(Page Update 1/11/25)
For most of human history, conscious performance was not required in the way it is today. Human beings learned, worked, and developed within environments whose demands remained largely within the range of what could be integrated unconsciously. Skill was transmitted through shared practice. Meaning was inherited through culture. Thinking itself was rarely examined because life did not yet require the details.
That historical condition no longer holds. The modern world confronts human beings with levels of complexity, speed, abstraction, and pressure that routinely exceed the resolving power of the earlier forms of intelligence. This shift is not merely social or technological; it is developmental. Conscious performance is now required. If coherence is to be maintained, human intelligence must be used deliberately, not mechanically. To understand why, look beyond common ideas: control of behavior, motivation, and technique. The deeper issue leads us to the levels of intelligence (the levels of thinking) within which one's consciousness operates.
The assumption here is that in earlier eras, performance was embedded in life rather than abstracted from it. The body learned through repetition and participation. Emotional life was shaped by ritual, shared hardship, and cultural norms. Thoughts were mostly guided by tradition and inherited meaning rather than by self-reflection.
This arrangement worked because the challenges of life, though often harsh, were comparatively stable and slow to change. Discursive-inference thinking, the level of intelligence associated with effort, imitation, comparison, and ground-to-consequence reasoning, was largely sufficient. Intelligence at this level expressed itself as competence within established forms. There was little need to step outside one’s own thoughts to examine how it worked, because the environment did not demand that capacity. Communities of practice were therefore not optional structures; they were the default context for human learning. People learned together because life itself unfolded together.
Modernity did not simply increase pressure. It changed the kind of pressure being applied. Performance became measurable, comparable, and scalable. Results became currency. Feedback accelerated. Methods multiplied faster than meaning. Identity slowly fused with outcomes. Pressure moved from episodic to constant.
These changes introduced demands that cannot be resolved at the same level of intelligence that once sustained human functioning. Discursive–inference thinking remains extremely effective for execution, effort, and incremental improvement. But under sustained complexity, it reaches its limit. It cannot reliably coordinate multiple perspectives. It struggles to regulate emotion under continuous evaluation. It confuses exertion with understanding and physical control with coherence.
The result is not failure. It is overperforming at an insufficient level of thinking. People work harder. Coaches refine technique. Systems optimize processes. Improvement continues. But coherence quietly erodes. Meaning fragments. Repulsive emotional pressure accumulates. Learning becomes brittle rather than stabilizing. At this point, unconscious performance is no longer enough. We can even say: It is not right; it is absolutely the wrong approach.
One of the central misunderstandings of modern culture is the treatment of intelligence as a single faculty or a fixed trait. In reality, intelligence expresses itself through distinct levels of thinking, each capable of resolving different kinds of problems . At the mental levels, intelligence manifests through four enduring forms of thinking:
Here, development means the level at which consciousness has centered itself, and from which level intelligence is naturally employable. (1) These are not stages one outgrows. (2) Once developed, they remain available. (3) Modern environments increasingly require access to the higher levels of this spectrum, not occasionally, but routinely. (4) The four levels of mental thinking serve as an instrument of understanding that coherence is perceived rather than constructed.
Note: Beyond the mental levels lies causal–intuitive intelligence, a fundamentally different mode of knowing in which ideas are apprehended directly rather than inferred.
To facilitate understanding of human development, I employed the energy aspect of existence, expressed as the four resolving forces. Each corresponds to a precise, definitive level of intelligence.
The modern world increasingly presents problems that cannot be resolved from the first two levels alone. When consciousness remains centered there, development stalls, not because of deficiency, but because one's development has not yet re-centered itself in a higher intelligence.
Conscious performance does not mean constant self-monitoring or effortful control. Conscious performance emerges naturally once intelligence has matured and stabilized through development.
Learning how to think is the first threshold. It marks the moment when the mental dimension begins to govern the emotional dimension, allowing intelligence to examine its own contents, differentiate perception from reaction, and convert friction into feedback. This shift is not stylistic or philosophical. It is architectural. It allows consciousness to operate as a dependable, self-activated, integrated intelligence. Once this threshold is crossed, conscious performance is no longer vigilance. It is maturity.
Much of what passes for thinking in daily life remains reactive to stimulus-response thoughts. Emotion drives interpretation. Identity fuses with opinion. Disagreement feels threatening. Decisions are made quickly but without coherence across time. At the collective level, this manifests as polarization, institutional rigidity, and the persistence of problems that no amount of information seems to resolve. The issue is not ignorance. It is a mismatch between the level of intelligence being employed and the complexity being faced. Under these conditions, intelligence must be used consciously: not forced, not strained, but applied from the appropriate level.
No individual can reliably make the developmental shifts discussed above on their own under modern pressures. And why collaborative coaching communities of practice re-emerge, not as innovations, but as ancient human structures that are now required to operate at higher levels of intelligence. As such, communities distribute perception, slow interpretation, and restore inquiry. They allow intelligence to mature through shared reflection rather than isolated effort. Their purpose is not agreement, but coherence.
Conscious performance is now required, not because people are weak, distracted, or unmotivated. The necessity is that humanity has reached a developmental threshold where the problems we face today far exceed the level of intelligence at which most individuals still operate by default. Learning how to think is the first step. Conscious performance is its natural expression. Together, they mark the next phase of human development, not as an ideal, but as a necessity. This is not a crisis. It is an invitation.
See More: The First Step: Learning How to Think