Here we wish to delineate the emergence of conscious direction in its initiating role of preceding action, for the purpose of automatic unconscious habit formations which reinforce the internal disposition towards further development. We start with the initial disposition of the individual, in whatever mode of being he has so acquired as constituting his present moment. Regardless of what the content of his consciousness may be, and regardless of his current psychological makeup, it is possible that a thought arises which leads to a bodily action, or to further thoughts, towards the emergence of emotion, or to a shift in his mode of being. This we define as conscious direction – that conscious forethought that appears to be causally related to our subsequent orientation in the world. This conscious direction appears as intuition, conscious will, a thought in which its intentionality is movement.

The movement which is intentioned by conscious direction is towards any aspect of the totality of our consciously experienced content. Sensory inputs of the visual, tactile, or auditory faculties can be directed to proceed the conscious direction, in such a manner that the proceeding perception is in alignment with the content of conscious direction. The thought may arise in conscious experience of “I will to feel the tactile sensation of my right foot”, this may come in the subjective experience of the conceptual linguistic form of thinking using language, as described, or may be a natural inclination within conscious experience, the mere thought that is pre-conceptual. We know it to be conscious direction by the will to movement, the movement is within the gaze of consciousness. The experiential subjective gaze moves from conscious awareness of the conscious directive, towards the apperception of the tactile sensation in the right foot, the integration of the awareness as conditioned by the perceptible faculty which factors out content of stimuli through the structure of our embodied being, becomes represented in the consciously experienced sensation. In this manner we experience the accomplishment of the conscious direction in its actualization.  

In addition to mere consciously directed sensory awareness, and the movement which can manifest in our gaze from mere awareness of present mental content, towards the awareness of mental content which is manifesting in relation to a consciously directive command, there are other movements which can be directed by the conscious will. Like the movement of the gaze of conscious awareness, which, in order to be apprehended mindfully, necessarily requires the implementation of mindfulness during the successive moments proceeding the conscious formulation or realization of the directive, we also can direct movement in any other area that is able to be perceived consciously. This movement that proceeds conscious direction, and the content of the conscious direction, both are necessarily apprehended individually by conscious awareness. Without being consciously aware of the conscious direction, we necessarily are not performing conscious direction, the latter requires the former, yet the former does not require the latter, in order to be manifested in conscious experience or actualized in its application.

While there is a multitude of consciously perceived phenomena which can precede the emergence of further action occurring, here we are only interested in that content which can be acquired by an individual. Meaning – an emotion, or a perception, a memory, can all arise in consciousness in a fashion which directs his mode of being to shift, or which act as causal agents towards the production of additional events in the individual’s life. We are not here interested in external stimulus, only internal stimulus. External stimulus is here wholly out of our “control” in the sense that we cannot direct it within the present moment. What we can direct is the action which proceeds an event occurring which then acts as a stimulus which changes our mode of being or conscious experience. We must here strictly separate that which is internally produced, the act proceeding conscious “will” to instantiate the noema, from the external stimulus, or that which is perceived in embodied form and intuited bodily. We are interested in the experience of that intentioned content produced within the realm of our conscious awareness that subsequently produces action.

The content of conscious direction thus can be anything which we are able to be consciously aware of. Here, conscious awareness is defined as the subjective experience of the content of the present moment, what we are able to experience. While we are always experiencing the present, often the presents relationship to us – us being defined as that transient conscious awareness itself – is that of an unknown known, or something with which we have inherent knowledge of but in the present is unknown, or out of our gaze. Only when the gaze of consciousness is reflexively directed upon itself, when we become aware of our awareness and the content herein of the present moment, does the term I here am calling conscious awareness spring into play. Once we can become aware of our awareness, the ability to recognize conscious content in its relation to being a causal agent in the production of an effectively “produced” content becomes available to us. The use of the word free will here must be eradicated from thought if it so appears to be in relation to the description I am describing. The production of conscious awareness, and of conscious direction, is wholly the product itself of determinate conditions leading to its arising, the ability to do so, like any other mental phenomena, can be improved in its ability to manifest through habitualization, expressed experientially by repeated manifestation into conscious awareness.

As phenomenologically discovered, the intentionality of all consciousness must be recalled. All content of our experience is directed towards something, and the mode of being which we here are referencing as conscious direction is actually the noematic correlate to the underlying noetic content of intentionality. The conscious direction which interests us therefore isn’t the unconscious intentionality behind all human action, it is only the appearing content in experience which occurs before the next moment, it is the conscious causal link to the effect in the moment. While deterministic rules apply to the emergence of conscious direction, this conscious direction is unalterable by the many factors of existence, and being that it is the experience which precedes the next moment, and is all “we” truly have as experiential proof of our ability to choose and alter the world, it would be optimal for us to forge this directional capability to be in line with our values, goals, beliefs, in a way which is psychologically and physically beneficial for us in the next moment, reiterated over time, for us and those we care about. This realm of influence and intention behind the potential theorizing of a beneficial mode of being from which conscious direction can pervade, can be expanded to include as many factors as one wishes. One can look to optimize and alter the content of this conscious direction towards an intention of single-minded consent, toward a singular goal, towards personal psychological wellbeing, towards family relational growth, in effect, anything which stems from the will as worthy of pursuing.

