Dr. David Hawkin's Levels of Consciousness

*The posts that follow came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author.


Each level has a beginning, an illuminating insight that provides the seeker with the motivation to seek out the end understanding that caps off the chapter. The end understanding provides the seeker with a base of power with which he needs to rely on while he's learning the lessons of the next level.

For Courage, the illuminating insight is "Oh wow, it's possible to gain power in the world." You're learning the basics of applying effort. Effort counts for a lot in the world. But it's effort applied mindlessly, effort for effort's sake. You reach the end of this level, the end of the utility of mindless effort, once you can turn on and off the effort engine. You can revel in working hard. I love good hard work, once I turn on my willingness to do so. 

For some people, effort is all they need. The people this level turns out, what happens to them if they don't move up, are earthy, practical folk, fun to be with and useful to have around. They're hilarious and great at instilling good work ethics in their children. Spending time around these sorts of people will gently draw you out of the lower levels and infect you with their gentle enthusiasm. If you're at higher levels, then time spent with these people is refreshing and uncomplicated.

The level of Neutrality starts with the illuminating insight, "Hard work is hard! There's got to be a better way." But if hard work is hard, not working hard is even harder. You're learning the basics of psychology, figuring out how to get along with people. Getting along allows you to pour far less effort into maintaining yourself, but making mistakes at this level destroys relationships and forces you to again kick up your effort engine and work hard once more. When you reach the end of this level, you've got a pretty safe, easy existence, but you're not terribly fulfilled. Hard work is fulfilling all on its own, but being neutral isn't.

Willingness begins with the illuminating insight, "I don't have to 'just get along', I can optimize!" This is when you learn the basics of information and learning. You've learned the value of effort, you've learned the value of getting along, now you can start utilizing all the available information more effectively.

Notice how all of these have to do with the external world. All the levels up to Love deal with it. You're generally not capable of making sense of the internal world yet. So you deal with the world as you see it. These are where the lessons are. They become real through application in the real world. You can try to skip around, but if you do that, it's a much more chaotic lifestyle.

So in Willingness you're eager to learn, and apply, the knowledge other people produce. Your vision starts to expand, the levels of Acceptance and Reason open up to you to study from. Knowledge is a powerful accelerant, effort applied here rapidly bears fruit. Progress here is fast and heady.

Each level contains all the levels within. You slowly become enlightened about a particular lesson, then you hit the limits of that lesson, so you start another adventure with a different lesson.

Very few people stay at Willingness because of how easy it is to see the upper levels. People stay at the lower levels because they never get initiated into the adventures of the higher, or they feel they don't have what it takes to live at a higher level. People who live their entire lives through the rigorous application of effort need help to see that there's better ways to live. Or they need the ego to prod them forward.

The end of Willingness comes when you start to run up against the point of diminishing returns. Your business model can't grow any more, your skill set is more than adequate. And there's lots of people dedicating their efforts to helping you. You get drawn into the community. The enthusiasm is infectious, you're starting to Accept your role in it.

Acceptance starts with the illuminating insight, "I should be doing more." The people at this level are learning the lessons of purpose. Purpose doesn't just exist inside you and it doesn't rely on others. It's a dynamic that affects both. The people learning the lessons of Acceptance are beginning to really start understanding the spiritual journey itself. Purpose is a very abstract idea, but it's very real. By the time they finish learning these lessons they have a good idea of where they want to go and how to live in harmony with their path.

A lot of people stay at Acceptance. They're interesting and insightful. They're community minded, and community takes up a lot of head space. They make amazing parents, nurturing and accepting. Movement higher than this requires a bit of ambition. It requires the willingness to cut things out of your life. Acceptance brings a lot in, it fills your life with an emotional fullness that is enormously satisfying.

