Your State of Consciousness Is Your State of Acceptance
By Harold Klemp
An individual’s state of consciousness simply means his ability to accept change in his life.
It includes new thoughts and new feelings, and the new behavior and actions that will naturally come as a result.
A state of consciousness is also flexible in that it swells (expands) and shrinks (contracts). Some events in our lives make us full of joy and goodwill, another way of saying an expansion of consciousness. Other events leave us suspicious or hostile or gloomy—a contraction.There are temporary changes in one’s state of consciousness as well as more long-lasting ones, the sum of all the lesser changes.
So your state of consciousness is a living thing. After all, it is a reflection of you—Soul—and is a product of each and every experience you’ve ever had. Ever.
Different experiences make for the difference in people.
The human race as a whole also has a state of consciousness, or level of acceptance. This ability does shift with the passage of time. Sometimes it moves ahead spiritually. At other times, there is a shift to a lower state.
Advances in Consciousness
For example, mankind had made some nice gains in the expansion of its world by the first millennium AD. Let’s overlook its never-ending lust for war and conquest, which will endure as long as human passions go unchecked. People had learned to make a record in writing of their exploits so future generations might profit by it if they so chose. A written language made it possible to review past mistakes and go on from there. A few, advanced in consciousness, had set down codes of conduct for society: like the sayings of Confucius, the ten commandments of Moses, the thoughts of Socrates and Plato, to name a few.
Those were signs of mankind’s progress in its state of consciousness.
Yet there were the dark times too. The most glaring example is perhaps the Dark Ages in Europe, usually fixed from the fifth through the tenth century. Some historians claim the only reason to call it a “dark” period is because so little written history survives from then. That is exactly the point. Why is there so little in writing? There was a falling back in consciousness.
But even as late as the seventeenth century, Galileo still felt the sting of the Inquisition, which censored his observation—made with the new invention, the telescope—that not all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. His support of the Copernican heliocentric system shook the foundations of the Christian Church. It called the theory a heresy.
The Dark Ages reflect a retreat in the state of consciousness.
Every person has a unique state of consciousness, even as does every community, town, city, state, region, country, or continent. The same holds for races, religions, political groups, and every other association that comes to mind. For example, who would say there’s no difference in the teachings of Islam and Buddhism? The unique doctrines of each are merely an expression of two different states of consciousness, or the acceptance of certain universal ideas that appeal more to one group than the other.
So a state of consciousness is the level of acceptance that one has to changes in conditions.
For some of a certain temperament, blind faith in salvation is a comfort. It gives them courage. They are relieved by the idea that a more advanced spiritual person will take care of all the details when this life comes to an end and will assure them a happy, joyful existence in the hereafter. And that’s OK.
People of another state of consciousness may have a more hands-on approach to the issue of death, which punctuates human life for many with a question mark. Their state of consciousness says, “it’s up to each of us to find our own salvation.”
Is it any wonder that so much of our history is penned in blood? No human state of consciousness is of a shining purity. Each has its stains. These stains are from the five passions of lust, greed, anger, vanity, and an undue attachment to material things. But their state of consciousness does determine how darkly these stains color the behavior of people toward each other.
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Excerpted from The Call of Soul.