A Note from Neale...

In the last issue of this Bulletin, published just before New Year's Eve, I made the point that we humans living in the 21st century are very lucky. We have achieved a very high level of Consciousness. It has taken hundreds and thousands of years for our species to accomplish this, and those of us living today are the beneficiaries of all that evolutionary work. 

We are conscious of ourselves, and we are conscious of the fact that we are conscious. As a species that had achieved self-consciousness, we have stepped into a grander and grander awareness of ourselves and of our relationship to all of Life. The opportunity of each individual now is to expand personal awareness further and further, until Complete Awareness has been achieved. 

This expansion of Awareness is a process in which individuals personally and consciously and intentionally engage. It is not something that occurs by happenstance, except in very rare instances. There are those who have had "lightening bolt experiences" in which they have achieved Total Awareness instantaneously. But for most of us, the journey is somewhat different — and somewhat longer. 

Let us begin, in this first Bulletin issue of 2019, a discussion of The Journey to Awareness. We took last week off as our holiday after the annual CwG Christmas Eve Candle light service, but we are back in the saddle again, and we begin our issues for this New Year with a most intriguing topic. 

Before we can talk about The Journey to Awareness, we need must first explore what the word even means. 

The dictionary defines awareness as "having knowledge or perception of a situation or fact; concerned and well-informed about a particular situation or development." 

That is close to how I use the word, but in metaphysics I am going to define awareness as "A state of consciousness reflecting the understanding of the process of Life, as well as the level of knowing of the true identity of an individual human being, that a particular person has achieved." 

Awareness is something we achieve. It is not something that can be given to us by another — although it is true that others can point the way to it for us. There are as many levels of awareness as there are human beings, as it is a very individual thing, just as is everything else about people. 

The level of one's awareness of how life works and of who we really are is reflected in and indicted by the thoughts, choices, actions, and decisions that mark the day-to-day expressions of experiences of one's life. 

Most people are not aware that life is not at all what it appears to be, and has nothing to do with what is going on exteriorly. That is, it is not about the exterior events that are occurring — although the exterior events that are occurring are a reflection of what life is about for each individual. 

Most people live from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. In this, they have it backwards. They are living life as a reaction rather than as a creation. The difficulty with this is that each reaction becomes the next creation, and so, the very thing we are reacting to becomes the very thing we next create, in nearly every case. 

This explains why people experience the same challenges over and over again in relationship, in occupations, in health, in parenting, in spiritual development, and in all areas of life. They seem to be living out "patterns" — and, indeed, they are, having "designed" their next exterior circumstance based on their reaction to their last most recent exterior circumstance. 

Only those who have learned to Go Within and to live an exterior circumstance as an interior event have found a way to break the chain and stop the wheel from going around and around and around again. 

The Journey to Awareness is a journey to the center of our being; it is a walking away from the exterior phenomena of life, almost an ignoring of them, in preference to the interior experience that one is directing and creating. 

And we will explore this further in our next issue here. 

Blessings,