Solving for X - Exploring Consciousness

Abstract

The topic of consciousness is the very thing that underpins the entirety of our existence here and yet none of us can come to any clear and consistent conclusion of precisely what consciousness is other than to say it is very difficult, at best, to articulate it.  In this article, I present another alternative series of thoughts about the topic of consciousness to add to the ever-growing body of thoughts on this very important subject.

Keywords:  Consciousness, Language, Life Lessons, Purpose

Introduction

Consciousness is an integral part of our being and purpose. Although I have often been one to say, “It’s not personal and that’s just not about you.” When contemplating challenging situations or interactions with others, in this case our conscious existence IS individually about each of us.  Consciousness is us and is about us.  It is also about what we most desire to experience here with our conscious focus in this specific point in space-time.  Life on planet Earth in our beautiful Milky Way Galaxy speaks to us all of the time through our shared consciousness.  There is not one thing you are not receiving at any point in your life, even while you are asleep and dreaming.

We are projecting and receiving simultaneously from everyone and every single thing we encounter as we focus on making our way through conventional reality also known as life on Earth.  We just don’t seem to clearly understand the various processes or the language.  Speaking of languages for a moment, there are many languages here.  Some are obvious, (e.g., English, Spanish, Latin, German, French, Hindi, to name a few).  There are some that are subtler such as the sounds of birds singing in the trees, the wind rustling the leaves of our beautiful trees or the sound of a gentle rain falling.  There is also the often-misunderstood language of love, the language of math and the language of sacred geometry.  There is also the language of energy and vibration. 

So this other language, the language of consciousness, is a somewhat known frontier that we have before us to better understand if we wish to live greater lives and make greater strides while awake and aware as we focus our energy here and now.  There is much that goes into that consciousness and understanding even if we’ve not yet possessed the components of the entirety of factors that will give us the proper solution that would result in telling us what it is precisely.  Even that understanding can help us learn and grow.

Getting into the Concept

The origins of this concept I’m about to explore came to me a long time ago and over the years it developed more and a little more.  I captured the origins of the concept given to me in a blog post a while back.  I’ll share that article (slightly edited, to convey greater understanding in this moment):

The Space Between

It was a sunny day in October of 1993 and I was sitting on my patio reading a copy of The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield.  I heard a man speak to me although there was no one around me.  I was reading about control dramas and this seemingly disembodied voice told me to pay attention.  He said the content of this part of the book would be the focus of a very long lesson plan for me.  I listened and I paid attention.  I grabbed my notebook and pen to write down what just happened.  I documented my visions and messages in the beginning.  As I finished writing my journal entry it was if an unseen hand had taken over my pen and the following picture (or one like it) was drawn on the page: 

When the pen stopped moving I stared at the image for the longest time.  I felt a down-load spooling in a space just outside of my being readying itself to enter my conscious awareness as so often I do but it had not yet completed itself to a point I could articulate it.  Realize this came during a time before computers existing readily in every home.  In fact, most of my writing, including my first book, Changing Perspectives – The Journey is the Destination, was originally done by hand in a notebook.  I digress, back to the event.

In an effort to try to prompt the “down-load” to crystalize better in my awareness, I sent a thought back to my unseen teacher, "What is this that you’ve shown me here?"  For an eternity of sunny silence it seemed I patiently waited knowing a response would come.  My ‘teacher’ began to speak again as the chills ran up and down my spine:  "This is a model of what you might refer to as time from your present perspective.  You will need to study this and understand it for it is not quite as simple as it may at first seem.  Know, however, that it will bring you much comfort one day and then you will begin to move beyond it."

The down-load finally came and this is what I received:  If you imagined the orientation as I had originally sketched it, it came out as a linear progression with the left hand side representing the experiences and your past left behind you in space-time. The right hand side represented all the experiences and your future to come - ahead of you.  You, you are the X in the center...you are the present at the intersection between your past and your future.  The past has lead you to where you are and you should be grateful but not looking forever backwards.  The present guides and moves ushering in the future but we do not need to gaze forward always to the future, it will come.  The present is the culmination and the power of creation always. 

So, where it ended up leading me...is spending my present looking back for longer than a moment to retrieve something is a waste of precious time and energy in my present.  Pining away for something I wished to have from my future or looking ahead for longer than is necessary to set a goal, is also a waste of precious time and energy in my present.  If I maintain my focus on my present and my being-ness at the intersection of the past and the future, which is me, I am diminished neither by regret nor desire.  If I embrace either regret or desire, I am pulled off-track. Regret and desire are temptations unseen. If I place my conscious focus in mind, body and spirit in the intersection - the center of my existence, I expand and I physically feel the expansion.  Hmmm, it is back to the crossroads with my thinking and me.  There is something so very rare and precious about that intersection of the past and the future - it is me, it is time, it is outside of time.  I cannot articulate this much more in this moment as it seems a 20 year delayed piece of this puzzle has decided to start to complete it’s earlier down-load.  I thought it was finished.  However, now as I look back, I see the initial concepts were born but not quite developed.

Once we have mastered the cross-roads, the space in between and the expansion of consciousness - we are ready to contemplate the other dimensions of which, our current physical perception is only one. 

The simplicity of the intersection requires much expansion and in fact, that is exactly what I am feeling whenever it is I pull my focus fully into the present moment - I experience an expansion unlimited by what came before, what is to come or space-time.  That space in between is where the magic happens...that tiny little intersection is infinite beyond comprehension.  That space in between is you and me whenever we choose to place our focus there.

Through my courses in study at my local community college as well as the University of Metaphysics and University of Sedona, I began to better understand what the X was pointing to.  In part, it points to consciousness and beyond that a concept that our limited vocabulary cannot properly articulate.  The image that came to me also seems to represent at least to me, a two dimensional view of a strand of DNA at one particular twist.  While my mind fires off too many simulations of this information to really get into it, I have to go back to a single thread of thought for the purpose of communicating in this limited language of words for now. The concept for my doctoral dissertation was born from this work.  As I finished up my doctorate,  I realized there was more.  A theme was emerging and it was one I needed to research so much further.  As I began to research, I realized a number of others had either the same or similar questions and only some of them were readily answered.

Another disturbing or exciting thought, depending upon how you look at it, is that what I was approaching was something I felt would take multiple applied sciences and alternative disciplines to fully define and describe.  It would take no less than theoretical physics and greater understanding of String Theory, Super-strings, M-Theory (see “M-Theory the Mother of All Superstrings” by Michio Kaku), the stratifications of consciousness outlined by Psychology and hinted at in Philosophy, Neurobiology and the looking deeper into the true origins of synaptic activity and then the alternative concepts of Metaphysics and possibly Theology to understand Source Consciousness and how we create.  Now, these disciplines don’t often play nicely together but through my research and explorations, I’m going to walk through a few concepts to provide greater understanding and rather than hypothesize the meaning of existence, I’m going to try to help you better understand what you are, what we are in this Universe and how you can take that knowledge and use it to engage in life with a greater sense of well-being.  My greatest impetus is to create something that will help lead you to your core through understanding and with that understanding, help you better know your life purpose through its current string of themes.

As I have learned in my research, consciousness is very complex and as we examine it further it can lead us down some very perplexing and interesting avenues.  But that is where the fun really begins.

Perspectives

The perspectives on consciousness from the well-educated and learned among us are so very interesting to say the least.  I walk away from reviewing works on consciousness with a wonderful feeling about the amazing creatures we humans are even if we cannot scientifically pinpoint consciousness consistently.  Maybe some of the points noted that consciousness as a whole, cannot view itself as a whole but can merely view certain component parts such as our levels of awareness or potential and varied aspects of our psychology through our own actions and reactions to the outside world are potentially true.

As I mentioned in my Introduction, this particular journey began a long time ago for me and it took so many years for understanding to begin to rise from the obscurity of every day life to a point in which I could begin to see some things and see them much more clearly.  On one hand, I could say that the last twenty years of my life were a very well presented lesson plan on various aspects of consciousness and even the psychological aspects of it.  Now, I’ll be honest.  I didn’t think many of my experiences were all that wonderful at the time they occurred but that was only because I didn’t yet under stand the “theme” I was working with. 

So many of us don’t stop to question our consciousness, our awareness, our behaviors, our experiences or our beliefs.  We just move right along living day after day merrily on our way.  We just do the normal human thing…eat, play, sleep, work, eat, sleep, etc. over and over again.  We just do, react or act as our perceptions or assumptions and then resulting emotions dictate.  This is not a bad thing in and of itself.  In fact for many, this is a perfectly fine existence.  But, for those craving something more out of their experience of life here on Earth or wondering about the Lesson Plan we’ve taken on here in the Earth School, we need to start asking questions.  It’s not so much the questioning of others or anything else in the outside world.  Rather, it is our own consciousness we need to reach into and begin questioning.  With time, attention and a good dose of patience, our consciousness will most definitely respond.

In my book, The Ego is the Veil, I considered that perhaps our consciousness truly is as Dr. Freud put it, “That point at which our consciousness meets the physical.” Perspective itself is an interesting concept in terms of our lives and it is also an aspect of consciousness that seems most apparent in our awareness, generally speaking.  Our perspectives are derived from our experiences.  Our catalogued experiences in the form of memories are the filters from which we judge what we do or do not need, want or do not want, fear and do not fear or love and do not love.  Our filters come from judgments that seemingly occur automatically and at least at a biological level this is true.  I wrote about this concept a bit in one of my recent works, So, It’s Over.  Now What?  To sum up the concept, there are aspects of our consciousness driven by automatic systems within our physical make up.  One such system is the Autonomic Nervous System or ANS.  The ANS controls so much of our biology but I want to focus on a couple of sub-systems that drive our fight or flight or rest and digest responses to the data taken in by our mental consciousness. 

