My Opinion On Reaching Higher Levels of Consciousness
A conversation on consciousness.
Earlier today, an acquaintance of mine hit me up and we had an interesting conversation. I love to talk about the nature of consciousness and our human experience in general, so it was awesome getting asked my opinion on these matters. I thought the resulting conversation was worth sharing, so I’m sharing it :)
His words are in italics, mine are regular. I cut out some irrelevant sentences. Other than that, the only words added are those in bold, because I wanted to provide context. It’s a text convo, so there are typos, but in my opinion, you can see exactly what was meant so I left them.
Keith what’s happening bro, I wanted to ask you your option on how a person achieve a higher level of consciousness
Nun much man, chilling really. And I just wrote a bunch of stuff that came to mind. It’s something I could talk about all day so it’s kind of wordy, but this what I thought of off the top of my head.
In no particular order,
Realizing life is a collaboration, not a competition.
Having a meditation practice and getting to know yourself and your nervous system. Learning how to become mindful of your breath and the present moment, how you feel in the present moment. Is your mind tense, are your muscles tense, etc.
Diet and exercise. Our bodies operate better and we are more able to pick up on spiritual/energetic nuances when our body is clean, healthy, and not fighting off toxins constantly from poor diet and not exercising.
Realize you don’t find yourself, you create yourself because we have choice and free will. Ask yourself who do you want to be, what are your values, what would the best version of yourself do? And do it as often as possible and when you don’t do it, don’t beat yourself up, but accept it and resolve to do your best to not repeat the mistake. But there aren’t really any mistakes as long as you learn from it. No losses, only lessons.
Faith, not in a religious sense but in the sense you don’t question life and what happens. Faith good things will happen if you plant the right seeds and water them. Don’t beat yourself up over perceived mistakes because there are no lessons without them. Trust and have faith others are doing their best with their current level of consciousness and their unbeneficial actions are due to ignorance, so condemn the ignorance but have faith in people to choose better if informed.
Faith that if you control what you can control, and don’t seek to do the impossible by attempting to control life, things will work out as meant to.
Non attachment. Not being attached to having a particular view, or seeing your ideas be seen as right. Not being attached to how you perceive others to judge you, because that is their task and not your own. Not being attached to receiving particular results because that’s outside our control, there’s many factors that affect our lives.
Attachment is the root of all suffering, to be attached to worldly ideas and material objects is to guarantee suffering, because when taken away you will feel negatively about it.
Curiosity. First off, about yourself. Because even doing your best to practice non attachment, inevitably you’ll still feel down and have negative feelings about certain situations. Know this doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you but that you are human and accept that. Then be curious about your human experience. Why do you feel that way? Where did it come from? How can you turn that suffering into insight, into something you can learn from so you can either avoid it in the future or bounce back faster. Our feelings are information and being curious about them, studying them can give us great insight into ourselves on a deep level and life is a personal journey so you should know the most about yourself in the end.
Then curiosity about others and their points of views, why they feel the way they feel, believe what they believe. Not being attached to your own opinion being accepted by others and then being willing to change if you hear something that makes sense. And not trying to change others because that’s outside your control, only people can change themselves. Just like only you can change yourself. You sharing your opinion might be the catalyst for them choosing to change themselves, but it was not your doing but theirs.
Seeking out different points of view and not being afraid of being “wrong”. Exposing yourself to different philosophy and figuring out what works and makes sense to you, then working with that until you find something that makes more sense.
Also, being able to relax, stay calm, and de-stress yourself. There’s no reaching higher consciousness in a state of tenseness and stress in my opinion. You can’t think straight when stressed really, so how can someone get to know themselves on a deep level when stress doesn’t allow them to think deeply or calm themselves?
Finding out what tensions and stress are you creating from your perspective, releasing those tensions best you can, then figuring out where you hold tension because how you were brought up and ignorance/dysfunctional thought patterns that resulted from your childhood environment.
It’s about finding out, in YOUR opinion, why you are the way you are, and then figuring out who you want to be and how must you act and conduct yourself to be that person. It’s a personal journey and you must be in tune with your own feelings so you’ll know the truth when you arrive at it. No one can tell you what it will be for you
A higher level of consciousness requires a deeper level of awareness and it starts with us personally. Until you’re aware of yourself deeply, it’s easy to get caught up in worldly shit and not have proper physical and emotional boundaries. You have to know where you end and the world/society begins
The crazy part about it is I see people trying to sell shit to make you achieve a high consciousness but people fail realize in my option that it comes from a healthy lifestyle and mindset. Facts! Because lately my feeling of living in the matrix is getting stronger bro
I feel the same way about health being huge part of it. We are meant to be in a higher level of consciousness naturally as human beings. When we ingest bs from our environment, in the form of negative food, negative energy, without having a healthy perspective to put it in proper context, we lose our natural connections. Also, when we try to judge the natural world humans did not create, rather than observe and accept it. How can we judge a life we didn’t create? I don’t think humans have the ability, wisdom, or knowledge to do that.
We definitely in the matrix in a sense lol cause society kind of operates like a prison for most people’s consciousness because it shuns creativity and freedom. The fear of not being accepted keeps people from believing their own self worth so they try to fit in, even when it feels off..
Nah for real though and the crazy part about it is that you can feel that negative energy weight on your body. The fact that you feel it’s not right but you do it anyway dulls your natural instincts as a human being. So in the future when something tries to connect to your path you miss it every time
Also they keep shit going in rotation all the time, to keep your mind busy with the bullshit and do sneaky shit behind closed doors. I feel like I can see threw that type of shit now more than I ever have. Like that Titanic shit
Yeah we only got so much energy, that’s why I feel like getting off social media freed me up to not only be more positive but also to focus more on building what I want to see in the world or how I show up in the world.
Focused energy is the most powerful and a lot of stuff we do just scatters our energy and attention, which dilutes the power of it.
You’re right because all you see when you go out is people on their phones but not really having fun or enjoying nature or life period! It really amazed me to see people look at you because you’re not doing what everyone else is doing
Lol I be going to the museum and that shit be blowing me Lolol like you not even looking at the art, being present with it, just taking pictures of it Lolol
Just to show people you were at the museum and doing something “cool” and different. But you don’t have to show people you’re different, you just are and they can’t help but notice
You just gotta do you fr. It’s a book called “the courage to be disliked” that’s the 🌊 fr. Great read.
But doing your own thing and not worrying about being judged is such a foreign concept to most because we are governed by these ideas of what’s “right” and “wrong”, ideas based on a constantly changing society. It’s tough because we are taught to be attached to receiving outside validation, but freeing yourself from that is huge and probably a life long journey for a lot of people.