The sustained exercise, task and goal of raising awareness is a fundamental pillar of transforming.
Even if you were not aiming to transform from old self to new self, and you wanted to just raise your awareness , the benefits of successfully doing so are incredible. Just on its own this one aspect of the transformation will positively change an individual’s life.
In this article, I am going to seek to do something which is, frankly, impossible. That is to explain the detailed aspects of raising awareness, and the experience it produces.
That’s because the experience is beyond description, and needs to be experienced, not understood.
Understanding it, without experiencing it, can – ironically – be limiting or misleading.
However, there are parts to this which we need to be able to explain in some form of words to try and motivate individuals towards exploring this.
So, all that follows is my best effort to describe the indescribable.
The first thing to say is we use the term ‘raising awareness’ to imply that the work we are doing is awakening and increasing awareness from a low level to a high level.
Each of us is a form, a physical identity, a home sapiens, a human, with a mind and a body. So, if we take the typical position of seeing ourselves as this type of self, we do so in this formed way.
Furthermore, with our mind, we have a very close relationship between our thoughts and our identity, so we tend to consider ourselves as our thoughts. In physical forms, we think of ourselves as something related to our physical manifestation (looks, size, shape etc.) and in other ways we form perceptions of ourselves based on what others think of us, how they treat us, what our name is, where we work and so on. We have this complex picture of ourselves and our identity based on our thoughts, emotions, mind and body, and the state of environment, the world we navigate through and that immediately surrounds us. We describe our inner world as our personal inner environment, and the outer world as our personal outer – or external – environment.
Crucially, we also hold onto a narrative of who we are, based on our past. Rarely – if ever – do we consider killing this past, not realising that this is even an option. This may sound harsh as you may have so many aspects of your past that you are attached to, enjoy remembering, and are proud of. That’s not the point, the attachment to the past – good or bad – is a restriction on our ability to consider that we may – in the present moment – transform to something new.
So, detaching from our past narrative is merely a way of becoming present, something new that is not guided by the past narrative. That doesn’t mean we lose memory of the past, we simply leave it in the past, focusing instead on the present moment.
We also have, unbeknown to most of us, a highly influential subconscious or unconscious aspect to us. This is shaped by our subconscious mind and unconscious actions and behaviours. This includes our functional systems, which automate so much of our lives. For example, our breathing and body temperature. Our subconscious involves our deep memory and this houses incredible depth, and influences, maybe controls entirely, our belief system and our particular nature i.e. how we tend to react, act, behave and view the world. It is important to be aware – or become aware – that this is unconscious, so we have to be become attuned to this. Inherently understanding our deepest identity is in fact not within our conscious realm.
All of the above are powerful forces, of one sort or another, that make us what we are.
However, none of that is the essence of who or what we truly are.
That essence is our pure consciousness, which is the awareness. It is through this awareness that our experience comes. Take away consciousness and we lose awareness, we lose the sense of experience. For example, remove this and your presence is removed, as is your sense of the present moment.
Conversely, if we remove thoughts, we retain our presence and we retain our sense of the present moment.
If we chop off our leg, we retain presence, we retain our sense of the present moment.
There are multiple ways of viewing this to try and understand it better, and I will run through a few of these for you, but ultimately there is only one way of getting to know this properly, and that is through experiencing it, you cannot read it, analyse it, or rationalise it, it is completely impossible to experience this experience, without experiencing it!
So, we can view ourselves as our identity as formed by our name and our memory. Or we can see ourselves in light of our environment, or our movement throughout that environment. Or as a physical entity. We can perceive things as material and physical, and ourselves as a part of this. We can perceive ourselves as the form of our thoughts and emotions, including our feelings.
These various ways of experiencing ourselves and the world around us, create projections or perceptions which we then turn into reality.
Our true essence remains undimmed and unaffected by this. However, our experience of our essence does become subjected to it, in terms of how our state of being is. In other words, we are aware (self-aware as well) and these projections/perceptions lay on top of our awareness and our awareness notices this and lets it run.
So, if we think of this as energy and energy as information, the complete entity that is us, awareness/form/identity/physical and all, our energy is focused into the areas of projection and perception.
This means our pure awareness is allowed to rest beneath this and is noticing this hive of activity. This is what we describe as low-level awareness, because it is as if we have preferred the physical reality over the formless reality. We are looking away from our awareness, not towards it.
The formless reality is the state of pure awareness, which is the true essence of being.
The exercise that works best here is one where we turn our awareness onto our awareness, an unfamiliar – and not particularly easy – thing to do.
If we conduct this exercise successfully we create the effect of moving our energy into a state of awareness, which is another way of saying we raise our awareness.
The exercise is a meditation exercise, focused around placing our attention on our state of existing, i.e. that we are existence.
We turn our attention onto itself, become more and more aware of being aware, with nothing else interfering.
As we do so we realise that without our existence, there is no existence. So without us being aware, nothing exists.
We have to be aware for anything to exist. Without our noticing, witnessing, observation or experience of being there is nothing.
So, if you are unaware, because you are anaesthetised or unborn or dead, i.e. unconscious – then there is nothing that exists.
This produces a ‘knowing’ that your existence via your awareness is all existence. In all forms. Hence, the experience of oneness that develops.
That existence only exists in the present moment, through your presence.
Your awareness at its essence, when left in its purest form, so stripped of all interference from anything else, such as thoughts or outside environmental disturbances, rests as existence, and in this resting state is bliss and serenity.
The exercise of turning our attention to our inherent awareness (or existence) is a powerful experience in many ways, and as we practice this exercise, getting better and better at it, so we slowly change our state of being towards heightened awareness.
This means, over time, we carry the effects of this experience out of the meditation into our daily life and activities.
The new type of energy we experience generates a sense of allowing and acceptance, which means we let life unfold. It also helps us to move into the ultimate flow state. And it changes our perception. The total effect is one where we change our internal personal environment and our external personal environment.
Allowing is exactly the same thing as no resistance.
No resistance is an important part of new self, as we lose all old self characteristics, such as forcing, control, striving, yearning, wanting and so on, all those things where we are trying to make things happen – where we are trying to make our wishes and desires (our intentions) appear.
This is why we reference “attention to intention” because when you raise your awareness high enough your intentions appear (“manifest”) not through striving but through attention. In other words, if you place your attention onto your intentions in the right way, and generate the necessary energy state, your intentions manifest.
As we develop the awareness exercise we move what is happening from a form of material force to a form of energy force.
The material force involves lots of pushing and physical effort of one sort or another, which requires trying to move heavy obstacles, and this – ironically – includes our own resistance, which can show up in many ways, from trying to control the uncontrollable, to unwanted thoughts, to limiting beliefs.
When we shift to a state of pure awareness, we change our energy frequency and our energy level. Now, we can focus this energy onto what we want, and this has no resistance of any sort.
This is the reason we describe manifestation as the art of becoming not doing, as we attract what we are not what we want.
This all comes from clearing out our current state, and moving from low level awareness to heightened awareness.
You start with this exercise of becoming familiar with your state of awareness recognising its current low level and building this to a high level, i.e. raising awareness.
As you do so the added beneficial aspects outlined above start to realise.
You will become a person of allowing, of no resistance, of higher energy frequency – and as you become, so you attract.
That is my best effort at describing the experience, but as we always say , you have to experience this to fully know it.