12/07/2023
Zooming in and zooming out into consciousness levels
There are many ways to understand ourselves when we do inner work or are trying to bring about any change in our lives.
I will use two frameworks here, so that you can understand yourself from them. However, please understand that any framework that sits well with your soul and truth is valid - religious, yogi, buddhistic, or your own Matrix.
Whatever taps us into our highest selves and the highest values for us humans - love, inner peace, joy, presence, grace.
Before we start, let’s talk about the Matrix and the maps for a second. For every word in the world, we have our own map for it, or meaning that we have built into it our whole lives. We put into it definitions from our parents, teachers, friends. Then we add our memories to it, our beliefs, and feelings. We keep editing our map for each word for the rest of our lives. This is a simple process for words such as ‘a cup’. We might have an image in our mind of a cup’s shape, color, material. We know its few purposes - holding the liquids, holding some solids, measuring some ingredients. We might have a memory pop into our mind of our dear one making us a cup of coffee, or not a pleasant memory, so perhaps we dislike cups. The collection of all our maps, and the meanings we have given them, constitute our personal Matrix. A set of meanings, beliefs, values, thoughts. Those are unique for each person in the world. And they are slightly or sometimes very different from the objective truth of that word, which is called ‘the territory’. I might perceive that cup as beige, when in reality, it’s grey. We all remember ‘the blue dress’ illusion.
Things become complicated when we forget to remember that everyone has a different map for everything in the world. Communication breaks down, as we assume that our map is the only or real truth. Things become even more complicated for abstract words, such as ‘love’, ‘success’ or ‘rightful’. We start differing even more on their definitions, and it is crucial to allow each other to hold our own meanings.
Master this, and you will master incredible levels of interpersonal communication, relationships and self-awareness as well as others-awareness.
Now an extra level of complication comes from the external Matrices that are imposed on us from our country, culture, political systems, religious systems, and groups we are part of. All kinds of beliefs and silent rules that we were raised in, that affected us. In Italy there is a saying when the child gets hurt ‘don’t look at them and they won’t cry.’ Or ‘boys don’t cry’ in most countries. When we get ‘brainwashed’ by these assumptions as young, they induce shame in us for ‘disobeying’ or ‘not fitting in’ or we often don’t even question their impact on us. That’s why as we are evolving as societies and societal consciousness, we have approaches called ‘conscious’ this or ‘spiritual’ that. They are bringing into our awareness the ability to question how we were raised, its impacts, and to choose differently so that we tap into higher values and reduce generational traumas or patterns. Let’s look at the pictures.
In Coaching, we have used Dilts’ model called ‘neurological levels’ of change. It is the pyramid of our needs and levels at which we can induce change. Those are the levels of our consciousness that we operate from, or can induce change from. These are your inner power - portals that you can use to get to know yourself from. Change one, and all the others will change. They correspond to the image of consciousness levels image/diagram and you can see that most frameworks have similar division. Zoomed in, we have lowest levels such as low frequency emotions, and very specific situations and zoom out, you find the levels of our purpose and soul. That is our highest yearning - to operate as much as possible from the highest selves. We call this many different words - becoming the creator of our own life, being one with the universe or highest power, living from our soul, inner truth, or being most aligned.
Notice that in self work, there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ emotions. They may make us oscillate at a different frequencies, however, they are important messengers and very useful. Anger has a message for us. Jealousy has a message for us. Until we learn to feel it and hear it, we will not be able to oscillate at higher level frequencies for too long. That is why many of us struggle with mental, emotional and physical health - we are not tuned into our internal messages, we did not honor them (or ourselves) and they are there to stay till we learn how to work with them and hear them.
This is the internal power and portals I like to share with my clients so that they can be in charge of these processes and not let life control them.
Tune in for the next post on HOW we achieve increasing levels of internal power. Sending you love and sunshine on your journey Neos! Time to define your own Matrix intentionally!
