While raising your consciousness can certainly enhance your spiritual development, this isn’t really a spiritual issue at its core. It’s really about hardcore mental development.
What does it mean to become more conscious? I have found that it is defined as the progressive realization of conscious mastery over your mind. This includes all of the following:
- making careful, intelligent, and deliberate decisions
- maintaining a positive emotional state regardless of circumstances
- developing empowering beliefs while purging disempowering ones
- understanding your own thought processes, emotions, and behaviors
- staying focused on what’s most important while tuning out distractions
- building an accurate and effective model of reality
People whose conscious minds remain underdeveloped often suffer from cluttered and unfocused thinking. Needless worries, trivial distractions, inaccurate observations, false beliefs, and negative emotions run rampant through their thoughts, and most of the time they aren’t even aware of it. It’s like being stuck in a mental fog. When you talk to such people, you can sense they aren’t fully there. The lights are on, but no one’s home. Ask them an important question like, “What overall purpose have you chosen for your life?” and you’ll likely get a blank stare in response. Because they don’t really have control of their minds, they live reactively instead of proactively. Such people are virtually powerless. They essentially do what they’re told and try to stay out of trouble, mistakenly assuming this condition is the best they can expect of themselves.
In contrast highly conscious people own their minds. Their thinking is clear and focused, and they select and direct their thoughts deliberately. They retain conscious control over their emotions, and they don’t easily succumb to distractions. When you talk to such people, you can detect depth and clarity. Ask them, “What’s the purpose of your life?” and you’ll likely get an intelligent and thoughtful response. These people live proactively and are emotionally resilient, rising above their circumstances instead of being victimized by them. They possess an inner strength that is undeniable. They exhibit both courage and compassion, and they know that this level of being is how humans were truly meant to live.
The difference between these two groups is that the first group has settled for the default mental operating system installed by their upbringing and social conditioning. Call it Human OS 1.0. They accepted whatever programming they initially received. The second group, however, challenges themselves to continuously improve upon that initial programming, embarking on a lifelong quest to design a more intelligent mental operating system. And they succeed. So while group one is stuck with a shabby and outdated mental OS, group two continues to upgrade its version, enjoying compounding benefits year after year. It doesn’t matter whether they’re currently using Human OS 1.1 or Human OS 7.0 — it’s the process of frequent upgrading that matters most, not the particular version number being used.
For more reading on this topic follow these links.
10 Steps for Creating a More Conscious Life
10 Ways to Become More Conscious
