The Stages Of Consciousness
- Mar 21, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 25, 2024
Written by: Bill O'Brien, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
There are many ways to delineate the journey that is called Consciousness. It’s a matter of degrees or stages of awareness. The borders are not clearly marked. It can also be described as expanding consciousness. The reward is heightened wisdom, deepened peace. The higher your consciousness, the more you are on the high road to happiness.
It begins with a dawning awareness that there is such a thing as consciousness. When a person first begins to reflect on himself, he may find that there are two parts to his inner world. The deepest part generates Love and the other part, the Ego, may not feel good about itself. Self-esteem is low.
It can be a long journey to a well-ordered sense of love for oneself, but it can, and often is, achieved by recognizing one’s talents, by validation from others, and by gratifying experiences of success. The important trait here is the courage to face challenges. An important insight here is that courage is not the absence of fear but the willingness to overcome it.
From here, there is the expansion to recognize one’s tribe and then acknowledge that those who are different from my tribe are not therefore bad or inferior. This transcendence of tribalism is a long journey for most. It is the lack of transcending tribalism that caused the Comanche Nation to be so reverent in their dealings with one another and yet so cruel and vicious to their enemies. It was to address tribal mentality that Jesus exhorted us humans to love our enemies. Coming to grips with this requires a measure of surrendering one’s ego and familiar ways in order to welcome and integrate the stranger. In the process, long-cherished customs and beliefs can be challenged and one’s heart must open to proceed.
There are many evolutions as we go from tribe to race to the nation and to global, and in the not-so-distant future to interplanetary consciousness. To get a feel for the challenge, suppose we discover life on another planet and we are obviously inferior to it. Imagine that they are much more accomplished and wiser than we. Would we readily adapt to that?
So the expansion of identification, the insight into the question “who is my neighbour” operates along one track. This track continues until my “neighbour” includes all of nature and I feel passionate about preserving Mother Earth and all her creatures.
The other track is more contained within my soul. It is the experience of all the dramatic possibilities of non-ordinary consciousness. One that is frequently mentioned is NDE, the Near-Death Experience. Anita Moorjani writes in “Dying to Be Me” that she arrived in heaven to discover to her surprise that everyone was there. This engenders a very different view of our lives and our source than we have securely believed for centuries.
Other experiences are many. One can have a dramatic experience during a silent retreat. (cf. my first article, “How Consciousness Became My Passion”.) In shamanic practices, persons can take on the form of another species and mimic their shape and life or find long lost parts of their souls returning to them, or simply find themselves in another time and place.
Experiences like these lead into the great sea of the Collective Unconscious, the vast area that comes to us in the form of dreams, myths, and symbols. This is the ocean that psychologist Carl Jung has identified for humanity. Matthew Fox describes its implications for religion in his book “One River, Many Wells”.
The journey of consciousness is an adventure of the imagination, ever energizing, ever-surprising, ever new.
“The understanding of ‘evolutionary consciousness’ is perhaps the most important thing lacking in spiritual practices today. Evolution means growth and development. This means that there are aspects of reality that have not yet arisen in our consciousness. But they will arise if we grow.” Ken Wilber
To join the adventure with Bill O’Brien, click on his digital business card at https://www.cardfly.io/billobrien A place of easy beginning is to click on his FB there and receive Wisdomkeepers for free.
Bill O'Brien, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Bill O'Brien has decades of experience helping individuals and groups expand their awareness of the capacities of their inner selves, their full, or divine, potential. He utilizes a range of methods to expand consciousness from meditation to self-knowledge techniques to guided imagery to shamanic healing methodologies such as Illumination and Soul Retrieval. With his Consciousness Coaching, experience is the touchstone. The goal is to draw up into conscious awareness the infinite contents of the individual unconscious. Bill spent twenty years in the Jesuit Order before launching out on the great adventure of the discovery of the Self. His Wisdomkeepers reach a worldwide audience. He is the author of "Wise Guide: The First Forty-Five Columns" available on Amazon. His mission: feeding the spiritual hunger of the world by healing and elevating human consciousness.
