Three Levels of Awareness
A Closer Look at the Three Levels of Awareness
To deepen your understanding of the three levels of awareness, the following analogy may be useful: Imagine that you’re walking in a dark room with only the small flame of a candle to light your way. You keep stumbling and bumping into furniture and other objects that you perceive as obstacles. You feel isolated and separated from the world around you (even though you are always inextricably connected to the universe. This is a state of contracted awareness.
Now imagine that you’re still in the same dark room but someone has given you a flashlight. With more illumination, you can move around freely without the fear of tripping or hurting yourself. You can also see that everything that seemed like an obstacle has a clear purpose. You can beam your light around and see that there is a couch you can stretch out on, a shelf filled with wonderful books, and a stereo for listening to music. What appeared to be threats or barriers are actually opportunities. You feel connected to the web of relationships that link everyone and everything. This is a state of expanded awareness.
Now once again imagine that you’re still in the same room but now all of the walls, including the floor and ceiling, are made of transparent glass and the room is flooded with sunlight. When you look outside you see that the whole world is your playground. This is the state of pure awareness. There are no problems and therefore no need for solutions. You are the creative, evolutionary impulse of the universe. You feel the wholeness and oneness of life. You are in flow and so you play.
To summarize, problems arise in contracted awareness. Solutions emerge automatically in expanded awareness. When you have pure awareness – awareness without conceptual boundaries – then you live in pure creativity. That is the basis of spiritual solutions, and you can apply these principles whether you want to improve the quality of your relationships, cultivate greater wellbeing, or enjoy more material success, or experience insight, intuition, imagination, inspiration, higher consciousness, and creativity.
How to Awaken Your Deeper Awareness
Look at your hidden assumptions and beliefs.
Take responsibility for your own feelings. Don’t blame or project.
Ask for answers to come from every direction.
Trust that the solution is there, waiting to unfold.
Be curious and follow your hunches and intuition.
Be willing to step into the unknown, for that is where all the answers lie.
Accept that everyone inhabits his or her own reality bubble. Become aware of the reality that other people are coming from.
Approach every day as if it’s a new world, because it is.
When you follow these steps, letting go of conditioned beliefs and ingrained behavior patterns, the possibility of finding new answers expands. You start to see that all of your struggles and frustrations have kept you from joining the flow of evolution, and you begin to let go. You experience peace in your mind and heart and are able to move through life with grace and ease.
