What are the actual benefits of becoming more conscious?  Why would anyone care to do this?  And what the heck does it even mean to raise your consciousness anyway?

While raising your consciousness can certainly enhance your spiritual development, this isn’t really a spiritual issue at its core.  It’s really about hardcore mental development.

What does it mean to become more conscious?  I define it as the progressive realization of conscious mastery over your mind.  This includes all of the following:

• making careful, intelligent, and deliberate decisions
• maintaining a positive emotional state regardless of circumstances
• developing empowering beliefs while purging

In the book Power vs. Force by David R. Hawkins, there’s a hierarchy of levels of human consciousness. It’s an interesting paradigm. If you read the book, it’s also fairly easy to figure out where you fall on this hierarchy based on your current life situation.

From low to high, the levels of consciousness are: shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, pride, courage, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, peace, enlightenment.

While we can pop in and out of different levels at various times, usually there’s a predominant “normal” state for us. If you’re reading this blog, chances are