To get to the point where we trigger these systems in one way or another, our consciousness is taking in loads of data in bits and bytes and processing that data by running simulations of potentialities against memories, against current bodily states and against perceived threats or moments of seemingly safe (See The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku). The body is wonderfully built to try to always maintain that state, homeostasis.  If you’ve ever studied or taken a course on biology, you will see this has been studied at length and been concluded to be truth. 

Through our consciousness, we perceive the world in interesting ways.  Within my own referenced works I used a term I borrowed from the computer technology field, malware.  I used this term to describe a series of hidden thoughts or beliefs from which we filter all the data we take in and then formulate judgments or decisions on and then act accordingly.  Understanding this malware is key to understanding your lesson plans.  You see, this malware is usually implanted within our thought processing systems when we are very young and unable to defend against them.  Sometimes they are formed at other times when we were vulnerable or otherwise impressionable.

We are really quite amazing in this regard in terms of our ability to have biological and mental processing systems that run in the background without us necessarily being conscious of them.  If malware gets in, it is very difficult to stop it from infecting the entire system of our thoughts and consequently, our actions.  This is important because even this is part of our conscious experience.

As a result of our unconscious ‘malware’, we may walk around with very skewed perspectives and beliefs about the world with no concept of why we hold those perspectives and beliefs.  We may have concluded, as a result, that because our mind has concluded a set of data must be truth, that it is…truth. If we don’t begin to observe ourselves in action and question our perspectives, all we’ve ever been is all we’ll ever be.  If that’s okay with you, you’ll find no judgment from me.  If that’s not okay with you then there are a good number of things you can do to become increasingly more aware of your consciousness and how many processes within it at the human-interaction level operate, including the malware.

A little more on malware I will leave you with before we move on.  While it might be easy to feel victimized by what has been unconsciously installed into our belief system, please understand that it is these things that speak to you the loudest of the perfect lesson plans you endeavored to experience here, learn from and then decide whether to stay mired in or transcend.  There isn’t a right or wrong way to do it.  This is after all YOUR experience, YOUR life and you do get to live it YOUR way.

Self-Love and Respect

One of our biggest challenges in life is that we have taken on many of the world’s messages as our personal affronts.  Malware in the form of misbehavior of others may have been unconsciously installed in your mental conscious operating system as I’ve explained.  In a case like this, you will be guided to situations that will help you find the malware buried unconsciously in your programming and transcend it.  But, before you get there you are going to have to understand something first and foremost every day and in every way.  This one thing is that you are a beautiful human being, deserving of love and much respect.  We have to learn to return to this and to do it within first instead of just demanding it from the outside world.  This isn’t something you just “get” and move on, you have to feel it to the core of your being and I am not talking about emotion.

As we’ve seen in the study of consciousness, we are so very complex and we are full of psychology, philosophy, biology, spirituality and all sorts of other forms of striations of consciousness that could define or label our being.  But we are more than that even. 

We come into this world so very precious and innocent and then the world takes over installing various programs into our mental experiences before we have the capability and development to a sufficient level to understand what we should allow to be installed and what we shouldn’t via our own thoughts, perceptions and assumptions. 

As I’ve written in other works, many of these processes from the mind are automatic and we are not conscious necessarily of the programs that have been written into our master program of thoughts from the outside world while we were still developing and impressionable.  In fact, even today we may have those around us suffering from their own ‘malware’ who continue to try to infect our thought systems through psychological projection.  If we’re not careful, we’ll blame ourselves, think bad thoughts about ourselves or worse, believe that the outside world accurately reflects who and what we are.

We react much on illusory conflicts but even that is a message.  If we were to engage in a very long study of every single one of our beliefs, especially those we hold about ourselves and test them, find the source of them and then truly understand what is accurate and what is not, we’d dump the ‘malware’ or eradicate it with love and logic and find ourselves in a much better place from which we could experience our lives with new eyes and an open heart.

These thoughts and practices unfortunately are not a switch you can flip, turn on and be set.  Also, unfortunately, there is no magic pill or drive-thru from which we put in our order, pay and then drive along on our merry way home “All-Better.”  We have to understand the systems and processes first and then we can start to reprogram what runs silently and unconsciously resident in our personal operating system unchecked over time.  Self-love and self-respect need to come from within you first.  It already exists within you but you may have to do some work digging to uncover where those feelings (not emotions) are.  This is one of life’s biggest lessons and this one is shared by most of us in some way.

Part of my reason for wanting to engage in this work is that I look out into this world and see so many beautiful things.  I also look out into this world and see so much suffering.  I also see some suffering that do not long for change and so perpetuate it.  I also see those who suffer and do not perpetuate it but do not know how to change. This book presents some concepts that if employed willingly can help you to get there but this work does not replace other effective means and ways that may be even more appropriate for you to pursue--especially, in the realm of psychological triggers. 

