(being there) Awareness

The term “consciousness” has often been misrepresented to mean “mindful,” “deliberate,” “thinking” or even “smart.” These meanings do not include awareness of your unconscious dynamics (patterns of emotion and behavior), and thus they represent a very low level of emotional skill.

Since consciousness has already been defined here, as the level of life skill that is common to all four aspects of being, any representation that does not include higher emotional skills cannot be considered Higher Consciousness. Being mindful simply is not the same as being conscious.
When you are being conscious, you are practicing a set of skills that allow you complete awareness of your inner dynamics, awareness of your Personal Truth, awareness of the responsibility you are claiming, and awareness of the behavior you must choose to be consistent with your truth.

Since you are so fully aware of you, it is much easier to identify the energy of others surrounding you. In the often-confusing mix between you and everyone and everything else, you are able to clearly identify you. This self-awareness fills you with an ease of being and a confidence that you can deal with anything else.

Awareness begins with being willing to feel all that you feel. It is only then that you can process the experience to gain all of the awareness that follows. Awareness of your emotion means feeling it, exploring it, knowing its color and texture and flavor, recognizing nuances, recalling previous experiences that felt like this, remembering your inclination to behave in automatic ways from this emotion and specifically naming it.

This requires exercising certain skills beyond willingness to feel. You will need to develop a habit of journaling about your experience. This will increase your emotional awareness like nothing else can, and is easily the single best awareness skill you can learn. We have seen from thirty years of experience that those who journal grow at a rate many times faster than those who do not.

Using the forum, BEingThere.net, is a way of "group journaling" that also increases your rate of growth. We have seen unmistakable evidence that those who post on the forum grow much faster than those who do not.

The next chapter will introduce you to the next most effective skill for powering your growth into Higher Consciousness and Enlightenment, seeking.
©2005, 2004 BEing There Enlightenment Systems, Inc.