What is “consciousness”? Is there such a thing as “higher” consciousness? Does it matter? There are a lot of questions that swirl around in the Consciousness Movement, and these are just a few.
A couple of says ago a person posting here as “Sara E.” asked a couple of questions that caught my ear. She asked about energies of people that can drain you (which I commented upon yesterday), and then she wrote…

I’d also like to hear your perspective about all this unconscious stuff I tend to hear. Isn’t the whole point that we GET CONSCIOUS of our thoughts and feelings and experiences AND own them???
When I hear the word unconscious, it sounds like there’s this part of me that I’m never fully aware of and is separate from me and my control. I don’t really buy that. I don’t feel that my Soul is some separate entity that is off planning the events of my life without me.
I’ve learned that when I track my thoughts and feelings and notice how my experiences reflect them both, that I have the ability to understand and love everything that has ever happened in my life. And from that perspective, it just seems that all this unconscious stuff is just some word that is used to describe a lack of clarity, a lack of understanding why something played out the way it did.

Let me respond to this in dialogue form, yes?
SARA: Isn’t the whole point that we GET CONSCIOUS of our thoughts and feelings and experiences AND own them???
NEALE: Yes.
SARA: When I hear the word unconscious, it sounds like there’s this part of me that I’m never fully aware of and is separate from me and my control.
NEALE: Most people are unaware of what is going on when they are “unconscious” in the medical sense. In metaphysical terms, to be “unconscious” means to be “unaware.” In my experience, it is possible to be “unaware” of things. In fact, I spent most of my life being spiritually unaware.
SARA: I don’t really buy that. I don’t feel that my Soul is some separate entity that is off planning the events of my life without me.
NEALE: Whoop….how did we jump to that? The word “unconscious”, in my experience, is not used to connote “some separate entity” that is “off planning the events” of your life.
SARA: I’ve learned that when I track my thoughts and feelings and notice how my experiences reflect them both, that I have the ability to understand and love everything that has ever happened in my life.

NEALE: Great! That’s just fabulous! The great teachers would say that you are on the road to mastery. Yes, our thoughts and our feelings DO create our experiences, and will, therefore, absolutely “reflect them both.” Byron Katie teaches in her book Loving What Is that we all have “the ability to understand and love everything that has ever happened in life.” It is a marvelous book, and it agrees with everything you have said here.
SARA: And from that perspective, it just seems that all this unconscious stuff is just some word that is used to describe a lack of clarity, a lack of understanding why something played out the way it did.
NEALE: Yes, Sara, that is exactly right, in my understanding. That is what I meant earlier when I said that “all this unconscious stuff” is another way of referring to “lack of awareness” or a limited awareness of the fundamental truths of life, of who we are, where we are, why we are here, and what we are doing in our moment-to-moment encounters with life.
I am going to suggest here that “consciousness” is energy. I am going to further suggest that “consciousness” – being energy – exists in all things. What I feel that I understand is that the level of consciousness, or life energy, that is found in everything varies from thing to thing. So I think that the word “consciousness” should not be confused with self consciousness.
All things are conscious (that is, “aware”), but not everything is conscious (“aware”) of itself. And even Self Awareness expresses at differing levels in different living things.
Dogs and cats have some degree of self awareness. Whales and dolphins, we are told, have a much high level. And humans are said to have the highest level of all mammals on the earth.
Still, even at that, most humans have not reached the level of consciousness at which they become aware of their True Selves. Most humans are only aware of their illusory selves. Most people are living cases of mistaken identity.
And of that small percentage who do know who they really are, only the tiniest percentage actually experience themselves as that. For most of us, most of the time, True Identity is intellectual/conceptual, not physical/experiential.
I like to think of consciousness, or awareness, as a doorway through which we move from knowing something to experiencing it. In this sense, “consciousness” refers to the ability to know only know something, but to embody it. A person who does this is said to have very high consciousness.
My experience is that living beings that are self-conscious at the highest level can expand their awareness. Consciousness is not something that can be “taught,” but it is something that can be “acquired.”
To me, it’s kind of like size. You can’t be “taught” to be Size 9. You simply grow into it. You become it. But there are certain things you can do to become a larger size. Body builders and athletes, for instance, know exactly how they can “bulk up.” So a person can change sizes deliberately, within certain limits. (It’s hard to grow shorter, and after a while it become virtually impossible to grow taller. There comes a time in your life when you literally “stop growing”–at least in terms of height. Would that such a thing were true about girth!)
It’s probably not the greatest analogy, but it makes the point. Consciousness is not something you learn, but it is something you grow into, and there are certain things you can do to trigger or enhance the process.
One of the fastest ways I know of to expand your consciousness is to assist another in expanding theirs. It works every time.