The Pain Consciousness
The daytime waking consciousness is driven by pain and the promise of pleasure.
As Mr. Gurdjieff noted, we tend to see the world topsy-turvy, upside down. As a result, we make our daytime waking consciousness the most important part of our existence and see sleep as nothing more than a period of recuperation. The daytime consciousness is wholly driven by pain and lack; we only have to observe our daytime activities to confirm that pain and lack drive us to maintain the body and seek a partner for mating. So, we busy ourselves with earning money, seeking shelter, acquiring food, finding medical help when needed, and desperately trying to satisfy the sex drive. Our daytime consciousness is a pain consciousness, and when we wake after a period of sleep, a sense of lack makes us seek the things the body wants.
Some might complain that the waking consciousness is not only about pain but that pleasure is also a part of the experience. As Epicurus and Schopenhauer pointed out, pleasure is simply the cessation of pain. It's part of the carrot and stick paradigm that is used by the pain consciousness to get us to do stuff so that the body is well maintained and we make efforts to procreate; very few things are more painful than an unsatisfied sex drive, and few things as pleasurable as its satisfaction.
The second aspect of the pain consciousness, after its use of pain to drive us on, is that it has built a picture of the world that serves survival and procreation only. It has not evolved to give us an accurate picture of reality; that would not serve survival and reproduction. Our pain consciousness has filtered out everything other than those things that promote survival and procreation. And so, we should not expect this consciousness to be useful for establishing objective truths because we do not have an objective view of the world.
The only other consciousness we know is oblivion; in other words, no consciousness. Despite the hand-wringing and furrowed brows of the academics when they speak of "the difficult problem of consciousness," it may well be the case that the pain consciousness we know is a very human thing. But even though it is a pain consciousness, we fear losing it, and the sight of the gates of oblivion usually frightens us. Even so, we willingly, and often with pleasure, embrace oblivion every night because we assume our pain consciousness will return in several hours. And there is this consciousness's grip over us because it fabricates an identity known as "myself," and we fear losing it. This "self" is nature's crowning glory making the pain of possible annihilation even greater, and as a result, human beings strive all the more eagerly to maintain their existence.
One thing is certain: the more we love life, the pain consciousness, the more we will fear death. The secret, then, is not to love life. Jesus Christ stated it very nicely:
He who has known the world has found a corpse, and he who has found a corpse, the world is not worthy of him.