Now let us study each level of consciousness. As you read, keep checking in with yourself. This page contains vital information. Remember that your attention and experience together are the most effective things you can do for your recovery, even as you read this and whatever it brings up for you.
Dip your attention finger into your experience’s river. Let what it is be. You’ve never had a life like this and never will. This time in your life is special and okay as it is.
Higher Consciousness Level 1: Life Happens To You
You may have spent much of your life, like most others, believing that life happens to you. Life is enormous, and if you’re honest, you never know what will happen next. You wake up one day with a glad heart and the following day with a heavy heart. Bosses dismiss you, illness incapacitates you, people you love reject you, and death is always around the corner.
So it’s reasonable that being unconscious makes you feel like a victim of life. When you believe life is happening to you, you typically see it as a danger.
So you stay stuck in your thoughts, immersed in your storyteller, who opposes, reacts, defends, and explains. It does anything but be receptive to life right now.
The 2nd Level of Higher Consciousness: Life Happens By You!
When this sense of powerlessness becomes unbearable, you evolve into the notion that life happens to you. You feel you can manage life rather than be a victim. It is possible to feel powerful at this level of consciousness. It’s a necessary step out of the first stage of higher consciousness, but some become stuck. Men try to control women. People are controlled by religion. Countries try to rule others. Most people want to control those who are different (gays, different skin colors, dissimilar religions). We try to govern ourselves most of all, striving to become what we think we should be.
This phase of greater consciousness takes a lot of work. The storyteller believes that good must be made to happen. So it loves to establish objectives and feels guilty if it doesn’t achieve them (think New Year’s resolutions!) The storyteller becomes the intention. Goals are where you utilize your intellect to make things happen. With intent, you operate with feelings. This isn’t awful or wrong. The journey to awakening requires these instruments, and they can work. What if you realize that entering into life will offer you what you most genuinely desire?
Controlling your reality is a newer form of control. The storyteller says all I have to do is think the correct thoughts to make my life what I want it to be. The biggest issue is that it doesn’t work long-term. It’s a delusion. Life is like a cork in the ocean, thinking it can control the tides. Yes, it affects the flow of water where it is, but it cannot affect the ocean’s other tremendous forces.
To remain in this higher consciousness phase is to be cut off from life’s creative flow. You are identified with your conceptual world, seeking to create a reality rather than showing up for it.
You may perceive the drawbacks of this degree of consciousness after a while. First, you start to fear your thoughts: “I shouldn’t think like this because I’ll manifest it in my life.” Second, it can cause embarrassment because when it doesn’t function as promised in the books, you assume you didn’t do it correctly or well enough. Carolyn Myss has developed into a teacher who teaches that you can materialize anything you want by thinking appropriately. In the 1990s, she asked 600 people in Seattle to raise their hands if they had created their desired world. No one did!
3rd Level of Higher Consciousness:
All your responding and regulating hasn’t delivered you the ease and delight you crave. Instead of being a victim to your life and trying to control it, you begin to realize that life is something to be listened to and opened up to. This is where you begin to evolve into greater consciousness, where life happens to you.
At this level of consciousness, you begin to notice that rather than experiencing life, you mostly think about it, seeing only your thoughts! When you think about life, you cease experiencing it as it is. To put it another way, we don’t see things as they are. We see them. Instead of perceiving what it is, you cast spells on yourself and others. Wan na see a loved one’s face? If you’re honest, it’s been a long time.
In this higher consciousness phase, you also comprehend that your sorrow is not caused by your life events. Instead, it comes from your observations. It’s inside you! You can survive a gray day. Then you’ll be miserable again. Because the day is gray, you say, not the day itself.
This is the point at which you begin to experience the you-turn.You lose interest in being a victim of your life or even trying to change it. You know that the healing you need comes from inside. Knowing the spells that cause your pain allows you to break free and return to life.
The 4th Level of Higher Consciousness:
The more you observe rather than react and control, the more you realize that your life is for you. Instead of life being something you must control, you realize there are no average times. And you’re one step closer to enlightenment.
There are no accidents in life. Intelligently, it places you in situations where you need to see and unhook from the spells that keep you out of its flow. Whatever happens in your life, you ultimately realize that life has a plan.
Rather than shaping life into what you want it to be, you learn to show up for life exactly as it is. Yes, grief, loss, and death are part of life. But fighting life’s sorrows only causes suffering, and resistance always causes more suffering than direct pain. Instead of closing around and avoiding your experiences, which just thickens your cloud bank of struggle, you direct your attention to them.
Curiosity about what is occurring right now is tremendous! Everything becomes looser when you respond rather than react to what is going on inside you. Remember that your inherent state is aliveness. Your vitality and excitement wane while trapped in spells. The trapped energy flows freely when the spells receive the light of your attentiveness. Not to mention, life is setup to raise you up and release what has been stifled so you can live!
The 5th Level of Higher Consciousness:
The higher consciousness phase shows you that there is no such thing as an ordinary time in your life and that life is always communicating to you. By allowing life to go through you and being intrigued by what you are feeling, you progress into a higher level of consciousness. This is when you know life is reliable. It is not always likable, but it is competent.
Presume you fully trust life. You wake up every morning full of adventure. Soothe your gut, open your mind and heart. Even while confronting great problems, you remain open to life rather than resisting it. If you’re trapped in a reaction, give it the attention it needs to let go.
The vivid flow of energy that is life can now freely flow through you, bringing forth the joy and aliveness you so truly desire. Unexpected creativity emerges, enriching you and everyone you meet with the wisdom of the meadow of life.
The 6th level of higher consciousness:
That sixth level of consciousness where you see that life is you is revealed to you as you stand with life, allowing it to move through you rather than responding to or dominating it. You are no longer distinct. Instead, you re-enter the creative flow of life, seeing that everything is you—rocks, people, clouds, molecules, and ladybugs. The Life! Eckhart Tolle declared, “You are not in the universe; you are the universe.” In the end, you are a focal point where the cosmos is becoming aware of itself. What a wonder. “
It’s fine. Come in.
The first two phases of higher consciousness are about fixing, changing, resisting, and controlling life (life is happening to you and by you). This is the universe of your storyteller, who doesn’t want what is (can’t open to life) and craves what isn’t (I can have what I want if I just think right). Because neither phase is about showing up for the creative river of life, there is a curtain between you and the live experience of life.
The following two stages of greater consciousness are about being intrigued rather than rejecting or controlling. You realize that the storyteller inside you is what differentiates you from life. An interest in what is happening now rather than a desire to alter it. The more you are here for life, the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, the more you realize that life knows what it is doing and it is for you.
In the latter two stages of greater consciousness, the meadow calls Less stress, greater flow, more delight as life moves through you. As your cloud bank evaporates, you realize you are the meadow! You are life!