What
Is Consciousness?
What is consciousness? At each level of consciousness you know yourself and the world differently. As you move up the levels you become less identified with the content of your life.
Dr David Hawkins has written extensively on the levels of consciousness and the different experiences one has as a human being at each stage.
Soon after my initial and profound spiritual awakening in 2005 I read his book Power v Force. He talks about a calibrated scale of 1 to 1000. The numbers on their own don’t have any significance, what is significant is the scale.
Dr Hawkins calibrated through kinesiology the scale at which different ways of knowing yourself and the universe become apparent.
I found this to be interesting but never picked up the book again until over three years later.
We often think that the way we encounter ourselves and the universe is the way that ‘it’ really is.
This is naive and convenient.
Two people will never agree on the same incident or interpretation so how can your way be the way that it really is?
Most people never challenge the mind to explain this. It is convenient to go back to knowing what you know, even though it is an illusion or simply an idea held firmly by your self identity.
There is only one consciousness but each human being’s experience is determined by the amount of ideas and concepts firmly held by the mind that keep consciousness hidden from itself.
In 2008, three years after first reading about these levels of consciousness I went and picked up another copy.
I had recently felt a shift in my consciousness and had started knowing myself differently.
It is interesting to read and compare the way you see yourself compared to Dr Hawkins’ description at each level. You then get an idea of where you are at and what a more peaceful life awaits you as you continue.
I had recently felt a significant increase in peace. I recall knowing and really seeing that everything I experienced really was coming from me.
This calibrates to 600 on the levels of consciousness.
It is an experience of peace. Peace inside as the mind really lets go of trying to be in charge and continue the illusion.
You can imagine the ego being found out and realizing it has lost its willingness and power to pretend anymore.
More and more subtle shifts in becoming aware of how I create my experience would correspond with an increase upwards on the scale of consciousness. This all happened rapidly in 2008.
It was fascinating the number of times I began noticing a certain experience, way of seeing the world, knowing the world and myself, and then a week or so later reading in books by various authors the same words. It was as if I had written it.
It happened time and time again, including when picking up Dr Hawkins’ books.
This all gave me confidence that I wasn’t just fooling myself and ‘escaping into Buddahood’ as some say. This was real and this was transformation of my experience.
Also, the other thing that gave me confidence is the more I grew the more willing I was to feel uncomfortable. I don’t mean I went looking for it but I knew extra growth and freedom could come through feeling some pain and I had an attitude of complete surrender to come what may.
There have been several times I burst into uncontrollable crying in a split second out of nowhere. I say uncontrollable but it is more so the fact that I simply surrendered and did not try and control it.
This always happened in private and the crying went without a trace in just a few seconds. One time it was replaced by uncontrollable laughter. There was no wondering what that was about or why it happened.
This is a good lesson for anyone learning to heal. A child will feel tears and hurt fully and in a split second heal and return to life activities.
Somewhere we learn to try and not feel, as if it is wrong or unnatural. We resist, which makes the feeling worse and it gets stuffed down only to come back with vengeance, more pain and destruction at another time.
To wish feelings away or try and not feel them by distraction is to create problems for your life. Not only your health but also your relationships and experience of life.
Fortunately the curiosity and questioning doesn’t stop. The more you see the more obvious the next question becomes or the next paradox presents itself to your awareness.
Even though there is a change in identification I still feel like the same person I always have been. This is because I AM.
One should not be scared of this change. It is a change to know yourself as you really are. It is a way to answer for yourself the question, ‘what is consciousness’? You keep your sense of who you have always been minus any suffering or unhappiness.
Difficult to explain, impossible to make someone else know, worth you being curious about.