Here a coherent system of values is optimal, so as to not enable our potential for conscious direction in the course of something we value to by hijacked by unconscious and immediate spontaneous pursuits which escape our mindfulness. By entering into a reactionary mode of being which is no longer mindful of the content of consciousness, we let loose the reigns of the psyche to operate in a natural, unmediated, subconsciously directed way. This isn’t negative or positive, as the state of our psyche and the totality of the being which we are, can, prior to the moment described, already be fine-tuned to our values, to a greater or lesser degree. The more time and effort and conscious formulation of rational goals, and habitualizing oneself to the pursuit of such goals, are some of the factors which will enable the spontaneous act of the will in an unmindful state to continue the pursual absent of conscious direction and the mindfulness which is aware of it. The contrary case is what we need to be wary of, in the not fine-tuned, unintegrated, un philosophically formulated valueless mind, the individual is prey to the whims of the will, rather than an orienting north star, and if they have meaningful pursuits which they would rather pursue, the necessary work in the realm of conscious habitualization and conceptualization, and practice, will temper the ability to pursue them.

Wellbeing requires pursuit of what’s meaningful. Pursuit of what’s meaningful requires a value structure. A rational value structure requires philosophical work. Philosophical work requires philosophical knowledge, rational capacity, intellect, effort, time, and experience. The experience of the individual, and his conscious recollection of it, limits the range of content which is available to be philosophically analyzed, thus limited the range of philosophical datum the individual has to work with in the optimization of the value structure (Value Structure Instantiation). Additional knowledge, both logical and experiential, will naturally expand the range of content from which the individual has to work with. The discovery of what is meaningful to one, thus must be uncovered, or created. Uncovered in the sense of an unknown known, as something which provides meaning to the individual’s life but goes unconsciously conceptualized in its relation to the individual, thus is inherent in his being but lacking applied mindfulness to it. Created in the sense of the application of conscious direction towards some pursuit, which creates the conscious conceptualization and attachment of the word “meaning” to that content. We naturally will find that anything our will is directed to has meaning to us, as we are always putting objects, rather physical or mental (idea, thought, experience), in relation to ourselves, and conceptualizing them in ways which makes sense to us. Thus every content of experience has a value and a meaning to us before we become conscious of it containing that meaning.

The very perceptional structure of our embodied being is fine tuned to a value system which has developed over the course of the development of the human genome, and has been modified since birth. This perceptible system necessarily runs in the present moment in its pre-conscious, pre-sentient, pre-directed, form which mediates the content perceived through a type of value structure, the content of which, and the characteristics of which, can be modified and altered by experience, including that which proceeds conscious direction. This perceptible system, I n its current state, is that which limits the range of conscious experience as it is directed to receiving a proceeding mental content in conscious experience, or in the actualization of embodied movement, including physical action, mode of being change, mental content change, and any movement which we are consciously able to be mindful of, or direct our being to be in accordance with. While the very content of conscious experience is mediated by this system, the intuitions, ideas, thoughts, or linguistic commands which arise in conscious awareness under the guise of conscious direction, are themselves the product the same embodied totality of our Being which gives rise to the instantiation not only of the mood, personality, mode of being, which courses through our conscious experience, but also is the manifestation of the content within the framework as well.

We are always acting with intention, out of desire, and the intentional object always holds a place of representation once it is conceptualized in the mental stream of conscious thought. The revelation, uncovering, or discovery of those contents, activity, systems, concepts, which hold the most meaning in relation to each other, in their total relation to us, is what we should seek to describe for our formulation of a value structure. The necessary interconnection between values, their place of priority, the discarding of lesser and the superseding of greater values must be carried out on an individual level, not only would it be useful to find what currently represents one’s values (based on time spent in pursual), but it is necessary for the optimization of conscious direction, our conscious experience, and thus our wellbeing, that we formulate what we would like for our value structure to be. What is an “ideal” value structure we wish to body.

With this “ideal” in mind we can further seek to optimize our time in proportion to this value structure. Thus the famous Jocko Willink maxim; discipline equals freedom. By disciplining our time and effort into those things which we most value, we are effectively exercising the freedom of the will to “choose” what its content is. A well-structured life which reflects the consciously formulated value system is far from being constraining, on the contrary, it constrains the pursuit of values which one doesn’t value, while providing the framework for a life which accurately reflects one’s values, providing the optimal structure which can be recalibrated with experience and further philosophical work towards improvement of the value system. By disciplining oneself to follow the consciously formulated values, we create the possibility of deeper pursual of what is meaningful to us.

With the value structure as our guiding star, conscious direction can be applied toward the content which is in alignment with what is meaningful to us. How are we to be confident in our pursual of such ventures? It is based on the work with which we have put in towards the description of values. If at any point we question our confidence in the path we are following, in the experience directed towards values, if it ever occurs to us that the path isn’t optimal, all we have to work with is the experiential knowledge and the philosophical application towards our conceptualization of values, and their relationship to each other in formulating a meaningful life. If this occurs, more work is to be done.