Consciousness Rules, Okay!

By Michael Roads

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

I remember when, many years ago, I used to listen to one of my friends talking about Krishnamurti. He was into Krishnamurti’s teachings exclusively, whereas I gleaned grains of wisdom wherever I could. He would go on and on about this great man, repeating some of the statements that had so impressed him. Two in particular stuck in my head, mainly because they seemed so blatantly ridiculous. Knowledge is the barrier to discovery. And, ‘There is no such thing as the unconsciousness.’

As far as I was concerned, these were preposterous statements. How could a spiritually enlightened man be so in error? The question really bothered me. If he was correct, how could I, and most other people, be so incorrect? In those days my life was dominated by my spiritual quest for the realisation of Self, my spiritual enlightenment. I read many of the books that were available at that time, but I never could get into the books by J. Krishnamurti. For me, he talked in riddles. I did realise that he was an intellectual, while I was very much a heart person, and as I know today, heart and brain each speak in a different language.

Although I thought he was mistaken, I could never dismiss his words. They stuck in me, hammering away on the edge of my awareness, chipping away at my smug assumption that I was right. Logic certainly seemed to be on my side. It was perfectly logical that knowledge was the very ‘path’ to discovery, not the ‘barrier,’ and as for no such thing as the unconscious, well, that was ridiculous. What would happen if I hit a person on the head with a lump of wood? They would fall unconscious! So why, oh why, would Krishnamurti make statements so obviously false? That was the factor that bothered me.

Years later, when I was forty-nine and three months … everything changed. After a close to death crisis, put simply, I became Self-realised. I moved into a ‘knowing’ of life. Be aware that spiritual enlightenment is not the end of our journey, it is but a new beginning; however, it is a profound ‘leap’ in consciousness. And be aware that spiritual enlightenment is not an experience held in linear time. Although there is a linear moment – a linear time/date – spiritual enlightenment is an experience forever held in the consciousness of the moment. So, having this experience, all the remarks of Krishnamurti that had seemed absurd, challenging and seemingly false, emerged from the fog of the intellect into the clarity of Truth. Of course, he was correct. As a basis for this article, I am going to take the second statement, “There is no such thing as the unconscious” and do my best to explain it.

“There’s no such thing as the unconscious…”

Consciousness is not something that crops up in everyday conversation, yet it is a state of being that is with every one of us every moment of our lives. Consciousness is not something that we are aware of on a daily basis, nor do we in any way celebrate our consciousness. In fact, celebration for many people means to further confuse and inebriate their consciousness. Put simply, we are not conscious of consciousness, and seldom conscious of being conscious!

Let me put before you one of the Principles of Truth that defines all life forms on Earth: Consciousness draws to itself physical form through which to express; the expression is consciousness. This means that we are Beings of consciousness, expressing that spiritual consciousness through our physical bodies. In other words, we are not bodies expressing consciousness, we are consciousness expressing through our bodies. It should also be stated that all consciousness is One – not yours and mine – but just One consciousness that expresses through all physical life forms on this planet – including the planet! I have said that we are not aware of consciousness, but neither are we aware of breathing, until or unless we are having trouble breathing. We are not aware of our hearts beating, our blood flowing, our organs working, our digestion taking place. We are compelled to be aware when our bowels and bladder need emptying, and our body needs feeding, but we are not aware of the difference between food that supports the body and so-called food that destroys it. We are not aware when sickness first invades our body, and we are not aware of our body’s most basic life-support needs until we are in serious trouble. We are unaware that as physical Beings we are vehicles of consciousness. In fact, we are incredibly unaware, period!

It takes little effort to show how unaware of consciousness we humans are, but in Nature it is a very different story. Without going into details – my books do that – I am a person who has learned to cross the membrane that divides the physical world from the metaphysical. As a conscious Being, I can leave my physical body relaxed and resting, while I enter other vehicles of consciousness. I choose to do this with Nature, moving my conscious awareness into the body of an animal or bird. I have done this hundreds of times, and not once, from domestic to wild animals have I ever found an animal that was unaware of its consciousness. The animal or bird is always aware of its consciousness not as separate – as we experience it – but as a single unit in the Whole consciousness of Nature. This, in turn, leads to a staggeringly different relationship with life than we humans experience. Not better, or worse, just different. The main thrust of that difference is in the animal’s ‘awareness’ of the ongoing conscious moment of its life. We, basically, have no awareness of the ongoing conscious moment of life, while Nature never for a second loses it.

