Elevating human consciousness
What are the practical, sensible how-tos?
How did the ancient sages sage? What had they gone through to get there? What were they observing centuries ago that quantum physicists are relatively recently starting to explore as well?
The traditional approach to deeper conscious awareness
The traditional methods of deepening our awareness and connectivity involve years of training, study and practices. Years that easily turn into decades. My own training took many years, and it continues. In my case, a repeatable methodology was used. I know it was repeatable because it was both repeatedly used on me, and repeated on others. Successfully.
That being said, I don’t find it to be the purpose of The Little Creek Monastery to train people in these traditional methods. Not because they’re not valuable. On the contrary, they are intensely valuable. Rather, because first of all there already exist teachers for these things, and secondly because the monastery sees its mission as more in line with helping those kinds of teachers and students bring forward their own improved methods and applications of the so-called Teachings.
The current paradigm
If every teacher successfully trained two or three students in their lifetime, or even a dozen or a hundred, it’s not enough. Because not only is the progress achingly slow, but attrition occurs. Not everyone who’s received training ends up really knowing what to do with it due to its profound and often unanticipated effects. And not everyone who gets trained is going to teach. And, not all training is equal. So combine the overall snail’s pace with these kinds of inefficiencies and we end up with progress that is so slow that significant widespread change becomes problematic.
Typically, when we talk about higher consciousness, we are referring to things like meditation, or yoga, or seminars and courses, or maybe we use terms like “elevating” or “reaching for something higher.”
All of this loosely suggests that we have two basic classes of studentship. I don’t mean to elevate one and disparage the other, because there are reasons behind the choices and circumstances that we each find ourselves involved in. I suppose it’s okay, however, to say that some people bite a bit deeper, and others are a little less involved. Maybe it’s like the difference between a professional food critic and somebody who leaves restaurant reviews on Yelp: deeper bites yield deeper insights.
Either way, key to a significant elevation in social and human consciousness is the occurrence of profound realizations. Realizations of the profound-type generally occur because we’ve had deeper experiences — the kinds of experiences in consciousness that can be life altering. While occasionally spontaneous, these types of experiences generally occur because of repeated practices.
In my experience, there clearly exists a repeatable methodology to get us there. But, as I’ve pointed out, it’s slow and arguably not scalable. The slower path is that of the ‘professional food critic’ while on the other hand most of us are Yelpers, at best. And that’s the precise problem our monastery is attacking: how can more people get ‘there’ faster? How can individual’s deeper consciousness and awareness be more rapidly improved?
Introduction to The How-To ‘Manual’ concept
The deeper path is not for everyone, yet. So perhaps our more immediate focus points should be on what can be done to elevate us now. For example, a revival of Stocism is occurring in certain self-help circles. And within contemporary Stoic thought we find a revitalized concentration on mindfulness and gratitude.
The more deliberate we become in our practice of universal principles, the more visible the reality of what’s occurring becomes. The invisible and arcane begin to emerge.
Gratitude is a principle. And within the context of consciousness, principles can be seen as fundamental, universal truths. They function as reliable guideposts or trail markers that we can apply in any situation, even in the unknown. Values and ethics change from culture to culture and even within families. But principles are consistent, no matter who’s using them or when.
The Principles of a more conscious awareness
Universal Principles are active and being used constantly, whether we realize it or not. For example, whether we are aware of the principle of Balance or not, nature is always striving for balance. The more deliberate we become in our practice of Balance (or any other universal principle), the more visible the underlying reality of what’s occurring becomes.
It’s fair to say that the degree to which we purposefully employ and practice principles becomes a measure of our own conscious awareness. The more deliberate and conscious our practice, the more deeply embedded becomes our awareness and mindfulness.
As these practices become ingrained within us, our responses to people, situations and problems becomes more spontaneously and organically principled. We become more settled and steady in our movements through life.
As more and more of us become principle-based in our daily lives, it becomes far easier for us to unify and reach consensus — because we are individually and collectively responding from a much more fundamental and universally common place.
