Consciousness — One of Our First Steps Toward a Better Future
I’m reading the book Spiritual Capital by Danah Zohar & Ian Marshall and was very taken with the following passage in the preface:
“The trouble is that most of us don’t think. We just avoid choice and let things unfold, content to go through our lives as sleepwalkers, or as bits of flotsam in the stream of events. In the cours of this we allow a lot of harm to be done and leave a lot of good undone. We avert our glance when we see someone in trouble, we let others take the blame for things we have done, we don’t confront painful truths about ourselves, our motives, and our actions, or we exclude whole groups of people from the arena of our moral concern. Yet this avoidance of choice is a deeper denial of our humanity than actively to choose the bad. our humanity is defined by our ability to choose between right and wrong. Not to choose at all is to deny this essence.”
I heartily agree that we are often wandering through life, unconsciously bouncing off choices like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper. This lack of consciousness makes it easy for us to end up down a road that we didn’t really want to travel–think Iraq, the US deficit, healthcare, or social security for ‘corporate’ examples or weight-gain, a relationship gone sour, or years spend in a job we don’t love for samples from our personal lives.
If we want to create a better future for ourselves and our world, we must first wake up and use our brains–and our hearts and intuition–to consciously consider what it is that we want and don’t want. This means being an active participant in our lives. Asking questions, examining our behavior, listening for the feedback of the universe are all imperative practices of the person seeking to live a conscious and spiritual life. We don’t just arrive at spiritual fulfillment by accident…we have to participate in the journey.
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