If you are experiencing psychological trauma, I think the first thing that you ought to give very real consideration to is getting psychological assistance.  I’ve written those words so many times and I really do mean them.  We have this wonderful operating system but we do not understand all of its component parts, all the various viruses and ‘malware’ that can be installed within our thought operating systems unconsciously.  If you do not seek treatment for a broken leg, it will not properly heal – that is, unless you are trained in how to set broken legs and properly take care of them.

Psychology is an excellent method for helping you understand the themes in your life that are part of your lesson plan. Through the guidance and assistance of the right trained professional for you, you can achieve healing of the more traumatic events that may be behind your learning.  Enough of my sales pitch on psychology.  Obviously I’m a very strong supporter and would very much like to see the negative stigma attached to seeking psychological treatment eradicated.  Why?  Well, if we don’t seek it and learn more about what prevents us from truly loving and respecting ourselves, it doesn’t matter what you read or don’t, what you do or don’t, your outcomes in terms of improving your lives could be unnecessarily limited. They just don’t have to be.  We can choose differently. Did you know you had a choice?

What do you think might be some ways you could experience yourself in a state where you might feel self-love and self-respect?  There are likely many ideas that come to mind.  I’m going to point you to a very simple one.  There is a very simple way to experience the truth of you and your true loving and self-respecting nature.  It won’t cost you a dime to engage in it and if you engage in it, you can learn quite a bit about how it feels to be you and again, I’m not talking about emotion alone.  Feeling is something born much deeper within us more along the lines of an energy vibration than the egoic attachment of emotion to thought.  So, want to know what it is?  Meditation.

Going Deeper Within

In the last chapter, my last word left dangling like a barely attached leaf in an autumn wind was the word, Meditation.  How can you know yourself without experiencing the truth of you?  So many say, “I can’t meditate,” “I can’t sit still long enough,” or even cite something more fearful and ominous such as “It’s against my religion.”  Meditation has nothing to do with religion and is actually a beautiful way to commune with everything including your God or Goddess by whatever names you choose to reference your focus. 

If you don’t believe in God, meditation is not born of judgment and is not attached to religion and can bring you wonderful benefits without religious undertones. Meditation is one way that we may experience the purest form of who and what we really are.  It isn’t difficult and it doesn’t cost you anything but a little time, the ability to focus on breathing no matter what thoughts, worries or cares are floating through your conscious mind.

I have what some might call a very stressful day job.  To be successful, I must multi-task in an epic way…deal with hundreds of emails each day, phone calls, drive-bys (those stopping by my desk needing assistance) and loads and loads of time-sensitive deliverables.  If I had not learned how to meditate thirty years ago, I would not be here today.  I would not be sane.  I took up the practice at a young age inconsistently.  I would sit quietly and just breathe.  Thoughts would come; I would ignore them. 

As I grew older, I began to notice a very distinct feeling as I meditated.  I was able to experience my true nature which had absolutely nothing to do with the labels of the outside world, what I did, didn’t should have or shouldn’t have done.  I realized that no matter what occurred to me, when I sat in silence the core of me never changed and was never effected by anything in the outside world.  I learned that I was constant, vibrant and peaceful always no matter what my mind or others told me I was.

Learning to cherish this experience has helped me to live life consciously aware.  If I knew my true nature, nothing anyone said or did could truly ever affect me…the consciousness of me…the beingness or true nature of me.  This was an important realization and you can’t logically come to this conclusion or your mind will not hold it.  You must learn to ‘feel’ what this means in order to truly own it.  Through meditation you can explore your truest feelings (again, not just emotions – although you can do that too if you choose).  Please understand, as I’ve said, emotions are a by-product of our automatic data processing and simulation systems.  Emotions are not facts but things we attach to our conclusive thoughts or decisions about something.  But ‘feeling’ is very different.  Feeling comes from a deeper place and learning to tune into this feeling is very important if you want to understand more about you and your life’s purpose.

In quiet times and with meditative practice, you can place your focus on what your beliefs are.  Most often if you ask people about their beliefs about themselves, they are not quite sure what to say.  Many beliefs we hold are given to us by the outside world, one of my wonderful teacher’s Toni P. would say.  Belief, as I’ve said is more like an untested hypothesis.  If you want to understand the truth about patterns, themes and your life lessons, you will need to bring yourself to a place where you can discover your beliefs.  You may want to spend time in meditation setting an intent as you begin breathing to “tell me about the beliefs I hold about me” and then see what arises.

If you still can’t quite discern it from within, you can take a look at the outside world in terms of who and what you are surrounded by and what you do or don’t do in any given situation.  We are in constant communication with everything all the time whether or not we are consciously aware.  Meditation helps us to get to the heart of how we truly ‘feel’ to be ourselves.  But getting to beliefs is important and sometimes it seems like such a jumble that we can’t even articulate our beliefs.  Some are like malware, buried so deep and so long ago that we can no longer even understand or grasp the source of them.  But we can get a clue by what is around us.  Through reflecting on our behavior without or what we actually attract to us unconsciously and then reflecting within, we can come to greater understanding of our beliefs.

