Consciousness—a Simple Explanation
A life with Awareness is not a physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual exercise. It is all of them combined.
Human beings are capable of multiple levels of consciousness.
The subconscious is the level at which you do things without knowing that you are doing them–they happen automatically. Examples include growing your hair and toenails, beating your heart and other bodily operations you don’t have to remember to do. These seem to just happen without your having to think about them. This same level of consciousness can be an instantaneous problem solver. It can instruct your body and mind to do things that your conscious mind is not capable of thinking. Your subconscious mind can make a choice for you in a situation where you are in danger and automatically respond by moving you from that situation. For example, your subconscious pulls your hand away from a sharp object or a burning hot pan. Your subconscious mind knows what to do without you needing to make a conscious choice.
The conscious level is where you have an understanding of what you are doing in the real world. You consciously choose to engage the turn signal in your car as you come to an intersection or you create a shopping list before you go to the grocery store. You know why you are doing these things. You could say the conscious level is where you know what you know, whereas at the subconscious level there are things you don’t know that you know.
The superconscious is the level of your spirit. It contains the overall agenda for your lifetime. Similar to your subconscious, it knows things that you don’t know at the level of conscious. However, it’s different in its purpose. The superconscious is responsible for attracting people and experiences to you in your tangible world at the exact right time to produce the experience you need for your spiritual curriculum. Your superconscious desires to have some experiences that your human-only mind and emotions probably wouldn’t. This will be explained more in the next section.
As you begin to create your life with Awareness, you experience the merging of your levels of consciousness. More of what you didn’t know you knew is revealed to you and then you know it consciously. You begin to create your real world experience not only from the conscious level, but also from deeper levels of consciousness.
The supraconscious is the level of full Awareness, your highest self and highest thoughts. Supraconsciousness is when your conscious, subconscious and superconscious all work together. At this level, you use your conscious mind to access and coordinate with your other levels of consciousness. This is the level of consciousness that Jesus, The Buddha and others demonstrated while in human form. This is also the experience that some people have during meditation and others have in moments just before death. All humans have the ability to access this level of consciousness.
Accessing the supraconscious is described in the next chapter. However, I want to offer you an example from my own life here. The creation of this book began in my superconscious before it arrived in my consciousness. At first I felt called toward this creation, yet I resisted because I knew the time and effort it would take would interfere with my normal conscious perspective that I should continue my job, making a high salary and building my net worth. This caused some of the most challenging emotions (including self-doubt) that I’ve ever experienced. It was only when I learned to access Awareness and my supraconscious that my conscious mind was able to comprehend what was happening. This was part of my superconscious agenda even though my conscious mind didn’t know it. Even when this was revealed to me, I still resisted and delayed because it challenged my conditioned, logical thinking so much. This was one of my key experiences of acceptance and trust. I conceded to the officially nameless and faceless Mystery and today you are reading this book. I can also tell you that no tangible world project has ever felt more meaning-filled to me. Others have been exciting and fun, but none more meaningful!