conscious means awake and aware — perceiving oneself and one's surroundings, or knowing a particular fact — and, by extension, done with deliberate intent; a conscious awareness is that of 📝Consciousness.
The word appeared around 1600 from Latin conscius, "knowing, aware," from conscire, "to be mutually aware," joining com-, "with," to scire, "to know." Its first English sense was social: to be conscious was to be privy to something, knowing it together with others. By the 1630s it had turned inward, meaning knowing or perceiving within oneself; by the 1650s it meant aware of a fact; and only in the nineteenth century did it settle into its everyday sense of awake, with the mind active.
Today the word carries three main senses: awake rather than asleep or knocked out; 📝awareness of something in particular (conscious of the risk); and intentional (a conscious choice). Its opposite in psychology is 📝unconscious, the part of the mind working outside awareness, with subconscious as a looser popular neighbor. Conscious shares its Latin root with conscience, but the two split long ago: conscience is moral knowledge of right and wrong, while conscious is awareness of any kind. To act 📝consciously is to act from 📝presence rather than habit.
I carry the word past individuals into the organizations I build: in the 📝Six Lifelike Qualities, consciousness of capabilities, interdependencies, and limits is the quality that emerges once the other five mature.