How can I raise my consciousness?

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You can’t develop your consciousness. Not directly. As far as I’ve been able to determine, consciousness slowly increases over the course of your life. Let me draw a map I’ve been working on for you.

The way the map works is that with concentrated application of the level underneath, you’re supposed to be able to make gains on the level above. You have to find the key first, someone can spend their entire lives in the realm of the intellect, never finding the key to wisdom.

The idea here is that if you keep finding keys and moving up, you can make progress on consciousness. But no key has been found for the last few levels, and so directly increasing consciousness is out of our reach.

At the bottom of the map is intellect. This is using the mind to directly solve problems. You can work on your intellect by doing smart people stuff, reading and thinking.

Next step up is wisdom. This is using the mind to recognize transcendent patterns and solving problems at that level. Intellect is knowing you can blow up the Death Star, wisdom is turning off your computer and just using the force. You can work on your wisdom by being willing to make mistakes and then learning from them.

The next level up is ego. Your ability to learn lessons is directly constrained by your ego. It’s worked on by the process of surrender. It’s extremely difficult to find this key, and most people never find it in their whole lives. Plenty of wise old men out there with enormous egos.

But if you do manage to find the key, the next level you run into is your identity, who you think you are. If you surrender your ego completely, we call this enlightenment, then you still have an identity and the identity can generate more ego artifacts, preventing you from seeing or moving any deeper. Identity is also worked on using the process of surrender, but it’s more difficult because while ego is not self, identity truly is. So the thing being surrendered is the thing doing the surrendering. This makes it an order of magnitude more difficult, even if you find the key.

Think you’re almost done? Nope, we have at least three more levels before we hit the top. And then we’ll discuss why meditation doesn’t really help as much as you might think.

Now we hit the level above identity, perception, the very things you see and perceive. Perception concerns the forms of the things you’re seeing. You can explore this function through meditation but there’s no key to find no matter how much you look here. Identity is composed of a number of things that you are constantly perceiving. Even knowing this, and even doing lots and lots of work to surrender your identity, perception just goes right on continuing to create identity artifacts. There is no key available here, all you can do is observe the process.

The next step is awareness. Awareness generates perceptive artifacts. Try it right now, try to be more aware of more things. Difficult to directly do. Regular meditation can temporarily increase this ability, but it’s really slow going.

The next step up is responsiveness. When things happen to you, the Buddhists call them ‘sense doors’, then you can respond. This happens many many many times a second and the perceptive artifacts that awareness generates are composed of these little responses to stimuli. Again, no key to find here, all you can do is observe the mechanism.

Finally we reach consciousness. To understand consciousness, you first need to realize the abstract nature of all the previous levels. Wisdom can be seen as a type of intellect, that gets transformed as you unlock it. It makes little sense to continue operating at a low level once you’ve found the key. And you continue to use the lower level until you fully unlock the new level. Generating new wisdom as you surrender ego is easy, so you don’t have to focus on it once you’ve figured out the mechanism behind it

As you work on your awareness, it gets seen that you can perceive different types of stuff. Studying responsiveness yields the insight that awareness is just one way you can respond to stuff.

Consciousness is the end because it concerns the very ‘stuff’ of being. It’s a backstop. If you were to change any aspect of the earlier levels directly, then you would not be a different being. If your awareness made a hard shift, responsiveness would still continue unabated. You can die and get reborn, rebooting your identity, and still be the same person.

Not so with consciousness. Meditate on responsiveness long enough and you find that it’s the very essence of being. To stop responding is to stop existing.

Now remember what I said about consciousness slowly increasing over time? I kinda lied there. It’s responsiveness that slowly increases. It’s just that the responsiveness increasing changes your very being. When you respond faster, everything else goes faster too. So you find the keys to move up the chain faster.

Note the terminology. I use self to refer to the aspects of being that are at identity and lower. Beingness concerns the levels above your identity. Imagine waking up in a dream. In the dream, you’re a doctor. Your identity has changed, your self is different, but you remain the same being, in that the consciousness mechanisms are the same.

In fact lots of things can shift, morph, and jump. But consciousness itself, the totality of all the previous aspects, cannot do so, otherwise you’d cease to be the same being, and at this high level, you have to remain continuous. This aspect is the source of the religious and spiritual convictions you see a lot stating that “you can’t destroy consciousness.”

So you’re kinda stuck, the long chain of mental aspects from intellect all the way up to responsiveness has to stay anchored to one point.

But the good news is that changing identity by surrendering ego, and transcending the identity by breaking it down into component parts is really all you need. It just won’t happen all at once.