Are you aligned?

Are you aligned?

Not cosmically, or chiropractically speaking, but, are you aligned in a conscious way?  Are your head, heart, thoughts, actions and voice aligned?  If they don’t sync up, you may not be the person you think you are – or would like to think you are. 

Happiness is when what you think, what you say,

and what you do are in harmony.

- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Socrates is purported to have said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  He said this when he was on trial in Athens for corrupting the young and undermining the state religion.  He chose death rather than to be quiet.  He was true to himself.   The goal of Socratic interrogation is to help individuals to achieve genuine self-knowledge, wherever that leads you.

Using the Four Stages of Learning, as outlined below, we can also employ this in relation to our state of consciousness.

1. Unconscious Incompetence:  You don’t know what you don’t know.

2. Conscious Incompetence:  You now know what you don’t know.

3. Conscious Competence:  You now know and are aware that you know.

4. Unconscious Competence:  You know what you know and you don’t have to think about it. Things have been learned and are automatic.

To explain these further, everyone starts at Stage 1.  You are blissfully ignorant.  Take for example, the skill of rollerblading.  When you first decide you are going to learn to skate you don’t know what it takes – you’ve seen others do it and figure you can do the same.  You’re starting with a blank slate.  Failure is likely because you have no experience with this – you don’t know how to do it.  You don’t know what you don’t know.

In Stage 2, you are now aware that you lack expertise in a particular area and that you don’t know how to do something, such as rollerblading.  You put skates on and stand up, you fall down, you get frustrated, you are afraid to let go of someone’s hand or a railing, etc.  You wonder if you’ll ever be able to do it.  You are now conscious of your incompetence. 

By the time you get to Stage 3, you know how to rollerblade but you still have to concentrate on what you are doing.  You have practiced and practiced and while there may still be a bit of discomfort, your confidence level has increased.  You are conscious of your competence.

In Stage 4 of your learning, you do things without having to be aware of them.  Not only do you know how to rollerblade, you can perform the skill instinctively.  It has become natural for you and you can now teach others how to do this.  You have a lifelong skill that you’ll never forget. You are unconsciously competent.

Using the four stages of learning above, we can translate this to awareness in general and living consciously.  For example, say you consider yourself a “good” person; you go to church or temple and volunteer at a local charity from time to time.  But at work or with your friends, you talk about someone behind their back or make fun of someone’s clothing style or hygiene.  You gossip.  Perhaps you don’t like “those” people moving into your neighborhood.  You are fearful of someone who may be of a different faith than you, based on nothing you have personally experienced.  But you still consider yourself a “good” person.  You are unconscious of your unawareness.  You are not blended because what you think you are and how you really are, based on your private thoughts and actions, don’t sync up.  

In the above example, the individual does not understand what it means to truly be a good person and does not recognize the discrepancy in what sort of person he thinks he is and how he thinks or acts in relation to others – and who he really is.  He is unconscious to his unawareness. 

A good way to begin becoming consciously aware and living consciously, is to start a  meditation program.  There is an excellent meditation system called Holosync technology – I can vouch for this as I have been employing this system for 10 years and have seen a difference in my world view.  If you’d like more information about this meditation program go here now.

Once you begin to see some discrepancies in who you purport to be, or at least appear to be on a Sunday morning at church, and how you act on other days of the week – or the minute you step out of your place of worship – then you can be said to be conscious of your incompetence or unawareness.  You know something isn’t syncing up. 

When you start noticing the discrepancies and start working on how you can truly connect your actions and thoughts with how you see yourself, or the kind of person you are, then you have moved on to Step 3 and are consciously competent. 

When you begin to see that you are truly acting out how you have been taught to treat others, maybe not always being successful, but making the effort, then you have become unconsciously competent.  It doesn’t end there – you must be vigilant in living consciously aware. 

I know this is a lot to comprehend – maybe rereading it will help.  I had to reread it and I wrote it!  

What do you think?   Comments are welcome.