What can I do to expand my consciousness?

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I want to give this a real answer based on my many years contemplating and analyzing existence and consciousness.

Generally there are two things people speak of when they talk about consciousness. There’s the conscious awareness aspect that everyone considers, and theres the sense in which we talk about “expanding consciousness.” There’s an intuitive conceptualization that spiritual people and even lots of scientifically-minded folks have of ‘levels’ of consciousness.

My own spiritual path interwove heavily with this idea, that people can expand their consciousness. I followed the teachings of a Dr. David R Hawkins, who spoke of a “scale of consciousness.” The scale proceeded from 1 to 1000, from body identification to mind identification to awareness identification to “Self” identification, differentiated from “self” identification.

It took me awhile, but I finally was able to move past his ideas and start coming up with my own. My own investigation concerned the specific manner in which consciousness grows. It seems obvious that consciousness is always experiencing things and always growing. But it doesn’t seem to grow at the same rate all the time.

Hawkins taught that some things increased your level of consciousness, and some things decreased it. That made less sense to me the more I looked at it. I wanted to know how much perception played a role. I had to come to the conclusion that consciousness always increases, it never decreases. It also never stays completely static. Therefore anything you do will expand your consciousness.

Your existence moves at the pace of experience. The very mechanism of experiencing things is the same as the mechanism of consciousness growth. Truly, you learn by doing. But some things seem to be better than others when it comes to growth. Spiritual people will think spiritual activities are better. Atheists, to the extent that they grasp the concept of consciousness growth, have a different perspective.

My understanding is that your consciousness grows faster when you are able to exercise more of it while you are having an experience. Things you find deeply fulfilling are going to require more from you. They’re going to push you inexorably towards lessons you need to learn so you can live even larger.

So my rough heuristic approach to growing consciousness as quickly as you can is thus: Find the most fulfilling life you can lead and just lead it. If you can’t do that, then come up with a plan that will push you towards that life and follow it. If fulfillment doesn’t seem to be an option for you, then do what you like to do and ignore the rest as much as possible.

A lot of people seem to think that movies and video games rot the brain. I am of the complete opposite opinion. These things often allow us to exercise more of the higher aspects of our being than anything else available. Particularly the ones that involve other humans that you play against.

Modern life has upended a lot of traditional values. One of those traditional values is the vaunted “thy must contribute to society.” Society fails so many people. Do what you love to do and let society rot. Obviously I can’t recommend you do anything criminal, but only because it’s hard to find meaning in being in jail.