Towards a New Consciousness
For the modern spin on Einstein, it is often said that the same level of consciousness that created the problem cannot be the same one to solve it.
What does this mean?
Spiritual teachers, gurus, your therapist, and your friends and family may have at one point told you, ‘come on, you got this,’ ‘you just haven’t tried hard enough yet,’ ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’ or go the sympathy route and say, ‘wow, that sounds so hard,’ ‘you can change whenever you’re ready,’ ‘change is difficult.’ Either way, through direct coaching or sympathy, the door through which you know you need to walk through in order to fully heal and experience your life remains firmly shut.
During my research year in Costa Rica, I began to understand the blocks and doors of my own personal and career life. I realized that as a therapist, I kept opening the door for my patients, again and again, instead of teaching them how to observe, and thus reimagine, the stuck door of their lives. I was changing the anatomy of the door for them instead of teaching them how to do it themselves.
Patients come to therapy for a variety of reasons: a quick fix, for someone to tell them what to do, out of deep anguish, their last straw, because it was recommended by someone, or because they are in crisis with nowhere else to go.
Not a problem.
When it comes to the concept of consciousness, however, the quality of your question yields the clarity of your answer.
Therapy helps many people realize, for the first time in their lives, that they have a mind, and that this mind can make them feel lots of different things, including the really bad things bringing them into therapy. Therapy helps you to remember your past (which most people have forgotten) and to arrange the clutter of your thoughts into narrative boxes: ‘I am this way because I was raised like X,’ ’I behave this way because of a trauma I experienced when I was X,’ ‘My problems stem from my inability to cope with my emotions.’ Good. And to continue with the door metaphor, therapy teaches patients that there is a door (made up of trauma, misunderstanding, neglect, etc.) and through that door is the life you’ve been waiting to have.
Consciousness takes things a bit differently. Consciousness is that part of you that is able to observe without needing to fix, react or change. This state is available to us at any moment and is often found through yoga and meditation, which is why so many therapists recommend such practices.
Whereas therapy instructs us on how to see and describe the door, consciousness urges us to keep asking the ‘Why’ behind all of the mind’s chatter. Why am I thinking this? Why do I believe this? Why am I feeling this way? Through consciousness, we reformulate the concept of a door.
This is what is meant by the title of this essay, ‘Towards a New Consciousness.’ The evolution of mental health, I am proposing, necessitates a shift in awareness from the thinker to the person experiencing the thought itself.
This is your mind and your mind only. Only you can know and experience what happens in that mind and your mind that created this door before you. In the new paradigm of consciousness, consciousness asks you to take one step further towards facing this door by contemplating why? Why was this put here? By whom? And what might this door be trying to tell me about myself?
By refining the question of your life’s problems, you enhance the outcome of your answer.
How do we find such a consciousness so that we may refine the answers to our life’s problems?
Keep on reading.
