We saw yesterday how changing our mindset and increasing our human awareness can help us to resolve problems. Today I’d like to introduce you to the three levels of consciousness, which will help you to gauge where you are on the ladder of awareness.
Throughout your life, you can measure yourself on the following three levels of consciousness. Few, if any of us, ever stay at any one level all of the time. These levels of awareness are presented from lowest to highest.
1. The first level is ego consciousness. In ego consciousness, your primary emphasis is on your personality and your body. There’s an exceptionally strong belief in your separateness from everyone else, from all that you’d like to attract into your life, and from God. This attitude puts you into a state of competing for your share as if your job is to get there first. Winning and being number one seem to be the most important things you can do when you live at the level of ego consciousness. You spend a lot of your time measuring your success on the basis of how you stack up against others.
If you have more than others, you feel better about yourself. Having more money makes you feel better. Accumulating more awards and prestige and climbing higher on the corporate ladder encourage you to feel good about yourself. Ego consciousness prods you to compete, compare, and conclude that you are the best, so you concentrate on running faster and looking better than others. It’s at this level of consciousness that problems exist. This is where inner peace is virtually impossible and success eludes you, because you must always be striving to be someplace else.
In order to walk comfortably along the extra mile, you must tame this ever-demanding, impossible-to-satisfy ego. Feelings of despair, anger, hatred, bitterness, stress, and depression stem from the ego’s anxiety and insistence on living up to an external standard. The result is the anguish of not measuring up or fitting in properly. The ego will seldom allow you to rest, and demands more and more because it’s terrified that you’ll be called a failure. When you move beyond ego and make your higher self the dominant force in your life, you’ll begin to feel that contentment and inner glow of peace and success that characterize the extra mile.
2. The second level is group consciousness. Group consciousness is similar to ego consciousness with the exception that you move past yourself as the central focus of your life, and you now include others who are members of your tribe or your clan. You suppress your individual ego and join a larger organization, the group ego. Your membership is based upon your family, your heritage, your racial background, your religion, your language, your political affiliation, and so on. You’re required to think and act like the group to which you’ve been assigned. You go to war in the name of patriotism to kill others who have been conditioned to do the same. You identify yourself as a particular ethnic person, often with labels such as Italian, Chinese, or African American.
At the group consciousness level, you’re often dedicated to continuing social problems such as war, brutality, and religious persecution, which originated in ancestral enmities that have existed for thousands of years. But it also comes right down to daily living. Families insist that you adopt their viewpoint, hate whom they hate, and love whom they love.
You have blind allegiance to a company that may be making weapons of destruction, a concept to which you’re normally opposed, but you do it anyway because “It’s my job.” Some policemen and soldiers victimize their fellow human beings by behaving worse than the criminals or so-called enemies they abhor so much. Our inhumanity to our fellow human beings is often justified on the grounds of a group-consciousness mentality. Members of gangs or societies will behave in horrid ways, spurred on by a group or clan mentality. In short, what the group dictates becomes your identification card as a human being.
Remember that, as we discussed yesterday, you can’t solve any problem with the same mind that created it. In order to resolve a struggle that results from group consciousness, you have to change your mind or continue to have the problem haunt you. Resolving problems related to group consciousness involves moving into the highest level.
3. The third level is mystical consciousness. This level of problem-free consciousness is distinguished by the feeling of connectedness rather than separateness. At the level of mystical consciousness, you feel connected to every individual, every creature, the entire planet, and God.
Feeling connected means you truly sense that we are all one, and that harm directed at others is really harm directed at ourselves. Here, cooperation supplants competition; hatred is dissolved with love; and sadness is reduced to nothingness with joy. At this level, you’re a member of the human race, not a sub-group. Here, you’re a nation of the world with a global awareness, rather than a patriot of any one country. In mystical consciousness, you won’t feel separate from any one, any thing, or God. You won’t be what you have, what you accomplish, or what others think of you. You will be the beloved, and you will have changed your mind! Problems will now be only illusions of the mind that you no longer carry around with you.
As the great humanitarian Mahatma Gandhi put it, “Man becomes great exactly in the degree to which he works for the welfare of his fellow man.” This is the level of mystical or God consciousness. It is a place where you can live a problem-free existence by changing your thoughts from ego and group consciousness to the higher level of mysticism. Here, you truly understand what Thoreau meant when he said, “There is no remedy for love but to love more.