Understand, the levels are adventures. People undertake them because of a restlessness that keeps them from staying still. You have to choose to move up, but when you do, entire worlds of new experiences become possible. Levels higher than Acceptance are like bonuses, caps on top of an already amazing life. They're distinguished by an increasing attention to details on the particulars, the minutiae of life. They're willing to drop attachments and chase these understandings on their own merits.

The illuminating insight that starts the journey into Reason is that "yes the world can be understood." The lesson is that of refinement. Refinement is different from optimization, in that when you optimize, you add stuff that works. Refinement is taking out stuff that doesn't. You clear your head of polluting influences and deal directly with the abstract. You organize your thinking into systems and use those systems to create things.

At the Reason level, your words and thoughts themselves become powerful. Before, effort was the primary vehicle for power. You learned ever more effective ways of applying it, maybe dabbled with creativity. Here the creativity starts taking primacy. When you finish learning the lessons of Reason, you're at the top of your game, your capacity for making abstract ideas effective in the real world is at its highest. Like Acceptance before it, it's perfectly fine for this adventure to take up your whole life. You don't need to start the Love journey, but it's there for anyone who wants to.

Love begins with the illuminating insight, "I really can learn to love everyone." As you're settling into facility with the abstract, the world of humanity starts to look less like a mass of chaos and more rational and knowable. People's motivations start making sense, now that you've gone through all the same trials and tribulations that they have. You really start to understand that we're all cut from the same cloth, that every mistake they've made, you've made. The refinement you began in Reason with the external world, you start to make on the soft side, the human world.

Here you deal with your emotions and your ego. Whereas before you possessed a sort of unconscious facility with them, now you need real control, because unconditional love is a very tough thing to pull off. The lesson with Love is letting go. Letting go of all the attachments you have to states and people. And when you finish, you've totally mastered yourself. This can be a journey of a lifetime as well. It will be, especially if you start with Love as the goal.

Know that it's faster to patiently work your steps than it is to skip around. It's more than possible to start the journey trying to learn unconditional love. But you're missing out on the adventure of all the previous steps, and often times the world will make you learn the lessons anyway. A lot of people try jumping straight from Acceptance to Love. But without building up the facility with the abstract that Reason provides, people's motivations will forever remain a black box. Your own motivations won't be clear half the time. You'll find it a real struggle if you try to start building your facility with the abstract by applying it to people before you apply it to one of the many systems we've created. The lessons won't stick.

Love can take your entire life, but if you've worked through the steps, Joy becomes available. Now that you know yourself, and you know people, immense quantities of energy and happiness open up to you. A new mode of life becomes possible, allowing your learnings and your sheer power you've accessed by opening up so many kinds of thought to carry you through existence. This level's illuminating insight is, "what can I achieve with all that I've learned?"

Again, it's possible to begin the adventure of Joy without going through any of the preceding levels, by molding your life after the adventures of the great sages of enlightenment. It truly is the journey of a lifetime though, taking a much longer time to gain the facility with the abstract and with people and with yourself than if you just took the prescribed path. It's getting more possible with the Internet, where people who've succeeded can write about their experiences and inspire others.

The lesson of joy is expansion. You become aware of the energy field around you and are learning how to project and control it. You rapidly lose what little that is false that's still in you, and you start truly aligning yourself with purpose. You can stay here, expanding and expanding until the entire world knows who you are. Just being who you are inspires and moves them. Or you can begin the journey of Peace.

While Joy is characterized by expansion, people on the journey of Peace contract powerfully into tiny little balls of energy. They flit through life, bouncing around, observing, witnessing, and gently pushing and pulling. They're entirely comfortable with the way the world is and know how to get by, around, through, over, and under obstacles. With Peace, your entire life gets abstracted, there's no real words that can describe it.

