I think it is important to point out that throughout this article I will refer to the act of remembering. With remembering I am not speaking of the usual thing we do when we recall bits of information that has been stored in our memory or minds. I am speaking of remembering ourselves, how we remember our being. To remember who we are, without forgetting it.
When I talk about levels of consciousness I often use describe it as different ”states of openness”. Imagine a door and how the door can be more or less open in infinite steps of openness. The more open the door, the more you can see.
Several teachings have introduced various ideas and concepts around levels of consciousness. Practicing the teachings of the Three Principles I have learned that whatever consciousness is there are infinite levels of the experience of it. It also seems like it is impossible to measure or grade these levels.
However, I came across a way of talking about levels of consciousness which helped me to create some way of measuring the movements of consciousness. It also helped me see why we move through the levels and don’t just stay at one level once we have reached it.
This I would like to share with you.
4 states of consciousness
According to some teachings it seems like there are four levels of consciousness for our being.
- Passive
- Active
- Self-aware
- Awake
The higher states knows about the lower states because it remembers them and their characteristics. The lower states cannot know the higher states other than as concepts and ideas, i.e. something created by the intellect, our mind. True knowledge can only be revealed in a real experience where you are fully present, not just like an intellectual idea or concept.
There also seems to be one universal law that applies when it comes to raise ones level of consciousness. No matter which level you experience life from, everyone from time to time pay visits to higher levels BUT in order to benefit and learn from those visits you need to be fully present when you visit them.
Only when we are fully present in our visits to higher states we remember them.
The act of remembering opens the gate to higher states.
This is merely an attempt to describe the different states and how I see them. It is very important to understand that there is nothing one can do to remember. The remembering I am referring to is the one that takes place without our doing, without effort. When we are being, we don’t have to remember. Attempts to remind oneself to remember is not a true remembering in that sense.
The different levels can be described as below.
- Passive (ordinary sleep) – we really don’t remember more than tiny fragments.
- Active – We think that we remember but we remember far less than we want to admit. We even try and succeed to deceive ourselves with this.
This state is Thought and Emotion driven. We have no or very limited control over our thoughts, our emotions, our imagination or the focus of our attention. We live in a subjective world of ”I like it”, ”I don’t like it”, ”I want it”, ”I don’t want it”. We don’t see the real world because it is obscured by the veil of our thinking. In an sense we live in sleep.
Here we can glimpse a higher state but we rarely remember them. They seem almost like small moments of dreams. They seem like this to us because our conscious attention didn’t follow into these higher states or the attention was held there for a very short period and we got distracted again. - Self-aware – the state of awakening, we start to wake up, we remember ourselves.
Everything around us will take on an entirely different aspect and meaning. We see that life as we generally know it is the life of sleeping people, a life in sleep. Million rows of information written by people for thousands of years in sleep will never help them waking up. On the contrary, the only thing it will do is to keep people sleeping and helping others to fall asleep. In this state we are aware of ourselves but we involuntary move between the state active and self-aware. We are also (and sometimes painfully) aware of this movement which can be a source to all sorts of discomfort. In this state we may experience the state of objective consciousness and we almost never forget these moments. - Objective consciousness – the state of no self. This is our true nature or true self if you prefer. We use memory and imagination for practical matters. Like making appointments and to avoid things we are not interested in.
We see the world as it is.
We are all beings with the same potential
What is very important to understand is that the levels of consciousness described here are within us all. There is no distance to neither of them. Therefor they are all within our reach, in every moment.
You can consider them as potentials of your being.
And the best way to discover them is to starting to explore your being.