As I’ve written a lot about consciousness I’m often asked what I mean by it. Thus the following is an attempt to elucidate the nature of consciousness as I see it.
The simple definition from Merriam-Webster is, “the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself.” This is the presumed meaning for most, that if we are becoming more conscious then we are becoming more aware of things within ourselves. But how does one do that? And how is it that there are things within us that we were previously unaware of that we are now aware of?
When we were born our brains were undeveloped. All we knew was hot, cold, comfort, discomfort, hungry, wet, need to be held, need to sleep, and so on. And the only method we had of communication was to cry when we needed something. It’s instinctual. There was no cognitive understanding of these things, crying was just a reflex to a need.
Over time our brains developed, and we expanded our sense of the world around us. You could say that we became more conscious. Eventually we learned language and how to speak. With more words we became aware of more states of being. But does the newborn baby contemplate its existence? Did we as infants consider how we felt when we cried and no one responded, or when our diaper was changed that it felt too rough, or when we were held while sensing the emotions of the one who held us. Perhaps we sensed our parent’s anxiety or stress and it affected us. But did we consider it? Most likely not.
Science has shown us that the subconscious mind records at least one million times more information than the conscious mind. Which is why through hypnosis we can recover memories, even the license plate of a car speeding away from the scene of a crime. Bruce Lipton has written extensively about the power of the subconscious and its nature. He describes the subconscious mind as a software system operating in the background, always running even though we’re unaware of it.
Emotional healing work is largely a process of dredging things up from the subconscious mind to examine and heal them. For example, as a child I endured numerous forms of abuse, all culminating in one overarching belief programmed into my subconscious mind that I’m fundamentally flawed and unworthy. Imagine if we walked through life constantly repeating a mantra that we’re not good enough and interpreted everything we do through such a lens. Imagine how that would affect literally everything in our lives.
And yet, this is what the subconscious mind does. For me it’s been I am flawed and unworthy. For you it may be something else. For each person it’s unique. But the consistent thread is that at any point in our precognitive lives in which we were loved unwholesomely or shamed for a mistake or treated unkindly or unfairly, or even worse things such as involving violence or sexual abuse, then those experiences are added to our subconscious programming which is still running like a computer operating system in the background — unless or until we access it and heal from it.
Once we do, some amount of what was previously unconscious becomes conscious, and we become more conscious. Meaning that we become more aware of things that we were previously unaware of.
In Bruce Lipton’s landmark book The Biology of Belief he says that our subconscious minds are being programmed in the first seven years of life. That when we’re born there is a clean slate, and while our conscious minds are undeveloped our subconscious minds are recording literally everything. And since every parent makes mistakes, everyone receives some amount of negative programming. Some more than others. In my case there was a ton of negative programming.
Thus the goal of personal growth and healing is to bring the unconscious into the light of conscious awareness. But there’s a huge challenge in that. For one, it feels terrible, because it requires that we relive experiences so we can metabolize the emotions associated with them and transmute the negative belief. What we couldn’t metabolize as a child we can as an adult, but after a lifetime of suppression we become almost hardwired to keep those unpleasant emotions safely tucked away in the subconscious mind.
But . . .
And there is a big but. The subconscious mind is there to serve us. It recorded those unpleasant or even traumatic occurrences in the subconscious mind and tucked them away for safe keeping precisely because we were unable to process them as a child. But then the subconscious mind seeks to serve them up into our conscious awareness once we reach adulthood so that we can eventually process and release the emotion.
The graphic below is a depiction of how it works. But it’s not to scale. If it were, given that the subconscious mind comprises at least one million times more recorded thought, emotion, and experiences, the band representing the conscious mind would be microscopically thin in comparison. I also feel the Essence/God Self is likely of infinite dimension as compared to the subconscious mind. So again, not to scale, but designed to provide a way of visualizing how the three elements of self are layered and how they interact.
The upward arrows indicate how the subconscious mind is constantly seeking to serve suppressed emotion up into our conscious awareness for the purpose of metabolizing and healing it. We feel this in many ways: anxiety, depression, pain, fear, anger, resentment, or the subtle “edge” as many refer to it.
Constantly working to suppress the emotion seeking to surface from the subconscious mind is achieved by solidifying the barrier between the two, or at least making it barely permeable. Solidifying the barrier can be achieved through addiction, distraction or numbing out. Numbing was one way I kept the barrier solid for many years, and then later through several forms of addiction. This is how we remain semi-conscious, or even unconscious.
But if we build an intention to heal and grow and engage in a spiritual practice that enables and facilitates the surfacing of buried emotion, the barrier between the subconscious and conscious minds become more permeable, thus allowing more to surface from the subconscious mind. And as we do, the conscious mind becomes more conscious. Thus the conscious mind band in the graphic below is a little larger than the prior graphic, and the barrier between the two indicates some level of permeability.
This is how we become more conscious. In spiritual circles we might say we are becoming conscious, or we are waking up, or we’ve woken up. But the truth of it is, it’s a continuum. We can say we are in a state of waking or becoming more conscious. Or we can say about another that this person is becoming more conscious, but we can’t really say this person is conscious, because we are all conscious to some measure.
Becoming more conscious means we allow for greater permeability between the subconscious and the conscious. This is a courageous journey because it means we are willing to face into literally everything that comes up. Many times this feels like crap. But as we feel the muck of it and process through it, the muck transmutes into happiness and even joy.
But then as we process through a level of muck from the subconscious, it won’t take much time before there is more that the subconscious will seek to serve up into our conscious awareness, and again we feel the muck, metabolize it, transmute it, and move through it.
It is seemingly never ending, but after some time of it (years even, maybe decades) we reach a place of feeling incredibly light and joyous. This is the time when the Essence/God Self will begin to emerge into our conscious awareness. This is the place the Navajo refer to as “walking in beauty” or in Hindu tradition they call it “Nirvana.” This is the beginning stage of enlightenment, when we begin to feel the truth of who we are, not just conceptualize it.
Thus the third graphic below indicates an even wider band for the conscious self, with an even more permeable barrier between the conscious and subconscious, and now we perceive the upward push from the God Self/Essence, as indicated by the arrows in this band.
Feeling the Essence/God Self is the next step in the process (that takes years or decades to reach). But it’s there in all of us. We just have to move through levels of stored trauma and negative and self-defeating belief systems before we’ve cleared the way for a much higher level of consciousness to emerge. But it will emerge if we do the hard work of clearing our subconscious minds.
Let’s keep in mind that words are incredibly limiting. So when I say “higher level of consciousness” I’m not referring to a place that we arrive at where we can claim a level of accomplishment, but rather another level of awakening or becoming. It’s a continuum of unfoldment, not a destination. The deeper levels are infinite. There is no end to how far we can go.
This is the nature of consciousness.
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