Personally, I agree with the late Neville Goddard that unless you can truly explain something to someone else in a way that they can understand it you do not really have sufficient knowledge of the subject to fully grasp its meaning.   The term “raising consciousness” is such a term.   Many of the so called experts and gurus use the term but never seem to get around to explaining it so anyone has enough knowledge about raising consciousness so that they can pass that meaning it to someone else.

                Those sitting in an audience at a seminar/workshop go “oh, okay, I got that” but you know in your heart that they don’t really?  When the seminar/workshop is over, can you really tell whether your own consciousness is rising or not?  As you walk out the door can you on your own put together a plan to raise your consciousness?  Do you have any idea what it takes to literally elevate your consciousness to a “higher dimensional thought pattern”?  Do you have even a minor understanding of what particular consciousness is being referred to that is being needed to be raised?

                Sobering thoughts, aren’t they?   How much money have you spent trying to find answers to that question that often defies the ability to form into some sort of mental picture of?   I know that the reason you’ve paid for and sit in those seminars and workshops was because somewhere deep within you there was a feeling that something wasn’t right.   A feeling that life isn’t as it seems and you know you are missing some knowledge about what life is really like.   That feeling can be very disconcerting and frustrating if you can’t find the knowledge you need to feed that nagging desire.  The desire that for millennia has often been described as a thirst.

                To try to point you in the right direction and help start you toward finding some meaning about this subject, together let’s take a look at how we can take a general look at what we’ll call your consciousness or the sum total of your daily thought patterns.   The actual thought patterns we’re talking about are the ones that you can become actively aware of.   There are thoughts that almost take place without us being able to consciously control them, we aren’t talking about those, as they begin to take care of themselves in time if you simply address the ones you can do something about.

Our consciousness is the sum total of our thought patterns for a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, it doesn’t matter what period, we simply need to look at it as the sum total of how we think about things.   Let me try to break that down a little further so that you can get a better grasp of the concept.   An average person has between 12,000 and 50,000 individual thoughts every day which combined make up the sum total of our thought pattern for a given day.

                Now that’s a lot of thinking about things.   We could think about the attitude of the clerk at the grocery store, how sexy that person was that just walked by, what errands we need to do on the way home, the fight we had with someone in our life or any of an infinite number of things.   You know it’s just normal everyday mental processing.  

                The interesting thing is that science has determined that out of those 12,000 to 50,000 thoughts that we have every day approximately 80% is generated with a negative viewpoint attached to them.   Take for example the clerk in the grocery store with the attitude,  your thought would probably be along the line of how dare that clerk to force their negativity on me which in turns causes me to move toward anger or hostility or some similar pattern but you get the idea.  So you see, this is how you go through most of your days.   Pretty much reacting to events in your life from a less than positive point of view! 

So you see when we speak about raising your consciousness to a higher level or dimension of thought we are simply indicating that what you should be trying to do is raise that average up toward a greater level of “positive” thoughts.    Now, how could I possibly achieve that?

Well one easy way is to begin to make yourself to be aware of what thoughts you are generating.  Again with the grocery store clerk, if I am trying to keep myself attuned to the type of thoughts I am having I might catch myself taking in the stimulus of their “bad” attitude and catch my mental gears beginning to regurgitate that through in a way that I feel myself beginning to “get a rise out of the situation”.    At that point I can with effort stop myself and begin to “rationally and consciously” redirect my thoughts along the line that they probably have had a very bad day and that instead of giving them an “attitude” back I should simply smile give them all the understand and love I can to try to “lift their spirits”.   In this way I begin to reprogram my conscious mental processes along a more “positive” path.

I’m not going to tell you it’s a quick or effortless process because it’s not.   It isn’t difficult, it just takes perseverance, dedication and a true heart based desire to make yourself better than you are.   That’s all.   You will not be able to catch yourself “in the act” all the time or even most of the time in the beginning.   Even if you simply go back as soon as you realize what happened after the fact and evaluate how you thought about the situation, decide how you should have handled it, make an intention to catch “in the act” and to handle it differently next time, and do so this regularly, you will find that before you know it you’ll be catching yourself “in the act”.

So until next time form yourself an intent and declaration that you will do this, keep a daily journal where at the end of each day you go back over your day before retiring writing down every situation that you can identify, what thoughts were created by this situation, how it was handled correctly or how it should have been handled, and if you fail off the wagon get right back on again.   Don’t ever give up!

Brother Asa