[Don Salmon]

I think you’re right on the mark – in a way.

Two things:

(1) From the viewpoint of most contemplative philosophies, particularly Indian, the reverse is actually the case. That is, it’s not that an outer action shaped our consciousness, but that Consciousness (not human, but Divine) was shifting, and the results showed up in the human mind AND human behavior.

(2) I’ve been saying this on this channel since it’s inception, have rarely been successful in getting it across, but as a clinical psychologist whose main work has been teaching various forms of attention, I would say at least practically speaking, we NEVER use one particular form of attention to the exclusion of another.

Also, the overall state of consciousness is radically different from age to age (as poet Owen Barfield pointed out, the “matter” that physicists study today didn’t really exist 500 years ago!!!)

So the kind of selective, narrow focused attention that was emphasized some 10,000 years ago, is radically different from the same form of attention today. Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart is coming out in August with what promises to be the best book on philosophy of mind ever written: “All Things Are Full of Gods.” Hart points out, as does Jean Gebser and Owen Barfield and Sri Aurobindo and countless others, that in the age of myth which began some 10 thousand years ago, fairies and subtle beings and devas and all kinds of things we think of as superstition were commonly perceived. It was understood that lightning, for example, WAS caused by the Gods, which is NOT in contradiction to the scientific “explanation” (which is really a description and not an explanation at al)

Well, I just wanted to post a few radical suggestions. the world is infinitely more complex and more strange than our modern science and most modern philosophy (at least, the abstract kind we wrongly label “materialist”) even dream of.