Spiritual Practice is for Conscious Awareness

 

What are you doing with your spiritual practice but seeking to have another, better experience? You want your consciousness transformed. Specifically, you want peace in your conscious awareness—that of which you are immediately aware. You want a different world, really. And that means recognizing that your world is not the material world the body’s eyes report to you—and of which they are a part. Your consciousness—your mind—is your “world.” When spiritual teachers point out that Truth is within you, they do not mean in your person’s body, but in your consciousness—which isn’t even really “your” consciousness but is simply an individuated expression of consciousness.

There are three parts to your consciousness:

 

Conscious awareness: That of which you are immediately aware. For example, what the body’s eyes see now and the thoughts and feelings in your mind now. Your conscious awareness is limited, so it cannot contain all of what is in your individuated consciousness at once, and most certainly not all of what is in consciousness as a whole. So, there are two other parts to your individuated consciousness. And those are:

 

Subconscious: What is just out of your awareness, but accessible when you want it. For example, the birds chirping outside your window, or remembering where you left your keys or what you meant to pick up at the store, or what you were thinking before you were interrupted. When you tune in to your surroundings, your thoughts, or your memories, the awareness and thoughts in your subconscious come easily to conscious awareness. If you do not tune into or don’t need what has been in your subconscious, ideas, thoughts, feelings, and memories may slip into your unconscious. You “forget.”

 

Unconscious:  What is in your individuated consciousness and what of consciousness as a whole that is not in your conscious awareness or subconscious is in your unconscious. In other words, the unconscious is vast, containing your individuated consciousness and the collective unconscious of consciousness as a whole. Ego holds in your unconscious what it does not want in your conscious awareness, like the awareness that it projects or aspects of its story for you that it is convenient for ego to have out of your conscious awareness. Your unconscious may also hold painful ideas and memories that are “forgotten” so that you can cope and move on. But, also, God’s Spirit is always in consciousness, so if Spirit is not in your conscious awareness or subconscious, It is in your unconscious. When you become consciously aware of Spirit within you, it means Spirit has risen from your unconscious to your conscious awareness.

 

One’s spiritual path begins with some conscious awareness of God, vague or complete. It may be God’s Spirit in consciousness or God beyond consciousness. Once on a “path”, you may have fleeting insights, epiphanies, or experiences of the Light of God flash through your conscious awareness. The experience will fade and you will probably want it back. What does that mean? You want it in your conscious awareness. It isn’t lost, it is just back in your unconscious, from which it came.

In my experience, those fleeting moments were the beginning of whatever I saw rising to conscious awareness. It was the start of a process that would unfold over time. So, where I was originally dismayed when they faded because I felt I lost something, I learned that they were only the beginning of whatever I saw coming to conscious awareness.

Your person’s life takes up much space in your limited conscious awareness. So, you cannot stay consciously aware of God all the time. When you don’t have a practice that keeps the awareness of Spirit nearby in your subconscious, Spirit is not gone from consciousness, but only from conscious awareness. You become unconscious to—unaware of—Spirit, and Spirit feels distant. So, spiritual practice is about keeping an awareness of Spirit nearby, in your subconscious, so you can access it easily. The practice is not to stay focused on God, which is not possible, but to bring your mind back to God often throughout the day, which maintains an awareness of Spirit in your subconscious. This is why the lessons in the Workbook of A Course in Miracles have you often return to the thought for the day. This is why once the Course introduces practicing the holy instant it never lets it go. And this was the goal of my 4 Habits for Inner Peace, which distill the means for keeping Spirit “nearby” that the Course teaches.

Think of someone to whom you could say, “You are never far from my thoughts.” This is usually a family member or close friend. What you are saying is that they may not always be in your conscious awareness, but they are “nearby” in your subconscious, where they rise easily and often to your conscious awareness. This is what you want with Spirit. This is what I mean when I say Spirit was my Constant Companion. My peace was in direct proportion to my awareness and trust in Spirit. There came a time when peace came to stay and I knew it would never leave. Spirit had risen to my subconscious to stay, and I knew It would never leave. I always had recourse to the Answer for any problem, any upset, as Spirit easily slipped into my conscious awareness.

And later, at the shift in consciousness, Spirit came to stay in my conscious awareness. Does this mean all the time? Yes and no. When my conscious awareness is occupied with other things, Spirit is not in my immediate awareness. But when it is no longer occupied with other things, Spirit is here in my conscious awareness. There is no longer a practice needed to bring Spirit to conscious awareness. Those things that are not Spirit are lightly held in and pass easily through conscious awareness.

 

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