I’ve picked on the people pleasers a bit in some of my books but I need to draw on them again as an example of my point.  I can do this well because I once was one.  I’ll have to expose myself and my own life lessons a bit to do so but I don’t mind so much if it helps others understand.  I spent a lot of time in life not understanding who or what I was.  I couldn’t understand my life lessons and knew not one thing yet about the concept I term ‘malware’ and what the psychologists might well label in psychological terms.  There is one in particular that comes to mind that I honestly feel is over-used as an umbrella term, co-dependency.  However, it’s a good example to understand for those on that life path and I’m not here to define each life path because there are too many to define.  Instead I’d rather give you the framework from which you can discern for yourselves.  At the end of the day, it isn’t what I think or have to teach that matters.  It is what you have to teach and learn yourself.

One of the most important things I’ve learned in my travels is that I couldn’t stand in my own light until I was so tired of learning that certain people just wanted to stamp it out or take it from me.  I went through the victimization thinking, the fearful states, the emotional states with this one lesson until finally I understood it and finally I could ‘feel’ all aspects of it.  When I finally understood this belief, how it was formed, how it was emotionally charged and stored in my memory unconsciously filtering my every thought and resulting action, I could consciously take over not as a victim but as a creator.  I created the lesson and I could learn it and transcend it.  This is not about self-blame.  This is about my own unconscious curiosity.  A theme I myself had a hand in creating but unconsciously creating. 

When I became conscious of the theme, I could trace it back to it’s origins, find the truth of the matter or matters that created and reinforced it and then consciously choose to let go of the charge, let go of the emotion and reprogram my own thought operating system in a healthy way.

So, I have learned many things in this life but none so important as going deep within to find my triggers which lead to my beliefs which helped me to seek greater understanding.  When the understanding came, the triggers dissipated and I stopped reacting to those triggers when they arrived in my environment and I began to choose to respond instead.

If I hadn’t taken the time to learn to meditate and feel the truth about me, these things might never have arisen to my conscious awareness.  I might have remained unconsciously trapped in an emotional-psychological loop that repeated throughout the entirety of my life.  That, at some point, just became not good enough for me.  I somehow began to know and understand that I definitively deserved a better experience. 

Through meditation I learned how to explore the emotions and relax as I went into the core of their source.  I asked myself question after question, I read hundreds of books, I learned and wouldn’t give up until I solved the riddle, took the test (a few times I might add) and then I finally got the lesson by feeling the definitive truth of it.

You see, learning life lessons is work.  Meditation can be used as a simple stress reliever or as a tool for greater introspection. Through learning about ‘feeling’ your way through something with the truth instead of believing something because there is emotion attached, you can transcend your lessons or at least begin to better understand them.

So, through better understanding more about the wonderful wonder that is you, you can shift everything about how you create in this life from someone things happen to – to someone who consciously creates with pleasure.  Through Meditation and going deep within fearlessly to look at anything objectively, seeking help where needed, you can learn what you intended to learn, alleviate your suffering and then be on to a new life lesson potentially even more rewarding.

What is X?

There is a bigger part of our existence than our limited experience of psychology or understanding of Consciousness would bring us.  Solving for X is about seeking to step back from the equation and see it not as the question but rather a mere point of focus for a specific reason of our own design.  Do you ever wonder why your path crosses with certain people who bring you so much joy you are elated beyond words or those who bring you a sense of great disappointment, frustration or disdain?  Well, you should if you want to better understand the much larger framework that we exist within.

You see, this is an amazing place we have decided to point our focus in and it takes a great deal of understanding, cooperation and collective willingness to participate than we ever even give thought to and encompasses by far more than our egoic states of awareness.  Now, these limited components of consciousness are the stuff of our greatest conscious life lessons.  But what if there was an even bigger framework?  What if the egoic part was a tiny glance in one direction and there is still this much bigger and evermore expansive you that exists as a part of Consciousness itself?  What if the Consciousness is the Source of everything?  What if every wave and particle that we experience is Consciousness and holds Consciousness in ways we just can’t cognize or recognize? 

We think we know what we are.  We’re human beings with physical bodies that must be looked after.  We have brains that think.  We feed.  We exercise. We procreate.  We run the Earth.  We have atoms and molecules at various vibrations and densities within us and within the outside world.  What if we are like a tiny ant trying to understand Earth?  We are not too unlike the ant most of the time while we live each day without thinking more expansively.  We march in our rows, we do our jobs and we rest when we need to.  We think this mound is ours but what if we belong to it?  What if we are part of the Earth?  What if we are part of the conscious energy that is this Universe or the Multi-Verse and even greater, the Omniverse – the Quantum Whole?  Have you ever wondered?

