Expanding Our Awareness of the World

Our last entry a couple weeks ago dealt with the move from sleep to awake, from hypnotized to aware,  from blind to seeing. These shifts imply and assume a shift in our consciousness.

So what is our consciousness?

I feel a need to define our terms so we are clear what we mean when we use these terms that are relatively unfamiliar to us in the Christian world.

Consciousness is the quality of our mind that includes our own internal reality.  It includes our self-awareness, our relationship to our environment, our relationship to the people in our lives, and our worldview or model of reality.

Your consciousness, or perception of reality, is created by the interactions of your subjective and objective life.  (Your subjective life being your interior world and your objective life being your exterior world…those two coming together is what creates your world view.)  Simply put consciousness is HOW YOU EXPERIENCE THE WORLD.

I am trying to link this to what Jesus was doing when he came to earth.  He was trying to get us to shift how we viewed and therefore experienced the world.

I want us to work on understanding how and in what ways we can transform our consciousness. That would mean….

1.  Heightening our awareness and moving from asleep to awake (think about how Jesus warned of sleepiness!!!)

2.  Transformation of our internal dialogue that creates the false self and tells a broken and incomplete story

3.  Awareness and transformation of our worldview and mental models which is how we make meaning in our lives

In other words radically shifting your consciousness means radically shifting your perspective of who you are.  Can you think of ah-ha moments or the culmination of a slow process where you had one of these shifts?

A Gift/Invitation for You!

 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Please accept this GIFT and INVITATION to

Spiritual Explorations Live with Ron Martoia

Sunday, December 28th at 6:00pm EST

• Slow down after a busy season to engage what it means to be transformed in the day to day
• Come together from whereever you are in the world to discover what Jesus meant when he said that he came that we might have abundant life
• Click here for the shapevine site where the conversation will take place.
• Logon at shapevine with a login you create there
• Enter at the youCAST link
• Type ‘gift’ for the group password
• You will see Ron in a video seat
• Ask questions and make comments on a chatboard
• Copy and paste notes from the evening that will be available on a noteboard

From Autopilot to Aware

Part of the shift in perspective (some call it conversion or transformation of our awareness) is learning to live from the deepest fullest “self”. I would call this the Imago Dei. Us learning to live from the breath of God part of who we are, the highest, best, most whole, true self.

When we can connect to the deepest part of who we are, we are moving past the false self (“old man” to us the non inclusive Pauline term) and learning to…

· 1. live out of our true self moment by moment

· 2. And allowing connection to whatever is… as it emerges

In these two places we begin experiencing fuller deeper life, the perissos (abundant) life Jesus said he came to bring.

This is essentially what has been called our consciousness….what are you conscious of day to day? Moment to moment? What are you aware of? In the Christian world we are afraid of certain words. Consciousness is one of them. But Jesus talked a lot about consciousness and awareness, about not being asleep and blind but awake and aware.

This was essentially what Jesus was getting at when he said the kingdom of God is in your around you.

In other words what are you conscious of? Are you aware of a bigger invisible world out there operating quietly but present nonetheless?

In the next several weeks we will be looking at all sorts of passages where Jesus is inviting us to a higher/deeper/fuller level of consciousness.

Another way of saying it is moving from being hypnotized to being awake and aware.

Do you realize you are often on autopilot and not aware? You miss exits when you are driving down the expressway? There is one example. Have any others?