Living Consciously – What Does that Mean?

I’ve found that learning to live more consciously is important to enjoying life to the fullest, growing personally in new ways, being more successful, connecting to people, and making a positive difference in the world.

Let me see if I can explain why even a little – because, in actuality, it is a fairly complex subject…

Living more consciously involves having greater awareness, paying more attention, and responding appropriately based on how the greater awareness informs us. It is a key factor in being able to shift to a higher perspective and seeing the bigger, more holistic picture of any situation, and that’s a part of being able to respond effectively.

If someone would ask us how conscious we are, we would likely respond that we are normally pretty conscious of what’s going on. We certainly aren’t unconscious to the world, except when we’re sleeping.

But the reality is that, far more than we might think, we are creatures of habit to a high degree – even to how we answer people’s questions and how we act and react to a large percentage of situations. Habit simplifies our lives and allows us to think about other things while we do mundane tasks. But habit reduces our level of consciousness of much of what goes on with us and around us.

Additionally, we tend not to see the need as individuals (or even as groups, collectives or societies) to grow consciously – that is, we lack awareness as to why we need to grow or how we should proceed.

We also tend to be highly unaware of how much our beliefs and present level of consciousness affect (limit) our awareness, perception, and interpretation of ourselves and the world. We tend to believe that growth, learning, and advancement are simpler and more linear than in reality they are.

The world and universe are far more complex, non-linear, interconnected, and wholistic than we realize, so we can’t see or understand all of the relationships. More critically, growth and learning happens in stages and levels, and in most cases you don’t have the perspective to understand things that are operating at levels above that of your current consciousness.

So individuals and societies and mankind must always seek to grow in consciousness, but very few people talk about the need or are capable of leading the way.

So when I say “living more consciously” it ultimately must mean “growing consciously”. Being more conscious always helps us be more aware of ourselves, more aware of others and the world around us, and more aware of what’s happening in our lives.

And more awareness helps us be more effective in decisions and actions for our own behalf and for that of others and for the contexts that we must relate to, such as marriage, family, organizations, teams, communities, and so on up the hierarchy. More effectiveness translates directly into more success however it is qualified or measured.

Living more consciously and growing consciously are vitally important to us and to mankind. Living more consciously is actually a grand calling that we should heed… It is the opening of doors of new opportunities, and it is our greatest destiny calling us in order to serve the world in all its growing needs.