We can operate within this whole completely asleep and just moving in our lines and rows like the ants do and life goes merrily along.  We can also operate within this whole growing ever more aware and awake to the truth about what it is, what it might be, what it could be.   But, only if we wanted to; if we just wanted to.  Solving for X; what is X?  Unlike math, I have no equation from which you may derive a definitive answer that is true for all.  Consider this, we are life, love, energy and consciousness bundled up into this point of focus that experiences space-time, gravity, emotions and other feelings.  We are sensitive to so much, dependent seemingly upon things so far out of our control and yet we do the impossible every day in controlling our lives in ways we just don’t comprehend. 

The way in which you formed your life here in this world is uniquely beneficial to you from the simple perspective of learning.  Your existence and interaction here is uniquely beneficial to others from the complex perspective of consciousness.  And Consciousness itself, what is it?  Will we try to continue to anthropomorphize it as God or Goddess?  Will we seek to understand that it is beyond our limited language to speak it or believe in it?  Will we begin to entertain that belief is nothing and feeling is everything and that it is okay to believe in nothing?

Everything that happens here has cause and effect in very specific ways limited by the laws of this collective agreement of this aspect of life.  But there are more divisions of existence than just what we experience.  There are worlds of experience where color has a scent or scent has a physical feeling or sound has a taste and on and on.  There are aspects of Consciousness that cannot be confined by our language and so that is X.  Understanding the source of your life lessons, that is X.  Reaching farther to answer unanswerable questions about all of existence as we perceive it, that is X.  What is Consciousness? 

Consciousness is the biggest, most magnificent and beyond description X that we will attempt to solve for-for eons and never come close to true understanding of the entirety of it.  X can be anything.  X can be you.  X can be your focus.  X can be your life.  X can be a symbol with you at the center point with all of your energy and experience exploding outward into the cosmos lending it your unique and wonderful beingness. 

To me it seems that everything in life results in a Yes, No or Maybe response.  I say that because you can pick a question, any question and ask it of 100 people.  Is it hot today?  What do they all say?  Some might say yes, some might say no.  So then, what is the truth?  Is our perception the truth?  It cannot be definitive if all do not hold it and not all are stupid because they don’t hold your perception.  Perception is an amazingly wonderful thing that is a unique part of our experience of life here on Earth. 

It is through our perception that we see a crimson and violet sky after the sun has set over the ocean and call it beautiful. It is through our perception that we see an action or behavior benign to some and not so benign to others and cry out with our labels of injustice in the absence of understanding.  We will put people and things up on pedestals with our labeling or tear them apart with them not understanding the truth.  But life goes on. 

Consciousness is energy and vibration at some level and energy doesn’t die, it only changes form.  What if we are dreaming safely elsewhere and everything we experience here is only a life lesson?  What if when people die, they aren’t gone forever, they’ve only changed form as their consciousness as part of the larger Consciousness lives on?  Would we be better able to find more compassionate methods to deploy as we live our lives each day?  I wonder.

I also think that even though I do not believe in fate, that there is a method, rhyme and reason to what we experience.  There is a microcosm of reason that is uniquely for our own benefit and there is a macrocosm of reason that is so much bigger and we are the center point of X and yet here we stand on Earth not knowing how truly precious and wonderful we are regardless of form here physically manifest or ethereally manifest.

I suppose the conclusion I come to, which I am entirely open to having changed as many times as is necessary to get to the truth, is that the truth is our experience and understanding is what matters.  I know that we matter, our energy matters, our pain and suffering is never in vane and is never punishment.  I know that we only punish others and ourselves in truth through our own misunderstanding of the meaning of life or the bigger framework from which we operate.

This is life in the third dimension, but what about others?  Yes. There are others and I’ll leave you now with all of this food for thought and maybe you might come up with and test some theories of your own.  What I hope you walk away from this work with is a better understanding of what you do without understanding and what you live without understanding so that maybe you just might wish to seek that understanding.  Understand?

Expectations

In a recent exchange between my partner and I about beliefs and the challenge of finding them, we sometimes need look no further than our expectations about life, people and things to better understand our beliefs.  I believe that the floor below me is solid and so I expect that when I place my weight upon my right foot to walk upon it, I will be suspended in space-time as the particles collapse into waves to support my focus and intent. 

But what if I was wrong?  What if I expected that water was solid just like the ground and I intended to walk upon it without getting wet.  What do you think might happen to me?  I can tell you I’m not Master Jesus, far from it.  So, what do you think would happen to me if I held this expectation?  Yes, I’d be all wet in a heartbeat. Thankfully, I can swim and so when I make the mistake of expectation, once I sink into the deep end of the pool, I can step out of the water without getting mad at it for being what it is and without being angry with myself for having an unreasonable expectation and can consider carefully the origin of my misfortune, my expectation.  Where did it come from?  What belief did I unconsciously hold that lead me to believe I could walk on water?  Hmmm?

