts. This can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of ideas, and stagnation in perspective over time.



You feel very uncomfortable questioning the underlying assumptions of specific ideas about life and your personal reality. You have an active resistance to change, and feel unsettled whenever the environment or situation shifts unexpectedly. When faced with a completely original situation or data, you may directly ignore the situation or aim to rationalize the data (through distortion) to fit a preexisting paradigm.

You may have a very narrow and static perspective of life and everyone's place within it. But your reluctance can often lead you into trouble with family and coworkers, as life demands a level of flexibility that is challenging to you.

You are someone who loves experiencing reality in all of its vivid details. From glowing sunsets to the rush of wind on your face, you love vibrance, and the freedom that comes with tactile exploration. You are an animated person and have a magnetic energy that will often pull others to you. You enjoy a variety of stimuli and have an appreciation for heightened sensory experiences. You often act as a catalyst in conversations, and you enjoy instigating daring activities in your friend-group - sometimes being the first to try new things.

You are nimble, agile in your medium, and you never miss a beat. You are in touch with times & fashions, intuitively picking up on what others are into and experimenting with the cutting edge. However, you're by no means restricted by these styles, and can be a trend-setter yourself. You like to refine your sense of style and technique in order to fit your personal expression.

Your experience of memory is cinematic. Real-time experiences call forth previous experiences in all the vividness of their original detail, offering alongside of them an awareness of how to maneuver the present reality. This gives you a sharp athletic or somatic acuity, and a general appreciation for the arts. You like going places that trigger these experiences in you, and have a fondness for certain smells, sounds or tastes. You have a type of nostalgia that is triggered by whatever evokes those sensations back into the present - causing a reliving of the experience -  and less so by specific places or origins.

You can get impatient at times when not enough is happening in your surroundings. And your on-the-edge lifestyle can sometimes get you into trouble, as you occasionally cross the boundary of what's socially acceptable or responsible. Still, you try to find ways to maximize your experiences within your existing situation, wherever that may be.



Your way of taking in the world is nuanced; you're always paying close attention to the subtle atmosphere that gives the present the qualities that it holds. You have a zest for well-choreographed sensations, and enjoy being immersed or consumed by the vivid qualities of life. You like to dabble with new mediums and experiences, often picking up on the craft seamlessly through your ability to quickly adapt your senses to its rhythm.

You take note of where things are in a situation, where they’re likely to flow, and you are ready to be there when they arrive. You like to nurture an understanding between experience and fluid motion. Whether it's through photography, dance, yoga, aromatherapy, or even racing or extreme sports -- you enjoy things that give you "presence" and amplify that one-to-one translation between the physical and mental.

You can't stand a life without flavor. You seek for ways to inspire or evoke a heightened and rich experience, and often design your appearance or your home around that principle. When you feel bravest, you like to live life at maximum throttle, and can be quite the daredevil. You have a latent adrenaline junkie inside of you, which comes out at the right moments or with the right people.

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Your attention to the environment is intermittent, often lacking focus and engagement. From moment to moment, you are guided by a vague, impressionistic sense and you have a tendency to avoid heightened lights, sounds or discomforts. Connecting with your environment can be disorienting and you fit aptly into the Highly Sensetive Person (HSP) spectrum. Navigating reality becomes stressful, and you can become impatient with your own disconnect.

Because of this disconnect, you're often forced to synthesize your situation using the few points of data you collect, leading to a non-situational responses to the present. You may hearken back to more stereotypical explanations of events or thematic assumptions rather than comprehending the situation for its present qualities. You'll have an impulse to ignore what doesn't fit these assumptions and revert to familiar hypotheses.



You don't live in the present moment, and you have to try hard to engage with the reality around you. As you actively avoid new places and situations, limiting your interaction with the outside world (being by default suspicious of change), you come to depend more and more on a world which is largely of your own creation. You have a narrow band of information intake, whether it's a single website, newspaper or small group of people. This can cause a runaway effect of intuition, where more hypotheses are created from previous ones - leading you to form very unique perspectives about life, significance and the universe.

This will cause a strong level of detachment from the world, where you may feel that you exist on a totally different wavelength or reality from those around you. This may cause great difficulties in day-to-day life, as you try to explain your perspective but manifest cryptically. As others lack the sensory context from which your ideas formed, it may be hard to tie your thoughts down to something tangible or relatable to others.

Those who are closest to you may know you to be an “earthy” person. You have an appreciation for the subtle textures in life, the heartfelt investment of your energy, and for the simple joys that can be found every day when we look for them. You put yourself into your work and you have a deep appreciation for what you have come to build and nurture. You have an appreciation for the wisdom of time. Others may see you as an old soul.

If you had to pick, you’d say you’re more of a tortoise than a hare. While others are quicker and flashier, they also burn out faster, while you endure the seasons. You’ve likely seen many people in your life do things too rashly, and are often offering your advice on how people can learn to create the future they desire with a bit of patience and pacing.

But you’re not without your own unique spark. You love a good time, and enjoy being spontaneous and silly, although you feel you can do this best around those who have known you the longest. They bring you back to a younger time, and you can be very creative, goofy and child-like.

You have a nostalgic sense of taste, and have a tendency to feel strong affection for recurring sounds/music, sensations, sceneries and places. You have a few secret hideaways that you keep close to you – and you like to share them with those you love. You may be a lover of the countryside, and have (or have thought about getting) a house away from the business of the city. You like to “set roots” wherever you land. You don’t feel good about being uprooted too often, and prefer to build up a place where you have the freedom to add your personal aesthetic. You may be known for your collection of knickknacks – precious rocks, coins or vintage items – and are a bit of a trivia expert or historian for the topics you enjoy the most.