Peace begins when you totally and completely make peace with your ego and have nothing left to motivate you to move through the world. You lose everything binding yourself to the rest of humanity. Purpose falls away and loses its meaning. The effects they have on those around them are so abstract and so profound that really only they can see them, and they're fine with that. They can't be figured out, can't be held down. These are the Jedis of real life. The illuminating insight at the beginning of the Peace journey is, "I don't need any of this." The endpoint is total transcendence. People at the endpoint of Peace are completely free, in every sense of the word. The lesson is plasticity. You're learning how to shift, flow, bend to the occasion, in a totally different sense than when you're in Neutrality. With Peace, you're learning to have complete command over all the powers granted from all of the lessons of all of the levels.

And this opens up the vistas of Enlightenment. This is the largest level, spanning 300 points on the scale. That means there's a lot of lessons, and a lot of growth there, even after you've transcended every earthly lesson. You're dealing directly with divinity. Your words are so potent that written down, they inspire just like a person at the level of Joy does with his physical presence. I don't know what the illuminating insight is, perhaps "I could be a god." After you've achieved transcendence, such a statement or desire doesn't seem so far-fetched. Instead of grabbing attention by expanding your spiritual field of influence, your Atman, as a person in Joy would, you channel the glory of the Source directly, purely, becoming a beacon. Instead of you aligning with the Source, the world starts to align with you.

I believe it's possible to get Enlightened in this lifetime if you want. You have to really, really really want it though, enough to have faith in the lessons you're learning and to move up with conviction. I believe there are certain accelerants that make progress much faster, certain truths that transcend even the levels. For example, total, absolute honesty will propel you through to the end of any adventure. Accepting everything the world gives you, as is, speaking only from the highest level you know. If you can do that, and maintain your sense of ambition, you'll keep moving up. But the second you start to forget the process, to lose momentum, you can easily tumble down. But that too, is a part of the journey. If you tumble down, that means you really didn't learn the lesson.

So have faith, believe in yourself, and you'll gain momentum. Never lose your sense of adventure. And if you don't want to move up, that's fine too. These are adventures, not commandments. 





---------I want to write more about the between points, the place where you've mastered the lessons of one level and have the choice to move up or stay put. I think pretty few people stick around to earn complete mastery of a level. This is where the scale model starts to break down a bit. Let's look at Courage and Neutrality. You might stay in Courage mode for ten years, really mastering the lessons of hard work and effort. At the end of those ten years, you really and truly are at 249. Or you might get to 238 and decide that you want to start working smarter. You stay at 238 but begin working on the higher lessons. You won't find it as easy to master Neutrality if you do this, but it's still doable. But if you skip Neutrality and try instead to start learning immediately without understanding basic psychology, you'll have to pull yourself up much higher using the new learning. A lot of the learning you'll read will assume you can get along with people, and it won't work otherwise.

Mastery of any of the Power levels is a nice place to be. I love visiting my grandparents because they're exactly the sort of salt-of-the earth folk that have mastered Courage that I described earlier. They can get along with people, but they don't rely on that, because they love hard work.

Mastery means you have zero problems using the lessons of that level to live your life around. The seeker tends to move up before he achieves full mastery, as soon as he sees another way is possible. What I like to do is spend lots of time among the lower levels, they help me to learn the lessons I missed on my meteoric rise through the levels. I think I've about mastered Courage, less so on Neutrality, really high on Willingness, bout middle of the road on Acceptance, high on Reason, medium high on Love, and low on both Joy and Peace. My unique life caused me to spend less time learning social niceties, instead seeking truth within. But now that I'm actively seeking the lessons and secrets of Joy and Peace, the lessons of the lower levels are starting to fill in for me. Peace is what I really aim to master, so that's where I say I am.

------I don't experience stage fright, so I'm not at all sure which level's lessons will fix the underlying issue concerning it. I probably would approach that problem by starting a journey in the field of public speaking. This will start you fresh off at Courage. By working the basic steps of public speaking, you'll slowly start to master it. If you really liked public speaking, you could carry on the pursuit of it into the Neutrality level, by networking with other public speakers and getting a little more involved in that world.