These are some extreme examples but think of some of the expectations you hold about others and things in your own life.  Do people always let you down?  Why is that? What expectation do you hold of others in your life?  Why do you hold those expectations?  Where is it getting you?  Is it bringing you satisfaction or is it breading distrust and discontentment?  If it’s a negative experience you have just stumbled onto a message to you from you that you have a belief that needs some attention and understanding. 

I want to share with you an article I wrote when I began to understand expectation and its implications.  The thing I think to remember is to look to those you hold for understanding only and then let go of expectation all together.  When you can do this and then rather than hold expectation, have faith in yourself—you’ll learn that you can navigate this path you traverse as you live the days of your life here on Earth and clear a way through the memories of pain and begin to live again.

Change and Resilience

Sometimes I think the world is so very complicated and at other times, I think it’s very simple.  I guess it depends on whether you are in a state of joy and harmony or a state of sadness and discord.  Life's happenings can often seem to blindside you or randomly wreck your day.  Sometimes even when you see what's coming, no amount of fighting, railing against the world or screaming at the top of your lungs will prevent the inevitable.  Sometimes the inevitable is the only thing possible in order to bring some needed growth.  That growth is important even if you cannot remember why you think you needed it (or realize that at some level it is you who creates all you experience). 

This seems to be, at times, a world completely out of control.  In terms of other people and certain events, I think we can agree that is true.  But, there are possibilities within our realm of control, such as our thoughts.  Our thoughts and how we allow ourselves to perceive things -- well, there is an opportunity for control that is little exercised.  Adjusting our thoughts and resulting emotional reactions can make things a little easier to bear.  But, it takes discipline, desire and a commitment to put all of your energy towards seeing the light in the darkness before you actually begin to.  Trust in your own ability to see eventually, that the bigger picture is what is needed along with a LOT of patience.

Life is funny I suppose.  With all of us running around building straw houses of expectations for this or that, entitlement abounds with good and solid justification (or so we think) and at the end of the day it matters not one bit because what will be will be. Our houses of expectation will be blown apart with the next strong gust of wind.  Its not personal, even if at times it feels like it.  We can reduce ourselves to victims spilling our power out in every direction but that is really a waste of precious energy. 

Breathing is the only thing a soul can do sometimes when the world seems fraught with nothing but disappointment and frustration.  When I encounter these things I start to realize that these "things" - disappointment and frustration - occur not because I haven't tried hard enough or that I'm not good enough but simply because I'm most likely refusing to change and grow from a situation or the goal set has already been accomplished and it's time to move on.  A situation I cling too out of fear of change or fear of the unknown could never bring me anything but continuous frustration and disappointment.  It's a hard realization.  At the same time, however, it is one very important and oh so very beautiful revelation

So, I watched the sun set tonight and I felt every color change deep within my soul.  I realized as much as I loved the beauty before me, I could not hold it.  I could hold the memory for a lifetime but the world turning is not something I can freeze in this moment.  I must let the vision transform as it will and then go.  I must let the world turn away from the sun, let the sky go cool and dark and still be okay with the coming night.  I realize in the thoughts of disappointment and frustration I have unlimited opportunities.  The light shines now in a different way.  The clouds as I'm thinking of hope and embracing much needed change turn pink and purple.  It's chilly now but I welcome the change as a necessary part of this framework of hours. 

I welcome now too the changes coming in my life as a necessary part of this framework in season.  There is no twisting or churning in my soul.  As these thoughts flow, I can feel the alignment return.  I take a deep breath and a mental step in the form of a shift in thinking in the core of my being.  I choose to allow what is to unfold and to remain ever curious of what may transpire.  There is a beautiful grace in opening to the unknown.  There is an absence of fear when you relax into the shift of awareness inside.  I'm grateful, as I stand here chilly with my partner smiling also enjoying this view.  I have much to be grateful for in this life and more things to come that no doubt I'll continue to hold gratitude for.

Take time every now and then to contemplate your frustrations and disappointments in life while watching the sunset.  Realize that this world and its happenings (or lack thereof in some cases) are not designed to hurt you but to get you to see how much love that you have inside, how much creativity and resilience you hold. 

Painful or shocking experiences resulting from your expectations are sometimes what it takes to get to the core of a belief.  If you continue to hold the same expectations time after time of the same outcome, you’re not getting it.  So what are you trying to get?  Don’t you want to know?  Don’t you want to quit walking into the same brick wall or traversing the same dead end road?  If you’re tired of it, it’s time to not engage in blame but to instead look to the origins, the impetus, the motivations for the decisions you are making. 