You understand the world as a series of interlocking puzzle pieces and you like to find those pieces that fill the gaps in your present understanding. You enjoy learning, and are a collector of information, whether that’s in books, textbooks, world history, maps or trivia. You always try to form a larger and more cohesive map of life by adding more layers to your collage. When thoughts come to you, your way of contextualizing them is through noticing their similarities to other things you’ve encountered ("I read a book on a similar topic to that") and you use this intuitive correlating ability as a spring-board for further expansion and elaboration.

Because of this approach to information archiving, you often explain your thoughts to others using anecdotes and stories. Your own firsthand exposure is something you don’t underestimate, and use it as a guide for your navigation through life. Still you remain curious toward reality and enjoy entertaining alternate angles to things. You have an ability to reframe information and organize those same puzzle pieces into a different arrangement, in order to better explain and account for your evolving experience of life.

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You have an impressionistic registration of information and memories. Literal data such as facts, times or places, rarely stay in focus for long. After a moment passes, the conceptual imprint left behind by them soon dissipates into the unconscious, where it takes an ambiguous form. Because of this, multiple repetitions are needed in order for new routines or habits to be formed. Tasks have a tendency to be performed in a rote manner without meaningful engagement or connection to the practice.

As you traverse life, you are guided toward or away from certain objects or places by this visceral sense of familiarity. In other cases, anxieties will be felt toward certain situations and people which may seem irrational, confusing and unfounded.



Your attention to objects is fleeting, as you impulsively leap from one stimulation to the next; often forgetting the previous moment immediately. Some may describe you as inattentive, scatterbrained and undisciplined. You may invest a lot of mental energy toward certain endeavors, but may feel like there's a hole at the bottom of the pan; what goes in soon goes back out.

You have a fear of being tied down too long or too often to certain ideas or places, and you may feel suffocated under the wing of an institution. You are a rebel, and both love and hate being unanchored. On one hand, it gives you the liberty you so desire in the moment, but it also limits your broader career options by disallowing a meaningful pursuit of any direction.

Your experience of the present is always informed and laden by the longstanding trends you see, which interrelate different cultural and social ideas together into one unbroken continuum. You have an unshakeable, recurring sense of how this moment is but one bead in a long chain spanning into the past and future, propelled forward into predetermined outcomes through a global inertia. You have a view of reality that is far-reaching both in its metaphorical scope and sense of time, and this may lead you to feel timeless and disconnected from your culture and immediate surroundings. You feel that appearances can be deceiving and you aim to discover what lies behind the scenes or out of plain sight.

You've often developed a reputation as a "seer" among those who know you best. You can make a lot of conclusions from a few points of data; every impression you experience is felt as arising from a pattern with a wider reach, even though this pattern may only be partially understood to you. The specific moments you come across in life are far less important to you than the thematic realities they represent, and which you archive daily to form a greater and more accurate map of how the world works.

Some may describe you as fatalistic, but you feel that others underestimate the causal weight behind certain forces. You naturally filter down possibilities and direct your focal point towards probability, but this may lead to an overly narrowed and closed perspective at times. You sometimes lack the ability to imagine alternatives to your singular vision, seeing certain things as inevitable. Because of this, whenever the target happens to be outside of your predictive range, your suspicions may seem like unwarranted superstitions or conspiracies to others. This can be especially challenging when you lack the words to communicate the subtle dynamics at work and how they bring about the current landscape, regardless of the specific conclusions that manifest at any given time.



You are someone who likes to perceive reality by tracking the evolution of themes; whether its in your personal social group or on a global level. You hone your perceptive focus around how a few facts can be responsible for wide reaching impacts, and you use the subtle details you see to read into bigger societal effects or into the personal qualities of people.

You enjoy exploring the continuity between the physical and the psychological/spiritual, the personal and the collective, or the societal and the aeonic. You viscerally archive sensory inputs into a mental plot graph and draw a line of best fit to project the trajectories of different platforms. You are rarely without an intuitive suspicion about where a certain field will go, and have a general appreciation of how every field of life affects all others in a holistic way.

You also have a more selected focus on certain topics, where your understanding is strongest. In these fields, your sense of anticipation can be almost prophetic to those around you - while you see it as nothing magical. When things happen as you anticipated, you may remain unimpressed - as the realization of the event already happened for you internally. You have a steady and settled perspective of the world which gives you a level of resistance toward the chaotic and spontaneous. You prefer to be methodical and focused and are selective about your impulsiveness.

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Your experience of the present will be difficult to synthesize within a consistent schema. As associations are brought to mind by the present, they will be incomplete - often connecting things together in muddled or criss-crossed ways. This may cause erroneous projections of outcomes and a general confusion about the future. When you try to rationalize using a broader global context, your ideas will get farther and farther from reality the more you elaborate.

You may find yourself avoiding certain things because of superstition, or refusing to try new experiences because a bad feeling looms over the thought. At times a single bad sensory experience can cause an irrational avoidance of an entire genre or topic.



You live your life with a notable divorce from any past or future context. You have a hard time escaping the immediacy of your experience or slowing down enough to grasp the wide-scale effects which result from this moment. The metaphorical and mysterious are not topics you like to dabble with; preferring to deal only with what you can clearly sense.

Some may see you as being shallow or vain; having little to say outside of your immediate tastes and interests. You compensate for this lack of foresight with quick adaptation to the situation, but this approach will be quite taxing and ultimately imperfect. Your lifestyle will inevitably lead to logistical problems due to a lack of anticipation, causing repeated mistakes and violations of social laws.