If you were to choose to do this, then your general vibration level would stay the same as you usually are, but your effectiveness will only be in the 200 range. But because your general level is higher, you'll have an easier time of it.

But you still have to start at Courage. If you think your Reason level in some other field is adequate to let you start off at Willingness in public speaking, then you'll go out and buy all kinds of books and tapes and stuff, and get absolutely nowhere. You have to get comfortable with the basics, or the books and stuff won't help you.

You in fact don't gain the facility with the abstract necessary for you to start out at levels other than Courage in new fields until somewhere around Joy. Speaking from personal experience, I'm trying to do this right now. Not even my general brain at Reason could understand all fields well enough to assume I'd be able to pick up the basics in the blink of an eye, though my ego would have told me I could!

----------Like I said, your general vibration remains around the same, but your effectiveness scuba diving was still that of the beginner. You picked up the basics quickly, but all that means is that you mastered Courage in that field. To progress higher, you would need to start networking with other scuba divers and doing a lot better job of it with a lot less effort. Eventually you'd become a scuba teacher, and scuba would become a part of your life. You'd get involved in the community and bring up other scuba instructors. At that point you'd have Accepted Scuba as a major part of your life.

-------You'll get to Willingness when you start taking something seriously. Right now you're dabbling in lots of different areas.  Your power stays low because you're not really using any of these things to make your way through the world. You're not making them real. One way you could cross over into Willingness right now would be to turn your music into a career, to gig, make money, and sustain yourself that way.

Neutrality is about networking and being social. Acceptance is about building community.

----They're states, and they're also perspectives, up to the point of consciousness level 600. At 600 the perceiving part of consciousness is all that's left of the ego. And that goes too at 700.
But states they remain.

After 600 there are still qualities of your former self that you have to give up to move on. From 600-699 a person's identity is wrapped up in being "the observer," which is a subtle expression of ego that must be identified and surrendered. From 700-849 is complete Oneness, awareness doesn't present itself as an observer, there's no division of mind left.

That's where it get's weird. Hawkins says there's aspects of the collective unconscious, not of the individual, that must be identified and transcended. They manifest physically. Jesus sweat blood.

  After 850, no systems of belief remain, no organizational paradigms, no nothing.

Everything is subjective at those levels, meaning they cannot be usefully described to another person.

----So, the major work of all the levels from Courage to Acceptance is dropping positionalities. A positionality is a false dichotomy the ego holds. A great example is "either you're for the criminals or you're for the victims." 

Each positionality consists of an aversion, This position is ego-based and limiting. They're created in childhood from experiences that threaten the ego-mind. 

One way to liberate the blocked energy contained in the above positionality is to adopt the position, "all people, including criminals, deserve the best conditions to grow spiritually," 

The end result is Acceptance.

Thing is, even when you're at Acceptance, you'll still find positionalities that limit, because you still have a ego-mind to transcend. But once you're at Acceptance, you're so used to the process of finding positionalities, they practically liberate themselves as soon as they're found.

------ The watcher is transcended at 700, where the body/mind simply bes, propelled only by spirit. You're basically a vessel to be used by God, 

Levels higher than that involve incorporating aspects of divinity directly into the body/mind. Advancement is random and uncontrollable, as there is no ego to propel itself forward. If God wants you there, He'll put you there.

At 1000 you're God Himself, a level only reached by Jesus in the last 2000 years, and Buddha before Him.

-----

Cognitive Bias

*This post came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author.


OK, so far we've dealt with the emotions, whose blocks were placed on you by others; and beliefs, which you are the originator of, through your experiences. Now we'll talk about bias, which by definition affects all of us. These were given to you by nature, they're the artifacts of evolution. Those of us who can escape our monkey brains are afforded great power in life.

Unfortunately, this is the murkiest and least responsive of blocks. Working with them requires a great deal of ability in dealing with the meta aspects of thought. Earning lasting improvement from work in this area is an order of magnitude tougher than either of the other two levels of blocks.

