When I look back on my life in my mid-fifties, after 15 years of active self-reflection, I realize that for my first 41 years I was living a relatively unconscious life. Although I was doing the best I knew how, and was married with two young children, I had never taken the time to ask myself introspective questions such as “who am I?”, “why am I here?” or “what’s most important to me?”, the answers to which would have helped me be far more conscious in the way I created my life.
When we ask these questions, we awaken within us a hidden source of creative power that has been waiting for us to become dissatisfied with the outwardly focused life that we have been experienced until that moment. From birth, we have been internalizing the data streaming into our brain through our five physical senses. Over time, our brain has cross-referenced this data, gradually molding perceptions into understandings, and into a filtered worldview that we believe to be truth. However, the data to which we’ve been exposed has been shaped by the guidance of others who each have their own unique filters, understandings and truth, much of which won’t necessarily reconcile with those of our other influencers.
When we start questioning what we have believed to be truth, and the assumptions upon which these truths have been built, we are highly likely to discover that what we’ve considered to be truth has just been perception, and that virtually all of these perceptions have been formed relative to our other perceptions, and often others’ perceptions, so cannot be considered truth at all. For most of us, our experience of reality is actually based on a perceptual house of cards, being perceptions of data that turn out to be nothing more than reflections of what we have consciously (through beliefs) and unconsciously (through neural association) constructed into our worldview.
Our brain and nervous system are really a bio-computer that is a small node within the network some call Universal mind. When our programming changes, our experience changes to reflect that, much like The Matrix, except we are the generators of our experience rather than some outside controller. In order to start consciously controlling our life, we need to ask ourselves existential questions, including those raised in the opening paragraph of this article.
When we do that, we acknowledge that there is a consciousness behind our programming, and start the process of bringing from the unconscious into conscious awareness what we have programmed, or allowed to be programmed, into our powerful brain. It is like we have given this deeper consciousness permission to emerge and guide us out of the thick forest that is our ego mind. Over time we will notice our desires changing, new gifting emerging and sometimes unexpected passions arising that come from our true self rather than the false self of the ego.
In my own case, this involved becoming instantly connected with a source of guidance that helped me to co-create programs and processes that now help our clients compress what is otherwise a decades-long process of awakening into less than a year. This emergence from ego consciousness is an awakening to who we are and why we’re here, each of us with a unique and magnificent purpose, through which we grow and help others to grow as we share our gifting with them.
To live consciously is to fulfill our highest potential, which is a truly joyful, loving and purposeful life.
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