INsight/ Your Consciousness Examined

Photo by Doreen Kinistino on Pixabay.

Manila, 6 October 2022 — Three paths to expand your awareness.

Story

It happened in 1993. My colleagues and I were sitting in a dark, gloomy-looking room in the late afternoon to start a training session. All of us had recently joined an international bank and we were excited to get trained for our new roles. This particular session, however, was very different from what we expected. The facilitator to teach us about stress management turned out to be a psychic, and the way he started the class made us sit up somewhat uncomfortably: he started laughing at us. 

After a while, he composed himself and explained that he could see our auras, and that for all of us, our energy fields were large around our heads, with very little energy showing up around the rest of our bodies. Top heavy, you might say, and clearly out of balance. I still remember feeling stunned by hearing his observation, and it triggered me to realize that I should expand my consciousness to take this and other new perspectives into account.

Remarkably, until today, consciousness studies from a scientific perspective are still in their infancy. Not for lack of trying though. Because of the difficulties in analyzing what are highly subjective experiences, science is still catching up with several insights that have been generated by the world’s wisdom traditions for several thousand years. For example, the presence of neural networks in our hearts and gut, long recognized in Eastern wisdom traditions and in many of our colloquial expressions, was validated by scientists only recently. For leaders who want to influence change in people and situations, learning to live and act from an expanded awareness involves using a variety of sources.

Challenge

In my experience, I have seen three paths for expanding our consciousness, commonly defined as a state of being aware of something outside or inside ourselves. Millennia ago, Buddhist researchers already identified as many as eight kinds of consciousness, including those associated with our senses as well as with concepts and with the experiences and ideas stored from the past. Awareness, then, is about our ability to be conscious. There is a lot to take in about this week’s topic, just as I was triggered by the psychic trainer to explore more dimensions of reality. 

So how can we, as leaders, practice to live and act from an expanded awareness? The first path is simple, available to us all with only a little effort, and yields immediate benefits. We just have to remind ourselves to use it often. It is to practice slow diaphragmatic breathing to balance our state of mind. We can do this many times a day, for a brief moment or for longer periods. We all know how a few slow and deep breaths can calm us down or center us. That is because breathing affects the two branches of our autonomous nervous system. Not surprisingly, therefore, all of the ancient wisdom traditions included breathing practices, to help us open the door to expand our awareness.

The second path builds on the first and requires cognitive as well as contemplative effort. It involves becoming a student of how people, the world, and the cosmos actually work, using an Integral approach that accounts for both subjective and objective perspectives. In an earlier post, I referred to using the Three Worlds Model to see reality simultaneously through the lenses of your personal world, social world, and observed world. Taking this second path helps to scan and select relevant perspectives in each situation, and to act from an expanded awareness. I practice this path every day. 

Question

For many people, these two paths are sufficient to help them live and lead from an expanded awareness. For some, including me, this is not enough, leading us to embark on a third path, which builds on the first two and goes even further. It involves uncovering the answer to the most fundamental questions about life as a human being and coming to realize through direct personal and transformational experience that it is actually our mind that creates everything we perceive, including all types of consciousness. 

On this third path, we can discover that behind all the dualities and illusions that show up in our minds and frequently cause suffering, there is an ultimate nondual reality that defies description and can only be experienced through direct personal practice. The Eastern wisdom traditions have long understood this, and offer us practices to discover and walk on this third path, with a commitment to help as many other sentient beings as we can. In Buddhism, this is referred to as the Bodhisattva path. You can give it your own name.

My question to you this week is where you are with examining your consciousness. Our journey of leadership development involves growing as human beings and gaining a full understanding of our life, our potential, and everything that we can become conscious of. The story about seeing auras is just a simple illustration of getting to see more of reality than I had realized before. In my coaching, helping leaders to expand their awareness is an integral part of what we work on together. If you would like to develop your leadership by walking on some or all of these three paths, book a free strategy call so that we can discuss how to make that happen.