If you've been posting here awhile you might have realized that only the people with clear wants and desires from their realities end up getting anywhere. Desire is a potent catalyst of growth, and some people have the desire in spades.

This is but one of the cognitive biases we must overcome. How do you fervently want to change, so fervently that you overcome lots of obstacles and get there anyway? Nobody was born with intense desire, the ability to seems to have been blessed upon certain individuals, with no seemingly easy way to get it when you don't have it.

The reality is, so much of what we feel we have no control over, we actually have so much control over that it's scary. Any one of us could gain a desire so powerful it drives us to put our most vulnerable selves, those we hold desperately on to, online, exposed to the eyes of total strangers, and gain commensurate benefits from being willing to alter those selves.

I'll give another example. That of public speaking. It might look as if my posts here are effortless and I'm immune to criticism and silent censure, but I'm not. I get almost as nervous as anybody else would when I speak authoritatively to a crowd. I'm simply better at hiding it.

This fear is a cognitive bias which affects us all. We were all blessed with personalities that allow us to do some things better than others. I spent most of my time growing up around girls, so I have no fear of approaching one and starting a conversation with her. Others, not so much.

All of these things have common roots. Nature made these things harder for us. Consequently, those able to overcome these biases gain great power in life. Those able to overcome the fear of going up on stage can become actors beloved by all. Those able to overcome their fear of approaching women end up courted on all sides by them.

To gain the ability when you don't have the natural gift for it is what this essay is about. It's not too hard to act in a way belying our natures once or twice. But to do this as if it were a normal, every day, action, like I've learned how to speak authoritatively, requires the sort of clarity of mind and vision I spoke about in my limiting belief thread. 

Your emotions simply cannot not affect your ability to act; you cannot be repressed in any way. If you have not yet released your repression on fear, then you absolutely need to go read part one and allow your fear to reach full expression, such that you reach the other side of it. Otherwise you will never gain traction. This is the stuff of powerful men and women, and if your emotions are still ruling you, then the side effects of true power will destroy you even should you succeed. History is littered with the stories of powerful people whose emotions ended up ruining them.

But eliminating your repression isn't enough to allow you to dictate your reality in this way. You must also gain the resolution of vision that comes from clearing away a large number of limiting beliefs. Without the clarity of being able to see how each individual event affects the next, you'll never gain the freedom of mind that will let you choose courses of action that gain you power. You, quite literally, won't know where to start. Your mind will require ideas that it won't be able to generate. Clearing away limiting beliefs will grant you a lucidity that will propel you to great power.

If you followed part two closely, you know now that a belief is a feeling you have about the relationship between similar events. A bias is exactly the same thing, only it affects us at a deeper level. So if you clear the higher level limiting beliefs, soon you'll get to a point where you'll be stuck. You won't know how or where to proceed. You'll make some half-hearted attempts at gaining real power, but for whatever reason, you'll fail, and instead stagnate at a level that's very comfortable for you to be in, but not passionate.

To bust through that level you need to gain an appreciation for the value of your ego. At levels before the one you're looking to enter, the ego is a source of blocks, your grand thoughts about yourself silly and childish. At this level, you need your ego back, because your ego is also your drive. You will need to validate that part of yourself that wants things for its own sake. You will need to un-repress your egotism, in exactly the same way you earlier un-repressed anger. All of your negative traits start gaining new value. You really start to become a whole person, light and dark, good and evil. You see how even the most darkest of elements end up driving people to become better.

That's when everything changes. None of your previous worries will affect you anymore, because now they're momentary lapses in judgment, to be ignored in favor of greater expression. You'll gain the willpower to do things people have always said you needed to do, but you always found excuses or just believed that you couldn't. Finding time to practice your instrument doesn't seem all that hard anymore. You'll be able to organize your life with a resolution, deliberateness and clarity that you've never seen before. When you read things, you won't care so much about what "resonates" with you or not, you'll see clearly where they're coming from and what truth they're speaking. Right and wrong will seem like concepts as archaic as slide rules, because everything you do will affect the universe positively.

