As you strive to bring more truth into your life, you must cultivate a high degree of self-awareness. This includes becoming aware of your strengths, weaknesses, talents, knowledge, biases, attachments, desires, emotions, instincts, habits, and state of mind.
As human beings, we’re often filled with conflicting desires. One part of us want to be healthy, happy, and highly conscious. Another part wants nothing more than to eat, sleep, have sex, and be lazy. Without the presence of consciousness, we fall into reflexive patterns by default, living more like unconscious animals than fully sentient human beings.
Recognize that your level 01 awareness doesn’t remain constant. Sometimes pure logic dominates your thinking: other times you’re overwhelmed with emotional concerns. Sometimes you feel incredibly spiritual; other times you’re worried about your finances. Sometimes you eat for good health and energy; other times you satisfy yourself with all the processed junk you can devour.
When you make decisions from a certain state of mind and act upon them, you reinforce that same state, thereby increasing the likelihood you’ll respond similarly in the future. For example, if you act out of anger, you’ll strengthen your mind’s anger response. If you act out of kindness, you’ll reinforce a kind response. Any given level of awareness has a tendency to perpetuate itself, so you’ll likely find yourself cycling through the same ones repeatedly. A significant part of personal development involves working to release your attachment to the lower states as you draw yourself into higher consciousness on a more consistent basis. On a practical level, this means letting go of addictions, negative emotions, and fear-based behaviors and replacing them with consciously chosen, principle-centered actions. And in order to successfully change your behaviors, you must first develop an awareness of your thoughts.
A good way to build your awareness is to make your important decisions from the most reasonable thinking you can muster. The best point to make new choices is when you feel alert, clearheaded, and intelligent. That’s the time to consider making big transformations in your life such as a career change, a relationship change, or moving to a new city. Learn to trust those higher states of consciousness. Put the decisions in writing and fully commit yourself to them. When you inevitably sink back down to lower states and lose sight of that higher perspective, continue to act on those decisions even though you may no longer feel as committed to them. Over time, your external circumstances will change in ways that reinforce those higher states. Living consciously gets easier with practice.
One time when I (Steve Pavlina) was in a state of very high awareness, I made the decision to switch careers from computer-game development to personal development. That was a stretch for me, especially since my games business was doing well, and I still had several large projects on my plate. However, I felt good about the decision, and I knew it was correct. But of course a few weeks later, I was still bogged down working on the games business with no end in sight. As I slipped into a lower level of awareness, I began to second-guess my determination to switch careers. I had to remind myself that I’d made the choice from a high level of awareness; and it was a sound, intelligent decision. This helped me let go of my resistance and trust the original choice I’d made.
My decisions may not be perfect, but when I use this process, I can at least trust that I made them correctly and from a place of truth.
When you consistently make key decisions from a high level of awareness, they will become more congruent. You’ll avoid getting stuck in that state of ambivalence where you keep shifting back and forth between alternatives and can’t make up your mind. Recognize that when you make choices from a place of anger, fear, sadness, or guilt, you cannot be aligned with truth because your predictions will be negatively biased by those lower states.
Self-awareness is really truth-awareness. When your awareness is high, you’re closer to truth than when your awareness is low. If you aren’t aligned with truth, your decisions will produce inferior results. Truth-aligned decisions are more accurate and will tend to yield better results than those made from low awareness. The key is to use your self-awareness to recognize when you’re aligned with truth and when you aren’t, and strive to make your important decisions only when this core principle is on your side.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina