What is the best way to find an Enlightened master to help raise my level of consciousness?

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Enlightened masters cannot raise your level of consciousness. Nothing can. I have been diving into the nature of consciousness for years, and I have yet to find a single useful method. It’s a good thing too. If such a thing were possible, then existing as a separate consciousness would cease to have any meaning.

What a master can do is point the way for you to have deeper experience. If you are ready for this, it will find you. But deeper experience is not really all that much more consciousness-raising than normal experience.

If you are not ready, then the master can spend years with you and you won’t be all that much better off than you would have been otherwise. Being around a master is interesting and neat and gives you the convincing illusion that you are advancing just by being in his presence.

But consciousness is bigger than any one experience, or series of experiences. It’s orders of magnitude larger. Or not so much larger in this case, rather deeper.

Consciousness is so massive, so amazingly deep, that you could stand in the presence of God Himself, have God open up his entire book to you, how everything operates in the world, and you’d only be mildly more conscious after the experience.

The reason why this is is the very essence of consciousness. Consciousness needs to be continuous, and it needs to retain identity. If either trait were to be lost, then what it means to exist as an independent agent is lost. It’s like the transporter dilemma in Star Trek. Does reducing a person’s body to information, transporting it across space, and reconstituting the body from the information kill the person? It’s a question of philosophy and not physics.

And so is the continuity of consciousness. If you could meaningfully affect your level of consciousness on any level other than the one offered by normal experiencing, then your identity ceases to be continuous. This means that every event you could possibly experience gets reduced to a ‘normal’ experience, not one that destroys your identity.

Death is the ultimate in destruction. But consciousness does not get destroyed upon death, it merely moves to another plane. It is instead, reduced down to essence, the minimum amount of information required to maintain continuity and identity. Continuity is easy, but identity is trickier. But you can resolve it by thinking about amnesiacs. Imagine if you woke up one morning not knowing who you are. Does that mean you cease to exist? No, you just forgot.

All beings are unaware of their true identity. They slowly learn what that is over time. It’s the very process of consciousness growth. Nothing can speed it up, so just relax and enjoy the time you have the best way that you can. Maybe you’ll find a master to liven it up a bit, maybe not. Either way, find meaning where you can.