Because this level is so powerful, a lot of systems and teachers will try to get you to attack these lower-level blocks before you even gain an appreciation for how debilitating the higher level ones are. The Law of Attraction is one, Steve's Subjective Reality is another. Nobody with emotional repression or piles of limiting beliefs will be able to make either of these work. 

The harsh fact is, they don't need the benefits of these systems, they need to learn how to feel good about themselves. If you can't make the Law of Attraction work for you, chances are you're emotionally repressed in some fashion. If you weren't, and you understood how limiting beliefs work, then you'd see that the Law is always in effect. You're always manifesting something, and you're currently dealing right now with everything you've manifested in your life, ever. It's not something you turn on or turn off, it's something to tune and tweak and to just keep in mind.

Limiting Beliefs

*This post came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author.

In this post, I will describe what a limiting belief is, how it affects you, where it comes from, and what to do with them.

Repression is the first layer of blocks you must bust through. The second layer involves your beliefs. The longer I watch people succeed and fail, the more convinced I get that beliefs in and of themselves have objective value. Some beliefs are literally better than others.

In order to explain this, I need to first define what a belief actually is. A person's mind is an imperfect thing, in that it cannot provide you with a complete vision of the universe. It cannot even provide you with a complete vision of the room you're in. In order to gain that vision, you must imagine the rest of the room that your eyes don't see. It will be hazy, unless you swivel your head around to take a look, or you've had security awareness training.

Beliefs function exactly the same way. Beliefs are imaginations, in the sense I just outlined, of the relationships between events. Something happens, something else happens. Whatever causal relationship between those two events that exists in your mind is a belief about those two events and others like them. It could involve anything, a popular set of beliefs concern an intelligent entity that guides all of these events.

That's the nuts and bolts of it. Let's zoom back and look at your life, at your beliefs. I said repression comes from other people, primarily your family, maybe teachers or friends. Limiting beliefs come from you, and only you. You can't choose what your parents have repressed you with. You can choose how your mind perceives a pair of events. If those two events happen to be getting dumped, twice in a row, by two different girls, you'll form a belief around it.

Not paying careful attention to how your mind is shaping your world for you results in beliefs that, simply put, don't make the slightest bit of sense. There's probably a hundred lurking in your attic somewhere cluttering it all up. The sheer number of limiting beliefs we have is staggering, and it's necessary to bite them off in small chunks. Nobody became enlightened in a day.

But before you even look at your beliefs, you should go back to part one and re-read it another ten times or so. Any repression you've got lurking in your attic will utterly destroy any progress you make in this area. The energy released by liberating your beliefs will get blocked by repression, and the experience will form more limiting beliefs. This is a dangerous game of whack-a-mole you're playing. Are you sure you don't want to go back and read part one again?

Convinced yourself that you're free of repression or that you don't need the structure of my ideas, just the content? OK then, read on.

To recognize a limiting belief, you first have to become aware of it. Fortunately this is easy, all you have to do is look at some part of your life and make a distinction between what you thought would happen and what actually happened. Or what you wanted to happen that didn't happen. Once you have this, you need to think clearly about why, what thing about the universe you didn't know, that if you did know, would have produced a better outcome? How could you have changed it?

That difference is your limiting belief. If you think about it long enough, you'll start naturally doing the mental calculus necessary to overcome the belief. Making predictions is important. I've made several predictions here that were right on the money. I predicted that Steve Pavlina's Subjective Reality experiment would wreck his life, and that he would have to rebuild it piece by piece, and that the rebuilt life would be ten times better than his old life ever could be. That's exactly what happened.