Are they bringing you what you want or not?  Do you want something different or not?  You see it is entirely up to you?  I’m just pointing out a way you can become consciously aware of your beliefs through exploring your expectations.  The inside part of you will try to speak but the malware can get in the way making internal information seemingly unreliable unless you can tune out thoughts and tune into feeling and then triangulate the lesson through reflection across the boundary of consciousness you hold contained within you and that consciousness that is happening on its own volition outside the boundaries of your mind-body. 

If you can put feeling together with patterns, you can see when something is amiss in your own perception.  Don’t mistake this as a “blame self” and then-stop-try again. That’s missing the point.  You have to push past that to the truth and it isn’t easy.  It takes time and effort to truly understand.  But, if you continually ask why?  Why this?  Why that?  How come this is happening?  What did I do to contribute to this? What thought did I think? What expectation did I hold?  What assumption did I make?  What belief did I hold?  Where did that belief come from and is it true? What can I do differently? Could I have done anything differently?  What am I learning from all of this behavior both internally and externally to me?  I can promise it isn’t about how not to trust this big bad awful world that is out to get you.  It isn’t.  It just exists as you observe it.

It…all of it…all of your experiences are trying to get you to look at you, to look inside of you, to understand you, to forgive you, to have faith in you, to know you and most importantly to love you.  Love you!  You are worthy of it, you can wield it to solve many a challenge that you face and use it to engage true compassionate unconditional love from which you use as a filter to view this world in its truth and not its seeming illusions.  You are amazing and powerful and you don’t even realize how much.  But when you look within and see all that you have created unconsciously, all that you have done and learned you can start to realize the true greatness of your Consciousness and how that Consciousness is connected to an even more amazing collective that is All that Is!

Conclusion

Going back now to where I began, the diagram, the thing that looked like an X, it is a point of focus of the entirety of your or my consciousness in physical form in this moment.  Imagine as you will that the X, or that point at which all of your awareness converges moves on a particular track or trajectory through space-time in this third dimension with all the gravity and everything else tangible and intangible that you have to deal with.  There is no set path except for that which you have designed and you have left yourself clues with every single thought you’ve had, every action taken, every situation experienced, every emotion held and every goal you’ve ever consciously contemplated.

Your presence here is not random, as some would have you think because you are not random.  You are very intentional.  Think about that for a moment in a very quiet and still place.  How does the thought of being random and meaningless feel to you?  Go on.  Try it.  Hold that thought and feel how that feels.  Does it really ring as truth to you?  Now, clear that thought away and go back again to the silence and stillness of your thoughts.  Think again.  Are you a consciously sentient being here with great intention and purpose?  Is your life being lived in alignment with its purpose?  Hold those thoughts and feel how that feels?  Does that ring as truth to you? 

You know so much more than you think you do but you haven’t been taught how to read the signs and the clues everywhere around you.  We human beings joke, “If only we had instruction books.”  But we do have instruction books and maps and education programs and it is called living life, right here and right now.  We are all we need and we have all we need to first discern our unique and particular purpose for intending to be here and then for finding and then understanding our beautiful purpose for living here at this time.

Look to your own experiences and learning, question your beliefs, know how to find the hidden ones as if you are on the biggest treasure hunt of your life.  I will tell you that if you take up this very uniquely personal cause, you will get to the gold, the treasures deep and vast that lie waiting right inside the heart of you for you to claim in pure and delicious victory.  You just have to be willing to want it.  You just have to want to understand.  When you want it and you seek the truth, doorways will open up for you that allow you to do the work necessary to understand your life’s purpose and it does have purpose and you being here has a great meaning not just for you but for us all.

As sure as I’m breathing here, typing away on these keys, I know that your lives are precious and despite the challenges and adversity that you face, you will learn that which you intended to learn and you will grow in immeasurable ways for the experience.  I’ve heard it said more than a hundred times, that when the student is ready the teacher will come.  I think the truth of that statement lies in the understanding that you are your teacher and whenever you are ready to embrace the fullness, wonder and beauty of you, you will have found it.  You will have solved X, whatever that is for you in your wonderful, amazing and beautiful life.  And that, have I concluded over twenty years of research into this topic I respectfully add for your consideration.

Thank you for being here.  Thank you, for you.

Referenced Works

Hart, Jaie.  “The Spaces Between,” “Subtle and Secret Passage Ways” and “Change and Resilience,”  2009-2014.  http://dreamintime.com.  Web.

Harter, J.L. So It’s Over.  Now What? The Ministry of Connected Consciousness, 2014.  California.  Print.

Harter, J.L. Solving for X. The Ministry of Connected Consciousness, 2014. California. Print.

Harter, J.L.  The Ego is the Veil, The Ministry of Connected Consciousness, 2014.  California.  Print.

Kaku, Michio. “M-Theory:  The Mother of all SuperStrings.” Mkaku.org: 2014.  Web.

Kaku, Michio.  The Future of the Mind. Doubleday, 2014.  New York. Print.

©2014 Dr. J.L. Harter

 Rev. Dr. J.L. Harter, Founding Editor. See Bio Section for more information.