I well remember the first experience I had of an Australian Wedge-tailed eagle. I was lying relaxed on one of our fields on the foothills of Mount Arthur, in Tasmania, when this eagle began a slow, lazy spiral about a hundred metres above me. I watched it, inner-quiet, relaxed, with just the thought of how nice it would be to fly with the eagle. There was a sudden, inner, wrenching-twist … and I was looking down onto my prone body from the eyes of the eagle. The experience was wonderful, but the point I want to make was that moment of seeing from the eyes of the eagle. The eagle looked through the eyes of immediacy. We look through the eyes of our intellect, our knowledge, our beliefs, our expectations, our desires, our hopes, our education, our wants, our fears, our frustrations, on and on, but worst of all, we look through the eyes of yesterday.

Only a child looks through the eyes of the moment, yet somewhere in their early years of growth and education, we inadvertently take that gift from them. Can you even imagine the impact of seeing through eyes that relate only to the vital newness of the moment? This does not mean that the eagle’s experiences are invalid, or removed, or that intelligence is not involved; it means that none of this gets in the way of the newness and immediacy of the moment. This is something that humanity has lost, has surrendered to the hurry of our lives, to the collecting of information, to the collaboration of knowledge, and most foolish of all, to the sanction of a science that is based in separation … but this is changing with quantum physics.

The eagle was conscious in the moment, of the moment. The eagle, without intellect, but with natural conscious intelligence, was conscious of consciousness. Even more than this, it was the movement of consciousness in me that drew the consciousness in the eagle to make the connection. Eagle and person, very different in their expressions of consciousness, but both expressing the ‘same’ consciousness. It was not the choice of an eagle to make the connection with a human; it was the choice of the intelligence within consciousness to offer a human an opportunity to experience a greater reality of consciousness. And I did.

All life is the expression of consciousness. All life is consciousness in continuity. This continuity of consciousness cannot be interrupted, subverted, displaced, or ended. Whether a human is conscious of consciousness or not makes no difference to consciousness, even though it makes a huge difference to the person, or people, involved. We have progressively developed a way of living that more and more depends on a supportive, yet holistically unaware system, and less and less depends on the conscious intelligence of the individual. This, in turn, has let us away from a highly developed sense of consciousness, to a dimmer, more distant sense of consciousness. Okay … so I hit a person on the head with a piece of wood, and they fall ‘unconscious’ to the ground. Wrong! They fall to the ground because consciousness no longer has the required connection through the brain to the physical body. If you make a telephone call, and while talking to the other person they hang up, they are not suddenly unconscious, they have electronically disconnected from you. The same with the wood and the person’s head – a sudden bio-electric and biological disconnection from consciousness . . . which continues!

Following in the footsteps of Sigmund Freud, psychologists today talk and teach about the collective human unconscious. There is no collective human unconscious! Nor are there unconscious emotions. But having said this, most emotions are involved in the arena of not being conscious of consciousness. You can no more have unconsciousness than you can have un-life. Even in death there is full consciousness of the continuing human experience. However, it has to be said that if there is little to no awareness of being fully conscious in life, the situation is not going to improve in the experience we call death. It is worth noting, there are thousands of recorded incidents where people on the hospital table, fully anaesthetised, have later described all that happened during their operation to a startled, generally disbelieving surgeon. A human not aware of consciousness when hit on the head is no different from a person not aware of consciousness in normal everyday life. Same conditions – chronic unawareness! In fact, this is so bad in humanity it has become – terminal unawareness. If a person is hit on the head they cease to be aware of the consciousness of the moment; this is called unconsciousness. This must therefore imply that if people in everyday life are not aware of the consciousness of the moment, they are walking, working, unconscious people.

Life, Mystery and the Unknown

The simple reality is, people today are not consciously involved in their own lives. Far too many people believe that life is an outside of Self event. The reverse is true. Life is something that many people are subconsciously afraid of, something they react to, and fear. All this accompanies a lack of awareness of consciousness. If you are conscious and aware of your moment by moment life, you are filled with an incredible wonder for the Mystery of life, a deep appreciation for the miracle which is life. Krishnamurti said it correctly; there is no such thing as the unconscious. If you can focus on the consciousness of your own life, if you can be aware of your conscious choices, of the flow of life within Self, then eventually you connect with Mystery, also known as the Unknown!

What is Mystery? This I will not attempt to answer, for to do so is meaningless. However, if you embrace Mystery with no attempt to understand it, you will find that all the barriers to discovery fall away. If, by using knowledge, you try to understand Mystery, to make the unknown known, you will certainly find that knowledge is a barrier to discovery!

So what happens when conscious people live without a fully conscious focus? It means that they are compelled to live from the subconscious level. If you were described as subnormal, it would mean that you were less than normal. To live subconsciously means exactly that; to live less than fully conscious. Apparently most people spend about ninety-three ninety percent – yes 93%! – of their lives from a subconscious level. Think of that. Over ninety percent of your life less than fully conscious. Over ninety percent of your life on a secondhand basis. Over ninety percent of your life repeating your past. Over ninety percent of your life locked in a repeat pattern of sameness. Little wonder you get deja’ vu! Over ninety percent of your ‘newness’ is unavailable to you. All anger, all negative reactions, all fear, all violence, all intolerance, all rage, all wars, etceteras, come from and involve people who live subconsciously.

