Raising Our Consciousness Through Empowerment

Most of us picked up the saying "knowledge is power" somewhere before we were old enough to question it. What I want to walk through here is the idea that lifting our level of consciousness, and doing it by empowering ourselves, gives us a way through a lot of the hard parts of being alive. I'm thinking especially of the mental health struggles so many people carry: anger, depression, anxiety.

Where do most of these troubles start? Usually with low self-worth and a shaky sense of one's own value, and with the difficulty of connecting to other people. Mental illness, boiled down, is often repressed emotion that the mind handles badly. Whatever you cannot control ends up controlling you. Until a person learns to master what's going on inside, they may stay reliant on psychotropic drugs, or on medication for physical complaints, because a surprising amount of mental distress shows up in the body as physical symptoms.

There's a scale of consciousness that runs up to 1000, an idea associated with David Hawkins. The bottom of that scale tends to map onto emotional suffering: rage, fear, deep depression, bipolar disorder, even schizophrenia. The question that follows is practical. How does a person climb?

I've watched people put in years, even decades, in Twelve Step rooms and still wrestle with the same thing they walked in with. Albert Einstein supposedly said the trick to genius is knowing how to simplify. Fair enough, but simplifying isn't what the human mind does on its own. Left alone, we complicate. That tendency to over-complicate is a big reason life feels so heavy for so many of us.

So what actually raises your level of consciousness? The word I keep coming back to is empowerment. If knowledge is power, then empowering yourself means teaching yourself. The people who know the most often turn out to be the ones steering society, and they're frequently the ones who get attacked for it. That's part of why a lot of brilliant minds also carry mental illness and end up isolated.

A piece of empowering yourself is simply learning to accept and love who you already are. Get there, and other people's opinions stop carrying the weight they used to. You can be without much of a social circle and still be content in solitude, particularly if you sense that some larger meaning and purpose is keeping you company.

My own view is that raising your consciousness takes two things working together: your own effort, and the grace of some unseen force. Call that force God if you like. Accepting grace from something good and larger than yourself tends to make a person more humble, and humility nudges the consciousness higher still. The people sitting around 600 to 900 on that scale are the most loving, compassionate, and least judgmental you'll ever meet. A 1000 would mean something close to perfect; some researchers suggest only Jesus and Buddha ever reached it.

Around 400 to 600 is the middle, comparable to ordinary intelligence. People here still have plenty of compassion, and they are usually the most driven people you'll come across. The reason is simple energy. Those stuck lower on the scale don't have the fuel for ambition, because existence feels like one long fight and chronic health problems run the show. A lot of those problems are mental: anger left over from old wounds, anxiety rooted in fear, depression heavy enough to make someone want to end their life.

Many people live in that low band, sometimes called "the dying consciousness," and they lean on medication just to get through the day. When there's no medicine, the coping often turns into heavy smoking, drinking, or other drugs.

Climbing out rests on two spiritual practices: mindful meditation and positive affirmation. Pay attention and you'll notice how much of humanity runs on negativity. Choose to aim your attention at the positive instead and you can genuinely reshape the physical structure of your brain. Do that and you gain the capacity to move through life's waters with more skill. Depression, anxiety, anger: these become things you can get past.

Learning to let go, to live inside the present moment, builds a healthier picture of yourself. Solomon, the wise king of ancient Israel, told people to accept their lot in life. But your lot doesn't have to stay grim. Focus more on the good and you start to feel the Law of Attraction at work, pushing the negative away and letting the positive fill the space. You find the energy to be ambitious, and ambition builds a better life and a better career.

You also reach a point where the work no longer owns you, so you can give attention to the things that matter more than money. And you discover something freeing: you have options. A lot of suffering comes from feeling trapped, whether in a job, a bad relationship, or just life. The moment you see that you are choosing where you are and what you're doing, and that you're free to walk off the stage whenever you want, the number of options in front of you grows.

Keep going and you may turn into a bit of a free spirit, someone who struggles to work under another person's rules. That's fine. By the time you reach this stretch of the climb you'll probably be free enough to work for yourself, maybe even recoil at the idea of clocking in and handing forty hours a week over to somebody else's payroll.

Everyone talks about climbing the ladder of success. The worst outcome, though, is getting to the top and finding the ladder was propped against the wrong wall. If you're going to climb something, climb the ladder of consciousness, the one built from educating yourself about life and how to live it more fully. An abundant life isn't really about more money or more knowledge or more sex. At its plainest it means being free of the negative thought patterns that once ran us and fed our anger, our fear, our anxiety, our depression. One more thing: don't forget where you started as you climb. That's what keeps you humble.

- Erwin Bishop