As you start making traction and start powering through your poor beliefs rather than letting yourself get caught by them, you'll find a wealth of intuition lying just under the surface for you to pull up. Reach down and pull up a vine of intuition. Anchor it by stating your prediction, either aloud, on paper, or silently in your head. I recommend making the prediction aloud to friends so that their social pressure will make you take them that much more seriously. If you're silent about it you'll tend to forget it, but if you're shy and don't want to look pretentious, just say them in your head.

Whether you're right or you're wrong, you'll have gained valuable insight examining the relationships between events that led to your prediction's success or failure. The more you can break events down to their base elements, the more success you'll have in creating good beliefs that stand the tests of the universe. You'll start seeing everything in greater resolution, concepts won't stick together as much.

You will need this fine-grained attention to causal detail to tackle the third level of blocks, cognitive biases. As before, I want you to go out and play with these ideas. Try the exercises out and see for yourself. They're very simple and only require investments of time and an open mind. Sooner or later you'll be keeping your consciousness clean, like a well-run kitchen or operating room. You will need it.

Repression

*This post came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author.

Recognizing repression

---

There's several different kinds of blocks. We'll deal with the first one here, the one most easily recognizable and the most easily transcended. That's repression. Repression affects you consciously. The other two, limiting beliefs, and cognitive bias, are deeper. You need to get over your repression before you can tackle anything else.

You recognize repression when you want to do something, but can't bring yourself to. It's like a giant hand forcing you back. Repression is usually the gift of childhood experience. Somebody told you to hate your body, so you can't ever look at it and feel good. Good feelings should flow all over you, anywhere you're going, anything you look at, and in any situation you find yourself in. Repression keeps those good feelings from flowing.

The key to eliminating repression blocks is to simply become aware of it, and focus positively on letting the energy flow. If it's anger that's repressed, then you'll find yourself always holding your anger back, never letting it reach its apex. You release anger repression by psyching yourself up as much as you can, getting angrier and angrier until you boil over. When you boil over, all of a sudden the energy will release itself. You'll feel suddenly silly that you let yourself get worked all up.

Follow through is key too. It's very common to, after releasing a block, to feel guilty about it and to subconsciously put the block back in place. It feels comfortable to be blocked. Follow through is in not putting the block back. Change those feelings around so you feel good about what you did. It will be easy to do this, but if you forget, then you'll put the cap right back on the bottle!

Post about the Law of Attraction

*This post came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author. 

When you're first wanting to change your life, your capacity for imagination and belief is going to limit the power of your use of the LoA. 

 In this situation, using Affirmations to work on your subconscious blocks is very effective. The key to using them is to use them in a "throwaway" fashion. Every morning, look at yourself in the mirror and say, "I look pretty," or whatever, and see how you react to that statement. Even I use Affirmations, in my own way, when I need to remove a particularly deep block, these days I find them popping up around psychic abilities.

Visualizations start becoming useful when you don't have any huge blocks to change, but still need to make the change "go through." Visualizing is a good way to reveal any latent blocks to change. If you find your visualizations lacking in strength, if you can't really see yourself being handed large stacks of money, then you may find needing to Affirm the desire to change, then waiting a few days or weeks, then trying out the Visualization again.

Finally, if you have a really good idea of what you want and how you want it, you can just Intend for the change to happen.  You can go for a walk and meditate intently on what you want, 
 
Basically, the three tools are best used in different situations. Affirmations work when you want to make a perpendicular move, one you can't even Visualize properly. They'll gently, but effectively start "steering" you in the new direction, without the need for conscious input. Visualizations will complete the "turning" motion, and Intention will propel you faster in a direction you're already going in.

Channeling, and why it isn't so useful

*This post came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author.

When channeling, the channeler uses his/her own brain as a translation tool. What's communicated gets filtered through the concepts and beliefs and thought processes of the channeler. It's a spiritual version of the telephone game. Meaning is inevitably lost, a great deal of it, actually. In fact, probably 90% of the meaning is lost, simply because the channeler cannot understand what is being channeled.

