10 Simple Ways to Raise Your Level of Conscious Awareness

[Idiopathic Joker]

6. Knowledge

Knowledge raises your consciousness. Ignorance lowers it.

First and foremost, know thyself. Think deeply about your life, and keep a journal to record your thoughts. Ask questions to which you don’t know the answer, and then search for those answers.

Look around you as well, and soak up knowledge like a sponge. Interact with your environment with a sense of curiosity and wonder. Study it. Learn from it. Experiment with it.

Strive to understand reality, including your role in it, as accurately as possible. The more accurate your beliefs about reality are, the more conscious you become.

7. Reason

Reason raises your consciousness. Irrationality lowers it.

Logic is a powerful tool of consciousness when used correctly. It lends structure and substance to thought.

However, the great challenge of logic is the avoidance of false assumptions. A single false assumption can throw off a lifetime of otherwise logical conclusions. So challenge all of your beliefs, and never have too much certainty about those that rest on clouds.

8. Conscious people

Conscious people raise your consciousness. Unconscious people lower it.

Seek out others you perceive to be at a higher level of consciousness than you are. Talk to them, ask questions, and enjoy their presence. Allow their ideas and awareness to infect you, and you’ll find yourself expanding in all directions. You’ll become more honest, more courageous, more compassionate, and so on.

But spend time with people at a lower level of consciousness, and you’ll gradually sink to their level. Their thoughts will infect you as well, causing you to become more dishonest, more fearful, more apathetic, etc.

Strive to find a balance between spending time with those who raise your consciousness vs. spending time with those you can help. Learn from those who are a little more conscious, and help those who are a little less conscious than you. In this manner you serve the highest good of all, expanding consciousness everywhere.

9. Energy

Energy raises your consciousness. Disease lowers it.

Take care of your physical body, for it is your primary means of interacting with the world. Energy gives you an ongoing flow of vital life experiences. But without energy you starve your consciousness.

Eat with an awareness of what you’re consuming. Exercise with an awareness of how you’re affecting your body and mind. Before putting anything in your body, consider its effect on your energy, not just in the short term but in the long term as well. Always ask yourself, “Will this produce energy or disease?”

10. Intention

The intention to raise your consciousness raises it. The intention to lower your consciousness lowers it.

Consciousness has the capacity to self-expand or self-contract, just as you have the capacity to grow or to commit suicide. In any given moment, you have the freedom of choice.

By genuinely voicing the intention, “I intend to become more conscious and aware,” you will initiate the expansion of your consciousness. Holding the intention to improve in any of the previous nine areas will yield a similar effect.

Alternatively, you are perfectly free to lower your consciousness at any time. While it’s unlikely you would choose to do so directly, you can achieve the same effect indirectly by lowering your performance in any of the previous nine areas. By choosing to lie, to succumb to fear, to commit acts of cruelty, to remain ignorant, and so on, you put out the intention to lower your consciousness. And in so doing, you initiate a process that will attract more falsehood, fear, cruelty, ignorance, etc. into your life.

Every thought you hold serves to either expand or contract your consciousness. There is no neutral. So choose wisely.

 

[9TRAY]

Joker, you know not too many posters are gonna' read that wall of text. You posted all 10

 

[Idiopathic Joker]

Joker, you know not too many posters are gonna' read that wall of text. You posted all 10

If my answers frighten you, you should stop asking scary questions

 

[BiblicalAtheist]

Joker, you know not too many posters are gonna' read that wall of text. You posted all 10

Then I shall help them out because there is really only one way, all those other things can be achieved by: awareness. Awareness of your thoughts, words* and actions. Sure it's hard and you forgot to be aware, but as soon as you remember you're back on track.

 

[Kat]

Good read.

 

[Splackavelli]

Joker, you know not too many posters are gonna' read that wall of text. You posted all 10

man get out of here.

 

[VIBE]

Reminded me to read an article I had put aside..

I was going to make this a thread (jailed anyway) but since this is made already, I'll post it here.

Is Consciousness an Illusion?

Cogito ergo sum means "I think, therefore I am." That quote—coined by French philosopher René Descartes—is the cornerstone of modern philosophy. What it means is that although you could be wrong about nearly everything, from the answers to simple math problems to the very belief that you're awake and not dreaming, the one thing that you can be certain of is that you're experiencing the things that you're experiencing.

But according to modern-day philosopher Daniel Dennett, even that is suspect.

"Real" Magic Versus Real Magic

There's a quote by religion professor Lee Siegel that Dennett use to illustrate his point: "Real magic is the magic that's not real. While the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic." There's nobody out there sawing people in half and putting them back together again, only illusionists using various tricks to make it appear that that's the case.

According to Dennett, the same is true of consciousness. The only difference is that our brains are triple-billed as the saw-wielding magician, the lovely assistant trapped in the box, and the mystified audience.

What we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it. But in reality, it's all smoke, mirrors, and rapidly firing neurons.

If that's a bit heady, then get ready for Dennett's next metaphor: If our brain is a smartphone, then consciousness is the screen.

In other words, consciousness is not how our brain works, it's only how we interface with it. A screen doesn't really have much to do with how the phone works, and in fact, the phone could do nearly everything it does without it. It just wouldn't be useable by humans.

According to Dennett, our brains are like smartphones in another way as well: they are basically robots, or thinking machines, and like any robot, they need a medium through which to communicate with their users. But it goes even further than that: if our brains are robots, then our neurons are smaller robots, which are in turn made up of even smaller robots. So even if we lose the concept of consciousness along the way, we're still pretty incredible "machines."

Is It All In Philosophers' Heads?

It wouldn't be philosophy if there wasn't somebody to vehemently disagree.

Meet Thomas Nagel, a fellow philosopher who has some key disagreements with Dennett's ideas. To Nagel, consciousness is something outside of the material world, and what's more, he claims Dennett thinks so too. After all, even if consciousness is an illusion, it's a "real" illusion just like the sawed-in-half trick is "real" magic. "You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion," says Nagel, "since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn't correspond to reality. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not."

If this is starting to sound like we're going full circle back to cogito ergo sum, you're not wrong. It just goes to show how philosophy operates as an ever-turning wheel of ideas and counter-ideas.

At the end of the day, it might be best to rely on Dennett's view when it comes to understanding the brain and how consciousness works, and Nagel's when trying to wrap your mind around the way you actually experience the world. Either way, our brains are thoroughly tied in knots at this point.