A fully conscious person has a ‘Love’ relationship with life. This is how being conscious of consciousness expresses in humanity. You cannot be aware of the flow of consciousness in all life and live in a mundane way. When you perceive the magnificence and beauty in conscious life, that same energy is also expressing through you. Equally, until you are prepared and willing to be conscious of the consciousness of life, you remain spiritually unenlightened.

It would seem very strange to accept that a rabbit can be fully conscious in the moment while a human cannot. Obviously, such thinking is flawed. If a rabbit can be fully conscious in the moment, then surely with the greater potential of a human, we can be super-conscious in the moment. This is true, we can, but before we can live from our super-conscious state we have to live consciously. That is, conscious of being conscious. By living subconsciously, which is not bad or wrong, we are in the place where the victims of life function. This is the place of accusation and blame, of hurt and fear, of suffering and sickness. If you are a creative person you already know that you have to be fully conscious to create anew. You can subconsciously copy and imitate, but to create something new you have to be fully conscious in the moment of your creation.

So you want to live consciously – right? Practice being conscious. When you wake up in the morning, spend a few moments running your focussed awareness over your body. Develop a sense of conscious appreciation for the faculties of your body. Such as, I can see – God, that’s wonderful. I can get out of bed and walk, fantastic. And so on. As your day unfolds, bring all these physical and mental attributes to your attention every now and again. When life gets a little threatening, put your focus on those attributes, and again ‘feel’ that sense of conscious appreciation. When you look at people, really ‘see’ them. If you choose to listen to people talking to you, really ‘listen’. There is nothing that you should, or should not be, to be aware and conscious. It is about being ‘fully conscious’ with and of your actions. Most people are basically doing one thing while thinking about other things. Where is their attention? It is scattered and displaced. This is the place of accidents and mishaps, of pain and suffering, of illusions..

People are not focused, and doing and being are mostly dual subconscious expressions in conflict. We come out the loser in this. Oh, we can be wealthy, but we still miss out in the conscious continuity of life. Life is not a ‘one lifetime all over,’ event. Life is a continuing process of either escalating conscious awareness, with its rewards, or declining conscious awareness, and all this invokes. When fully conscious we get to choose in life. When not fully conscious, we get ‘more of the same,’ our subconscious repeats. Make a choice to live fully conscious of consciousness. This will not happen easily, but neither is it difficult. Habit is the stamping ground of the subconscious; newness is the proving ground of conscious awareness. Make your choice for newness … because not choosing newness means more of the same old same old same!

The simple reality is … consciousness rules, okay!

Stepping… Between… Realities…

Michael Roads’ latest book “Stepping… Between… Realities…” is available here on Amazon.

In “Stepping…”, Michael’s metaphysical adventures take him to the galaxy in which we physically live – a galaxy with which we have only a remote relationship. He metaphysically enters a black hole for an experience beyond his wildest imaginings, encountering amazing astral worlds and meeting a galactic Being who is a galaxy within itself.

Michael explains, “Over my lifetime I have learned that it is possible to move into my metaphysical Light-body and access that greater reality. I step between realities. This book is filled with my own insights gained by metaphysically journeying into realms and realities beyond imagination. My consciousness-expanding journey into the dynamic, living energy we call our sun, is just one such indication of the miraculous universe in which we live. The galaxy is not dead matter and endless space; it is filled with consciousness, purpose, direction… life!”

Stepping Between Realities is available on Amazon in softcover and kindle editions. You can also check out Michael’s catalogue of books here.

Previous articles by Michael Roads:

• A Different Approach to Guilt, Blame and Forgiveness
• Free Will – How Free Are We?
• The Difference Between Soul, Spirit and Higher Self
• Some Pointers (and Pitfalls) for Talking With Nature
• It Really Is Time To Wake Up World
• Relationship Between Garden and Gardener
• A Disconnected Humanity: The Age of Pineal Suppression
• Conscious Gardening: Find Better Health In Your Own Organic Garden
• Conscious Connection – Bridging Species Through Love

About the author:

Born in England in 1937, Michael Roads discovered at an early age he was able to communicate with nature and go beyond linear time and space. He immigrated to Australia in 1963 where he was a beef and dairy farmer, and prominent in the early organic movement. He wrote the first book on organic gardening in Australia, which was an immediate best seller.

After becoming spiritually awakened in 1986, Michael wrote about his metaphysical experiences and has since published 14 books, translated into 16 languages. 2016 marks his 25th year of travelling around the world giving talks and 5-day intensives on unconditional love and emotional balance.

Connect with Michael at michaelroads.com and Facebook/MRoads.