 It's hard to sell books with very basic spiritual knowledge, even though that knowledge is much more important than the magical stuff, which won't work without a lot of application of the basics.

The end result of all this is that the spiritual usefulness of teachings laid out through channeling is only going to be marginally better than if the channeler had simply made up the entire exchange out of whole cloth.New ideas that didn't exist in the channeler's mind before can be described, but those new ideas are subject to the degree of spiritual development of the channeler.
 
This is why, given the choice between channeling and one's natural spiritual progression using self-inquiry, the savvy spiritualist with choose the latter every time. Channeling is something serious aspirants will play with but eventually discard, as it doesn't even offer much in the way of personal growth. Other beings will talk to you, as long as you want them to, simply because it's better than nothing, but as long as you're focused on this sort of telephone game, trying to operate based on incomplete information that your own mind has filtered out, you might as well be running in circles.

The channeler is basically having a conversation with the entity, then, out of his or her own words, writes down, not a translation, but her own words describing what they had. It's like that blog where that one guy who spent a bunch of time with UG writes about time spent with him. Reading this guy's blog only describes, but never comes close to having spent real time with UG.

Narcissism

*This post came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author.


Narcissism is a big problem when we’re trying to communicate with the other sex. Nobody ever thinks they’re narcissistic, but narcissism isn’t an acute disease, it’s a pandemic. We’ve all got it, the question is to what extent. Narcissism is a product of our times, plenty of people make good livings off of it. The Last Psychiatrist goes into detail far better than I, I defer to him for a better blog concerning it.

If you want to get better at relating to others, you have to really get narcissism, and how it affects you, personally. You can’t just witness it in others. That’s only half of the journey. You need to realize that all of your expectations and demands stem from narcissism, and that they need to be thrown out and replaced with better ones.

When a father expects his daughter to dress conservatively, that’s narcissism. He believes he is the gatekeeper to his daughter’s sexuality, that she’s too young/dumb to handle the responsibility. He’s over-estimating his contribution to her maturity due to a misplaced sense of duty. Making illogical demands does not serve this purpose, having honest conversations does. But the narcissist is afraid of honesty, he is worried that honesty will strip control from him. Control over others is the cardinal task of narcissism.

So much of what we say and think is predicated on narcissism, it’s nearly impossible to catch yourself being narcissistic while you’re in the act. The solution is to proactively invite honesty into your life. Learning to make simple statements that express the whole of a situation, including your selfish desires.

If you’re single, male and horny, honesty is approaching a woman, telling her she does funny things to the insides of his pants, and asking her for her number/a kiss. Cut the BS and be straight up. The key is to avoid all expectations that there is a “process” to dating/relationships/sex. It’s all about the present, and it remains about the present even years after you’re married and the kids are in school. Honest communications work always, and serve to cut narcissism off at the root.

Honesty means realizing that there’s another person behind that mask you’re looking at. Too often we see each other not as people, but as supplemental roles in the movie constantly running through our heads. 

To avoid looking at people as unfeeling roles, always labor to never say a person “should” be doing something a certain way, no matter how strongly you feel about it. In fact, the more strongly you feel, the more likely you’re succumbing to narcissism. Knowing somebody means understanding their motivations, and until you have deep communications with somebody through numerous radically honest conversations, you won’t be able to, and the mind, when it cannot understand something, typically makes something up to bridge the gap.

 The mind hates uncertainty, it will constantly try to fill in gaps. You’ve seen this every time you’ve ever witnessed or participated in a political argument. Nobody “knows” that conservative or liberal policies are best, but that doesn’t stop people from being “totally certain” about their position. The convincing arguments they make about these positions are the mechanisms by which the brain fools itself. 

This is even more true of relationships. You don’t ever really know the person you’re relating with, but that won’t stop you from believing you know them better than they know themselves. Based on what? A pattern of behavior? That tells the narcissist nothing. And unless you’re being radically honest, you’re being a narcissist.