Our consciousness is ‘where’ our suffering takes place. Once people have learned to take a reasonable amount of control over theirs, the first reaction is always a blush of regret that they did not acquire the skills earlier in life.
Looking backward, with new vision, everyone can see countless lost opportunities. Unresolvable issues dissolve into simple misunderstandings, where forgiveness comes easy. In short, the world looks much more friendly and flexible. It’s less dangerous, and it is filled with much more opportunity.
Interestingly, most students wish they had learned how reality worked when they were a young adult. I’ve always marvelled at that artificial barrier—you can see by choosing it, they see their issues as having largely started in early adulthood.
In reality, our issues start as soon as we’re born to parents that cannot model this way of living. Babies are essentially becoming children, then teens, then adults, all by absorbing huge amounts of the egos of the people around them (or, in some cases, the exact opposite of those egos).
The reason the students choose their late teens or early 20’s is because that is when they are often first ‘alone’ in their responsibilities. Simply put, rather than ego, they still see ‘adulting’ as more of their issue, and so then they tend to see consciousness management as a strategy for coping with it.
In reality, a huge part of what makes people feel better is that the notion of ‘adulting’ reconstitutes as a different idea in the brain. It loses its starting point, and instead it becomes a part of a larger flow of reality that does not stop and start.
That revision of what a person ‘is,’ and what reality ‘is,’ is what creates the ‘allowance’ for flow to happen. That is not a strategy. That is the ‘letting go’ process that goes with clearer vision. It is opposite of people’s previous resistance to the natural flow of reality—which egos then call: ‘adulting.’
If someone learns about reality before their brain stops growing at around 25-27 years old, it means at least some portion of their ‘initial brain’ will have been assembled using true reality as the framework. And from that point forward, that portion of our brains will be faster at apprehending true reality than the parts that were wired up by ego.
Fortunately, much of the other ego-based wiring is destined to change anyway. But without us being more conscious, often times it changes on an ego-basis. That leaves the person feeling like they are working on solutions for their life. But because their analysis and reaction process is filtered through ego, they are often just building new walls that will lead to even more challenges in the future.
In the end, life is like a building filled with doors to rooms, that include even more doors to even more rooms. The doors we choose to go through will open up some opportunities and close others.
Principles Training cannot make life’s walls go away. In reality humans will face some rejection, and we will age, get sick and die. People will have false beliefs about us. We will be blamed for things we did not do. But we can’t fix that. So, in many ways, reality is formed by the limits of our capabilities.
The benefit of consciousness training is that it can turn the barriers of our limiting egos, into the clear glass of clarity. And that ability to simply see more of the truth is obviously incredibly helpful when it comes to figuring out which doors might lead us where.
That is what the older students notice: in hindsight they can often see routes to their dreams that were innocently missed, when the walls were opaque. That realization may seem to indicate that people will be tortured by the road not travelled, but such is not the case.
In clarity, our torture is converted to mild regret simply because people fully accept that the past cannot be changed—which means all of our opportunities exist in our futures. And if they can see clearly, it’s hard for a conscious person to not to be excited by any future in which our vision and understanding is better than it has ever been before.
peace. s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.